"MY CLIENT CAN'T POSSIBLY GET A FAIR TRIAL -- EVERYONE SAW HIM DO IT ON TV!"

The headline is from a wonderful old Willy Murphy cartoon which, alas, I cannot find online; but I could as well have used Groucho Marx or any one of number of shyster double-talk comedians to represent the latest lawyerly conservative defenses of Tubby against his indictment for trying (as we all fucking saw) to overturn the 2020 election. 

The ridiculous National Review defense is what inspired today's Roy Edroso Breaks It Down item, which imagines without difficulty NR applying the same logic to an earlier celebrity defendant. (Free to non-subscribers! Live it up!) 

But there's plenty more where that came from, by other conservatives who portray Trump as an innocent victim being persecuted for his Free Speech, e.g. "Jack Smith’s dangerous criminalization of dissent" at the rightwing pennysaver Washington Examiner. "Smith has plenty of evidence that Trump was told he was wrong but scant evidence that Trump believed what he was told," the editors plead, as if Trump's many documented and witnessed attempts to foist fake ballots on the Electoral College, and, in the last ditch, try to murder Congress were OK because he was rilly sincere about it. 

The "not a criminal, merely a dangerous lunatic" defense may comfort MAGA choads but it ain't fooling normal people, which is why Trump and his patsies are screaming to get his trial moved from DC, where his crimes were committed, to some dismal holler whose citizens might consider it their solemn duty to nullify on behalf of white supremacy.  It's no crazier nor more desperate than anything else they've tried -- and they're only going to get crazier and more desperate, and quickly, so we all better watch out. 

COME LET US REASON MAGAZINE TOGETHER. At the Washington Examiner, "A libertarian camps out with Wall Street occupiers." The libertarian is Timothy P. Carney, whose bona fides are impeccable. Expectedly he finds the occupiers' grievances "unfocused," "scattered," "incoherent ," etc, but like Rod Dreher he has to admit, or pretend, that he sees something to approve in them:

They're right. It does undermine our democracy and harm our economy when hiring a former Senate majority leader, for instance, can be the best investment a company ever makes. Wealthy special interests do dictate policy too much, regardless of which party is in power. I don't know who made the sign under which I slept Sunday night, but I agreed with its thrust: "Separation of Business & State." The back read "I can't afford a lobbyist."

Aw, that's sweet. Inevitably, though, Carney has to explain to these kids why all their dreamy talk founders on the strong bedrock of libertarianism: they "don't seem to understand," he says, "that getting government more involved in the economy always gets business more involved in government." I'll bet if he said that to the guy with the sign, he'd be flummoxed! Maybe James O'Keefe can try it with a video camera.

Assuming, perhaps unfairly, that he hasn't already tried it and encountered an unhappy result, Carney should go back down there and explain to the protesters why they can't get something more for the 99 percent out of the 1 percent, because as Galtian supermen the 1 percent deserve every penny they've got. Also, that they should instead focus on reducing government to its libertarian essence, because in that state of nature everyone will get what they need -- except the losers, of course, who are always part of the libertarian vision. (In fact they're its most important part, because how could you be sure you've achieved Free Market Nirvana unless some people die because they don't have health insurance, or starve because they don't make enough money, or lose their home to conflagration because they didn't pay the Fire Department?)

He should tell them also that maybe 99 percent is too big a target -- they should count on ten or fifteen percent, or maybe more, remaining sunk in penury because they made bad choices. Couldn't we call our movement the 75-to-80 percent? Or better yet, the Winners?

C'mon, Tim, let's get the dialogue going. Maybe you can have 'em wearing tricorners before the weather turns cold.

INSULT AND INJURY.

German Chancellor Angela Merkel, IMF Managing Director Christine LaGarde, and Trumpelina who puts her name on other people’s clothing designs: One of these things is not like the others and the crowd at the G20 Women's Summit didn’t go for it.

You’ve probably already heard about Chris Cilliza sweetening his own beat by defending Trumpelina from the women who had the effrontery to mutter at her (and after he harshed on Chelsea Clinton, too — man, he’ll never miss a meal!). “It's important to remember,” Cilliza warbles, “that Ivanka is, first and foremost, her father's daughter. As such, she is going to defend him -- as would almost every daughter…” This is pretty much the Washington Examiner’s take as well: “Ivanka Trump booed in Germany while defending her father's record on women." Others in the MSM got in on this angle too -- that Trumpelina was just being a good girl, protecting her soft-headed old daddy from the mean femininimisms who pelted him with mudballs. So much for the toler— well, you know how it goes.

“Ivanka Trump 'Booed' at Women's Forum in Germany,” headlines Newsmax, as if there were some question of the booing’s authenticity. (Well, they did say the booing audience had “a majority of women”; maybe booing is something ladies aren’t supposed to be able to do, like comedy or self-determination.) “That NATO bill just got 10% higher,” says Twitchy, echoing something The Leader is probably bellowing right now in the Lincoln Bedroom while he waits for his buttpad to be warmed.

GOP mouthpiece Amanda Carpenter, looking for some of that sweet Tomi Lahren triangulation from Trump, essays that Trumpelina was “becoming like Hillary Clinton in the worst ways… she’s sort of becoming increasingly unlikable.” Watch your back, Chris Cilliza! There's more than one way to speak "pet me" to power.

Many morons, including Breitbart, accused the audience of behaving “rudely.” “Rude Germans Boo and Hiss Ivanka Trump,” hollered The Gateway Pundit. “So rude Germany, so rude,“ tsked WorldNewsPolitics. “NASTY WOMEN! Ivanka Trump BOOED…HISSED By Unbelievably Rude Crowd,” headlined We’re New But Loud Like Breitbart Come Let Us Slow Up Your Computer With Pop-unders.

And of course they did. Look at how the New York Post pre-emptively fluffed Trumpelina's coming-out:

Because Trumpelina is entitled to this. So what if she has no relevant attainments, let alone enough of them to qualify for such a position? She’s a princess and deserves to be plopped down amongst some of the most accomplished women in the entire world to offer her unqualified views. After all, I assume her father reasoned, it’s just that one, the German, I wouldn’t shake hands with because you have to show 'em who's boss; and that other one, from “Imph” I think they call it, she musta gotten the job by fucking the last guy, DSW or whatever it is, he’s a real hotshot.

Trump sent Jared Kushner to Iraq and let him sit in his bigboy playroom but, brutish as he is, you know he wouldn’t send Jared to address the United Nations or go anywhere else where he had to pretend to actually know something.

But the G20 women's summit — well, that’s just a bunch of chicks, right? What's the big deal?

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

See, I like new music. Well, new-ish.  Well, and it has to sound like Heaven 17 or something else I recognize from my youth.  Fuck, don't listen to it then if that's how you feel.
• Anti-gun-control conservatives like to portray themselves as the rational, cool-headed ones: Look, I am not flustered by this mass shooting that has you libtards all worked up for some reason! (I think they roll right past the preliminary "of course this is a terrible tragedy" bit anymore because they think it weakens their argument.) But you read something like this, from Charles Two Middle Initials Cooke at National Review, where he tells his readers the Orlando massacre shows nightclubs would be safer if you let people bring loaded guns to them, and you have to wonder:

I must say, I find this way of thinking somewhat bizarre. Certainly, one could argue that there would be more accidents/shootings/suicides if more people carried in general (although this isn’t borne out by the data). Likewise, one could argue that nightclubs are bad venues for concealed- or open-carriers because they are dark and loud, and because people tend to drink a lot and/or take drugs while inside them. But those are aggregate, not specific arguments. When one gets to the specifics, can one really say with a straight face that the victims at Pulse wouldn’t have been better placed had one or more of them had been armed?

"One could argue" that loaded guns at the disco on a Saturday night is a bad idea! Motherfucker, talk to a bartender! Ask him or her if it's a bad idea. And "those are aggregate, not specific arguments" is the last act of a desperate man. I bet Cooke has a flowchart showing drunks in a bar turn into "polite society" if you give them loaded weapons. (Though, under a "Bring your guns, ladies drink free" policy I suppose the Mateen shooting might have been prevented by Pulse being shut down long beforehand, due to its frequent dance-floor gun battles.) While I am on the whole glad that our immigration laws are as yet sufficiently relaxed that we still allow even Thatcherite twats to become citizens of this country, I wish the authorities had first taught Cooke some of our folk wisdom.

• I keep saying on Twitter that I have a new funny thing at The Sherman Oaks Review of Books but Twitter obviously is over because my item has not blown up. So go have a look why don't you, and then stick around to look at the other stuff at the Review which is also funny. It's a humor site. We're humorists. And we mean that in the old-fashioned sense of producing laughter, if that's the sort of thing you go for.

• Remember when a couple of posters of Obama as The Joker in 2009 meant Obama was washed up? Well, they work this same routine every so often, and it currently is being worked with a clutch of rainbow-flag "Shoot Back" posters in West Hollywood. Gay folks in the neighborhood don't seem to appreciate the sentiment, per the L.A. Times, but the artist, Sabo, interviewed by PJ Media, tries strenuously to counteract that impression; "it's important that people know that this image came out of the gay community," he says, meaning out of him. This reminds me of the post-Orlando Red Alert Politics story (amplified by the ridiculous Washington Examiner), "Gays rally around Trump after Orlando attacks," based on the testimony of... four allegedly gay guys on Reddit, and two allegedly gay guys on Twitter ("'I am a gay man and this disgusting incident has persuaded me to join the Trump train!' Snowduckling wrote"). It's like they want to co-opt the gay vote but know it's useless and so aren't even putting the usual effort into their propaganda. Maybe they should get a high-ranking Trump surrogate to go on air and talk about how he loves cock.

STILL ON MOOCHER PATROL. Remember when Virginia wanted to test its welfare recipients for drugs, then found out it would be an outrageous money-loser for the state and backed off? Well, another election has come and gone and Republican members are reviving the idea, because they've found a way to lose less money on it:

"We got hung up last year on the cost, and it seems that we determined the costs aren't as great as we were told last year," said Del. Dickie Bell, R-Staunton, the bill's sponsor. "There are new methods of screening and testing used other places, and some are practical and could be applied here"...

The [original] legislation failed... after the state estimated it would cost $1.5 million to administer the tests, compared with the estimated $229,000 that would be saved by stripping benefits from those who test positive...

Republicans believe a statewide testing system is necessary to prevent taxpayer money from going to drug users.

"You're going to have some abuse no matter what you do, but you can curtail it to where it's minimal," said Del. Riley Ingram, R-Hopewell.

You don't learn till way far into the Washington Examiner story that "before Florida's [similar] law was suspended by the courts, officials found that only 2 percent of welfare recipients tested positive for drugs." Heritage Foundation wonks have been pushing the alternate line that drug testing keeps people out of the welfare system, which they describe as a savings, however speculative.

But saving money is the least of it; what they really want to do is grind their heels a little harder in the faces of the indigent. Their main argument is that welfare is not part of our common obligations to one another, but the property of Them That Gots, to be grudgingly dispensed with ever-more-onerous conditions to those creatures whose subhumanity is proven by their bad luck.

Whether they're commanding the poor to pee in a cup or demanding that the childless procreate to fulfill the will of Heaven, always remember that these people are not animated by a desire to realize a common good, but by the need to assert their superiority against all evidence.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Before Mel Brooks, there was Bradley Kincaid!

Only one free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down item this week -- a prospectus for a new, boldly-bothsider, difference-splitting, ultra-neoliberal magazine. (Look, just subscribe already, OK? Cheap!) But alas, some of my older items about the end of Roe have become newly relevant -- all the way down to the insufferable attitude of Megan McArdle, who isn't necessarily against abortion as such per se, you understand, just the ridiculous notion that American women have a Constitutional right to it, hmmph! 

I already talked about this when the Dobbs decision was first leaked, but let me add a few things. I mentioned then, as others have, that as bad as Dobbs is (and it's a nightmare), it's not all they want to do; conservatives continually dump on all the other rights based on privacy, such as those decided in Griswold (contraception), Lawrence (non-procreative sex), and Obergefell (same-sex marriage), and those will certainly be next. The weak sisters in the conservative coalition swear up and down in the Dobbs decision that, oh no, they don't mean you guys, abortion is special because the Jesus people say it's babies. But Clarence Thomas blows their scene, saying out loud that of course we should revisit those cases. 

Don't tell me Thomas is only one guy, and particularly twisted -- he represents the mad MAGA berserker tendency of conservatism; I'm sure a few of his fellow Justices would love to get all the way to the promised land, and the next time a minority-elected Republican president gets to replace any liberal Justice, all bets are off. I already think of this as the Thomas Court, and Roberts' wistful, whattaya-gonna-do concurrence in Dobbs suggests that he's totally given up trying to make the shit look like shinola.

I know I'm not telling you good people anything you don't already know, but there seem to be a lot of people out there who think the real thing to be worried about is cancelculture or some trans kids taking hormones. So make sure to tell them. 

As for the shock troops on the ground, this Washington Examiner essay is a good indicator of where they're at: They're promising lots of love for the little ones women will be forced to bear, even including expensive legislation for pregnant women and babies -- legislation that, for some reason, they didn't find it necessary to promise before today. But the driver of it is not love, at least not as you or I would understand the word. "The goal," the author says, is "to make abortion politically unpopular, legally unobtainable, and culturally unwanted." The bookends they have not in 49 years been able to achieve, and there's no reason to think they can do it now; but the iron fist of the middle proposition will do all the work for them. 

UPDATE. Here's a good thread that might lift your spirits! I know, for many of us it's too soon, but we'll all have to lift our heads up eventually and better sooner than later.

UPDATE 2. I should mention a bit of typical (but, in context, especially ominous) rightwing shtick that’s going on now: Right-to-lifers claiming that they’re the real victims, because they heard somewhere that crazed abortion rights supporters are going to attack them. In the midst of its ululation over the reduction of women to brood-slaves, for example, National Review makes this clumsy transition:

Our fellow citizens who reject the right to life for all human beings, tragically misguided as they are, have the right to protest against the Supreme Court’s decision. 

(LOL like they believe that.)

They have no right to threaten, intimidate, vandalize, or commit acts of violence. One of the worst causes in American history — the defense of a judicially imposed regime of abortion-on-demand — appears likely to end in further disgrace. The Biden administration will be derelict in its duties if it fails to keep the peace.

“Appears likely,” huh? From communiques pulled out of their ass, I suppose. Meantime I just saw footage of a truck running down abortion-rights protestors in Cedar Rapids.  Every Republican accusation is a confession. And, since this is in fact fascism we’re looking at, expect more of it.

2018: THE YEAR IN BULLSHIT, PART 3.

[See also Part 1 and Part 2.]

(c) 2018 Ted Eytan under a Creative Commons license

2. The Republican Trump protection racket. Normal people perceive the Mueller investigation to be a sober, workmanlike pursuit and analysis of leads to determine how the 2016 election became a Russian propaganda operation. Yet conservatives kept trying to discredit the investigation and its sources in the FBI and elsewhere.

California Republican Congressman Devin Nunes and his GOP buddies kept hinting that there was something in a House Intelligence Committee memo that would expose criminal or at least unseemly overreach in the FBI's investigations of Trump -- but when released the memo proved to be a put-up job meant to shield the President, of the sort in which Republican committees seem to specialize anymore.

Republican periodically waved messages between anti-Trump FBI lovebirds Peter Strzok and Lisa Page as if their private political opinions invalidated whatever intelligence the agency might have turned up on Trump. Wisconsin GOP senator Ron Johnson even claimed "he had an ‘informant’ corroborate reports concerning the existence of an FBI ‘secret society’ working to undermine President Trump," reported the Washington Examiner.

This went on all year and probably reached its apotheosis in the loony accusations by rightwing grifters Jacob Wohl and Jack Burkman that Mueller, despite evidence removing him from the alleged scene of the crime, committed sexual assault. And indeed the part played in this protection racket by pundits has been huge -- and ongoing: See the New Year's Eve post by David Brooks, in which he suggests that, notwithstanding Trump's probable crimes, if Democrats don't say Simon Says when they go after him -- if they don't act like "modern versions of Archibald Cox, Elliot Richardson and Judge John Sirica... then the roughly 40 percent of Americans who support Trump will see serious evidence that he committed felonies, but they won’t care! They’ll conclude that this is not about law or integrity. It’s just a political show trial." Totally ignoring, of course, that the quietly industrious Mueller is the most Cox-Richardson-Sirica-like Republican since -- well, since Cox, Richardson, and Sirica, yet Republicans already act as if it's just a "show trial."

But even weirder than the paid propagandists running interference -- which we could expect -- is the dedication of what were once unironically called public servants to defense of Individual 1 -- with Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell repeatedly propping the door open for Trump to shut the investigation down. I gotta admit, when I focus even for a moment on that, I get that old feeling of outrage we used to get whenever prominent politicians acted like low-level mob goons. And Mitch and the boys don't have too much time left to wear us down and get us accustomed to that level of criminality.

(c) 2018 Fabrice Florin under a Creative Commons license

1. Conservatives versus kids. I understand why they take public stands against immigrants, minorities, and even women -- it's the same evil they've been doing for years, and it still works for them, if less over time. But it strikes me as a bad political move for them to side so strongly against the survival of children. Americans don't even approve of Trump's conscious and deliberate immiseration (and in some cases killing) of refugee kids -- and they're not even white! Also, sending administration lie generator Kellyanne Conway out to accuse Democrats of using the dead children as "political pawns" is, under the circumstances, like a rapist complaining that the prosecutor is ruining the girl's reputation by revealing that she isn't a virgin.

But the real headscratcher is their continued devotion to the NRA in the face of all the school shootings -- and, more importantly (because face it, they've been stonewalling school shootings for years), in the face of strong public awareness and activism against their reign of terror, particularly since Parkland and the media-savvy survivors that came out of it -- not to mention the boycotts.

Apart from the usual only-outlaws-will-have-guns bullshit, their outreach seems faulty, too -- mostly these-kids-today seethings from guys like Rod Dreher ("They’re already celebrating the intersectionality of [Emma] Gonzalez, a self-defined bisexual who has shaved her head") and Dinesh D'Souza ("Worst news since their parents told them to get summer jobs"). It's almost as if they don't care if they lose -- that they just want to reassure one another of their own righteousness as Americans get pissed off enough to finally turn on them. I'd like to think it's a neurosis born of guilt, but I must say I'm having a hard time giving them the benefit of the doubt anymore, even on that.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

‪...about Kanye West exciting the brethren and Michelle Wolf pissing them off. As usual there's an analogy in there somewhere.

The column is packed and I'm sorry I couldn't include the RedState column by Brandon Morse, who not only declares “This Kanye, Kardashian, Trump Episode Could Be One Of The Biggest Turning Points In Our Culture," and insists "if you’re part of the elite left, you’re gripping the arms of your chair. You’re in the river on the edge of the waterfall" -- he also finds special significance in Kim Kardashian's defense of her husband:

...as we’re all woefully aware, Kim Kardashian holds more sway in the media and the minds of many than we like to give her credit for.

News to me. Is she the inspiration for so many rich girls marrying jackasses?

...one of the most mainstream of the mainstream just said it’s okay not to be mainstream. The woman that a good many western first worlder consider a role model, American royalty, or just a flat-out obsession gave her blessing about having right-leaning proclivities.

That’s huge, whether you think of Kim Kardashian as the modern day goddess the media has made her out to be, or you think as I do that she’s a woman who got famous by being famous for silly reasons.

That last bit is so perfect: Morse imagines Kim Kardashian letting her husband suck up to Trump is an epochal, game-changing event, notwithstanding that he also finds her silly. It sums up the rightwing idea of culture war: they have no idea why anything cultural is popular, and indeed seem to find it all ridiculous and unimportant (at least as compared to timeless pursuits such as propaganda and ratfucking) but still want to manipulate it to their advantage. This also explains why they're so bad at it.

UPDATE. There's been stiff competition for the stupidest thing written about this, but I think Jenna Ellis of the Washington Examiner is going to be hard to beat:

Michelle Wolf exposes the true, despicable agenda of the abortion industry...

In part, Wolf said on abortion , "Don’t knock it till you try it — and when you do try it, really knock it. You know, you’ve got to get that baby out of there. And yeah, sure, you can groan all you want. I know a lot of you are very anti-abortion. You know, unless it’s the one you got for your secret mistress." 

Are we really so depraved and desensitized as a culture that we are expected to laugh about “trying” abortion? As if abortion is equivalent to Saturday brunch and hey, if you didn’t like the eggs Benedict, there’s always next weekend. Have a mimosa, chill, and try abortion for fun, girls. Generally, if someone says “don’t knock it till you try it,” it’s something they enjoy and are encouraging you to try to see if you enjoy it too.

Funny how she blew right past anti-abortion men's secret mistresses and their abortions -- especially considering it has become a Republican hallmark, like flag pins and red ties -- to yell at Wolf making a joke about it. Also, I bet Ellis thinks Wolf was really "encouraging you to try" abortion the way the other outraged conservatives think she made fun of Sanders' appearance -- that is, not at all. Most of their propagandists aren't that dumb -- they're just trying to bamboozle a couple more people who are that dumb.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

I don't think Hoagy could write a bad song if he tried --
and he may have here.

Yes, only one free story from Roy Edroso Breaks It Down this week – and I remind you, Satan-to-Jesus-in-the-desert style, that all this – i.e. five days a week of deathless prose on contemporary topics – will be yours if you send me seven measly dollars a month. Considering he was only offering Jesus a bunch of hot sand, I'd say you'd be getting the better deal.

The current freebie is a version of that Rich Lowry essay defending FBI-threatening Trumpkins, stripped of its bullshit veneer. Lowry and that whole Republicans with Good Taste crew have certainly disgraced themselves in the Trump era – more than usual, I mean! – but, two impeachments and a coup later, their continued fluffing of Tubby should make it plain even to the dimmest professional centrist milquetoasts that the whole movement is rotten and irredeemable. 

Based on the continued ineducability of Damon Linker et alia, I guess it can never be made plain enough for some people. But at least some of us are trying. And now there’s the White House Twitter account mainstreaming the “This You?” attacks on Republicans who blubber about student loan forgiveness but turn out to be PPP pigs. I think it’s awesome that Biden’s people are smacking these wretched hypocrites around, for the usual petty reasons but also because it does the great public service of acknowledging that the civility with which liberals are always expected to treat conservatives is not only never reciprocated but also continually exploited.

I mean, these people worship Donald Trump, for fuck’s sake. All the hardcore rightwing ragebait emails I get are filled with stories like “DeSantis BLASTS Fauci to Kingdom Come: WATCH” and other equally combative rants. And Republicans candidates are pretty much expected to show themselves shooting or leading airstrikes against their unseen liberal enemies. 

American politics is a free-fire zone – except it’s only free going one way, toward the left. And yet, as the many citations of Murc’s Law have shown, when liberals even so much as point out how crazy these people are acting, they draw a red card from the prestige media.

Well, fuck that shit. The civility train left the station a loooooong time ago. I’m only disappointed that Biden called them “semi-fascist.” Uh uh, Dark Brandon, they’re full fash, and letting people know and giving the evidence is simply good citizenship.

UPDATE. I try not to be too "cry harder" about this, but really how can you resist when it's Timothy P. Carney at the Washington Examiner:

Did you know that if you ever took any form of federal aid, you’re never allowed to criticize any other form of government aid?

? No, I did not know that. What -- 

That’s the only reasonable interpretation of the snarky tweet campaign spearheaded by the White House on Friday, comparing the forgiveness of student debt to the forgiveness of the Paycheck Protection Program...

What they clearly believe is that giving money to anyone — in any circumstance — buys the White House the right to say “shut your mouth” any time that person criticizes a government program.

The White House "snarky tweet campaign" was just this: they ran Republicans' rages against the loan forgiveness next to the amounts of said Republicans' (often quite substantial!) forgiven PPP loans. That's it. The simplest kind of mockery. And this has reduced Carney to a full-body sputter of persecution mania:

In that light, you can better understand the unending desire to expand government. The more thoroughly you get everyone on the dole, even if you do it by first cutting off their access to nongovernment money, the more you get to boss everyone around.

We'll subsidize your electric car, but then, you have to shut up. We'll subsidize your crops, but then, you can never criticize us. We'll subsidize your home purchase, but then, you have to agree with us on everything.

The italicized section is very like what Carney italicized-fantasized was being said to him during the 2015 RFRA controversies: "Bake me a cake, photograph my wedding, pay for my abortion and my contraception." Guy's got an M.O.! 

Finally:

The only sensible response is to get government out of every part of our life we can so that we preserve the standing to criticize the government. I don’t generally support that take, but that’s what’s required by Biden’s behavior.

You liberals have forced me to pretend to be a libertarian, again! Yeesh, what a whining little bitch. Makes you want to creep under his window at night and stage-whisper BAKE ME A CAAAAAAAKE.

UPDATE 2. Ugh, it's a real pity party on the right today:

But we should blame ourselves: We should have been telling them to fuck off long since. Now they're spoiled. 

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP....

...about the Manafort and Cohen stuff and conservative desperation to make it look like either a.) no big deal or b.) a gross injustice against some Republicans who are definitely not criminals -- at least not criminal enough to actually face justice for it!

I kept it short and left some popular tropes unexamined -- for example, conservatives' newfound distaste for snitches; my favorite example is Michelle Malkin (now there's a blast from the past!) saying, hey guys you know what, "Let's Join Together to Stop Out-of-Control Prosecutors" because now we've all got a stake in it -- you liberals want to protect the poor and under-represented from being railroaded, and I want to protect Donald Trump! (For an actual good-faith argument against over-reliance on jailhouse snitches, see Popehat.) And then there's Jenna Ellis at the Washington Examiner, giving us the benefit of her penological expertise:

In any other context that wasn’t so politically charged, most juries see right through this. How many crime dramas and movies depict the all-too-common “jailhouse snitch” that is a star witness for the prosecution, and then his story falls apart because he’s doing it just for his own benefit?

Don't worry, when they send Trump to prison he can hide the tunnel he's drilling behind a poster of Rita Hayworth.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Church was like this, I might go.

•   I got through the entire week without dropping a single free Roy Edroso Breaks It Down episode – that’s how committed I am to driving you chiselers into the paid-subscription corral. (Sign up now it’s cheeeeeeap.) But since you alicublog readers are the O.G. late-night real people, I have unlocked my latest fantasia – The Mar-a-Lago Raid as The Alamo, as the Duke might have imagined it. (Of course you have to remember he’d be 115 years old and hella senile.) Feast your eyes! 

•  I also want to share with you my logical atrocity of the week. Surprisingly it has nothing to do with Mar-a-Lago, directly; it’s about Liz Cheney. I have no brief for her – she sucks, and while her standing up to Tubby on this one particular thing (i.e. trying to destroy democracy) shows admirable grit it doesn’t excuse a lifetime of rightwing malfeasance. But the conservatives who are excited that she lost her primary because she displeased The Boss are even worse, and include a lot of what I am accustomed to call Just the Tip Trumpers – rightwingers who used to find Trump de trop but now defend his every thuggish act. This definitely includes Byron York, late of National Review and now at the Washington Examiner, who offers the worst equivalence between Cheney and Trump I’ve seen: 

There have been dozens of headlines in recent months suggesting that radical supporters of former President Donald Trump hope to start a new civil war in the United States…

Now a new voice is talking about civil war, or more accurately, Civil War. In her concession speech Tuesday night, Rep. Liz Cheney (R-WY), soundly defeated in a GOP primary, invoked Civil War imagery to describe her determination to "do whatever it takes to ensure that Donald Trump is never again anywhere near the Oval Office." Cheney's words were filled with martial imagery and indirect comparisons of today's atmosphere to the 1861-1865 war that claimed as many as 750,000 American lives…

In any event, Cheney's speech shows that Trump supporters are not the only ones engaging in dreams of civil war.

See, Trump may have incited his goons to insurrection, and since his joint was raided may have stepped up his rhetoric to the point where Republican candidates can comfortably call for the murder of federal officers – but he’s not the only one inciting civil war: Liz Cheney used martial imagery, and also vowed to keep The Boss out of office, which when you think about it is like slavery -- except, you know, ha ha [pushes in nose] so even worse. 

As has been made abundantly clear, even putatively housebroken conservatives are full-bore MAGA shitheads. In fact even the anti-Trump ones are monsters (I'm still waiting to see whether Jen Rubin's conversion is sincere). And the ones who are Trumper on the Downlow are probably the worst of all.

FRIDAY 'ROUND-THE-HORN.

Jazz ain't dead, it don't even smell funny.
• A snippet from a recent Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter (TO WHICH YOU SHOULD SUBSCRIBE, he hollered with one hand to the side of his mouth like a newsboy in a '30s Warner Brothers picture, IT'S CHEEEEAP ™):

For his recent defense of the Electoral College [David French] might be excused, because it’s mostly no better or worse than all the other shitty rightwing defenses shoved, hastily and scarce half made-up into this breathing world by conservatives after Elizabeth Warren called for the EC to be abolished. (David Harsanyi’s “Democrats Want To Kill The Electoral College Because They Fear The Constitution” at The Federalist is my favorite; Jamelle Bouie effectively smacked down all this nonsense on Twitter.)
French does go the extra mile, though, with this: 

And let’s not pretend that a national popular vote elevates every citizen’s vote in a way that the Electoral College does not. Your vote counts in each state, and the fact that your state is overwhelmingly red or blue is no more or less demoralizing than the popular-vote idea that your single vote is thrown into a pool of 130 million others.

So the Republican voting in D.C. (where Clinton won with 90.9% of the vote) presumably feels himself more connected to the result than he would if his vote had a chance of contributing to a winning margin. I don’t think even French believes that.

I bring this up because the aforementioned wave of wingnut Electoral College defenses by Very Serious Commentators, all full of Founder Worship and rEpUbLiC nOt A dEmOcRaCy yak, has been followed (as if so ordained by Morning Memo!) by some dumbed-down (well, more dumbed-down) versions tailored to the Trumpenproletariat in bottom-feeder media such as the Washington Examiner, where David M. Drucker writes under the interesting headline "Republicans resigned to Trump losing 2020 popular vote but confident about Electoral College":

Some Republicans say the problem is Trump's populist brand of partisan grievance. It's an attitude tailor-made for the Electoral College in the current era of regionally Balkanized politics, but anathema to attracting a broad, national coalition that can win the most votes, as past presidents did when seeking re-election amid a booming economy.

"Trump's populist brand of partisan grievance" is "tailor-made for the Electoral College"? I wonder if James Madison had that in mind.

Others argue that neither Trump, nor possibly any Republican, could win the popular vote when most big states are overwhelmingly liberal.

“California, Illinois, and New York, make it very, very difficult for anybody on our side to ever again to win the popular vote,” said David Carney, a Republican strategist in New Hampshire.

Since it's rather giving the game away to say "Most people don't want our candidate to be President," they're arguing that most people is the wrong people -- libruls whut live in fancy states where they have highfalutin' sundries like soap and toothpaste. (Drucker is so grateful for the Trump campaign's help in filling his column that he ends with some bullshit about how the Trumpkins expect to lose the popular vote again but win the Electoral College even bigger in 2020 -- “We look to maintain and expand the Trump map" -- mainly, it would seem, to impress even more crushingly on Americans that the dead hand of the Founders -- manipulated as a cat's-paw by the modern GOP -- doesn't give a shit what they think.)

For a doubly-dumbed-down version see Hannity on Fox, transliterated here:

"You think all those red states would stick around and be in the United States if they kept losing to New York, New Jersey, California and Illinois?” Hannity asked. “I tend to think not.”

The final tantrum is always secession with these people. This time I say let them go, and we can establish generous refugee programs for the non-assholes who will flee the New Confederacy.

NEW VILLAGE VOICE COLUMN UP...

...about the crash and burn of the American Health Care Act, which obliged the brethren to explain what went wrong without speaking ill of their own deformed and unpopular policies.

Nonetheless they had a go, and some refused to acknowledge defeat at all. At the Washington Examiner (picked up from a garbage website with many popups), Brian Brinker says, "while many are quick to label this as a Trump failure, I can't help but wonder if it's instead a moment of business savvy." How's he figure? Because polls show people don't actually want what Trump and Congress are selling -- which means a Trump loss is retroactively a stroke of Trump genius. See:

Ultimately, the repeal failure fits with Trump’s business style. Throughout his career Trump relied on contractors, in this case GOP members of Congress, to perform work. Trump has always been known for being tough on these contractors...

 (that is, he regularly stiffs them)

...and that appears to be the case in the currently unfolding scenario. Further, Trump has made it clear that when it comes to deals he is pragmatic and flexible. Congressional failures likely means that Trump will be shifting gears, with blame for the current failure falling on Congress rather than Trump.

In other words, Trump screwed Congress just like he screws everybody who trusts him! There, Trump voters -- don't you feel better?

If you can stand it, you can also go see WWC Whisperer Salena Zito explain why Pennsyltucky will never forsake The Leader: "their beliefs and their intellects — which they imagine [Frank] Rich and his ilk chuckling over while sipping chardonnay — are what pushed them away from an increasingly elitist Democratic Party in the first place," blah blah. (Steve M. from NMMNB notices that Zito has gone back to calling Westmoreland County "Democrat" even though they haven't voted for a Democrat for President in 20 years.) But maybe go read my column instead, which is at least as funny.

STREET HASSLE.

I see that conservatives are having one of their periodic "crime wave" waves, claiming that, in the words of James W. Antle III at the Washington Examiner, "Surging crime rate spells trouble for Democrats in 2022 elections" (with neolibs like Ezra Klein saying pretty much the same thing) and, in the words of the Manhattan Institute's Jason L. Riley, "Shrinking Blue States Have ‘Defund the Police’ to Blame." (Blue states haven't really lost much population, but Riley thinks "lackluster population growth" is just as bad.)

Crime rates are up, but that can hardly be laid to "defunding," since recent big-city PD cuts have been small and sometimes, as with Minneapolis, resulted in zero force reductions. And many other things besides crime are out of whack now, considering we're coming out of a historic pandemic with its various dislocations. Also the increases are -- you will be unsurprised to learn -- not as dire as the professional panic merchants put them -- from my most recent Roy Edroso Breaks It Down newsletter issue*:

From the most recent CompStat crime statistics report, for the week of May 10-16, from the New York Police Department: Murders in New York City are up in 2021 from this time last year by 22%; rapes are up 2%; and felonious assaults are up 5.9%.

Chaos! Death Wish! Etc. But the actual number of murders year-to-date 2021 vs. 2020 are 155 and 127 — meaning there have been 28 more than this time last year. Rapes went from 491 to 501 — 20 more. And there are 7,182 assault in 2021 vs. 6,782 in 2020, or 400 more.

The population of New York is about 8.4 million. Meaning, even if we leave out the tourists and other outlanders, the percentage of the city’s population that has been murdered so far this year is 0.00184%. The raped population is 0.006% and the feloniously assaulted population is 0.08%.

We won’t even speak of the decline in robberies (-9.9%), burglaries (16.1%), and grand larcenies (-9.3%) in the same period...

Nonetheless you'll see the usual suspects at City Journal and elsewhere talking about it like the return of Death Wish. It's been such a long time since those rates actually rose that I'm not sure if the old Ooga-Booga is going to work like it used to -- especially since there are more voters in the system now who have other things to worry about, and conservatives are basically talking about crime the same way they used to scare your grandma with it back in the old days. But it'll be interesting to see.

* I'm not making this issue available to non-subscribers because I'm trying to cut back on the freebies and get more paying customers in the door, hint hint. But here's yesterday's, about the future of Texas education laws -- still fresh, possibly evergreen! 

A NEW LOW.

So Professor Karlan said this at the impeachment hearings:

When Democratic Rep. Sheila Jackson Lee of Texas asked Karlan, "What comparisons, Professor Karlan, can we make between kings that the framers were afraid of and the president's conduct today? she responded, "So, kings could do no wrong, because the king's word was law. And contrary to what President Trump has said, Article II does not give him the power to do anything he wants. And I’ll just give you one example that shows you the difference between him and a king, which is the Constitution says there can be no titles of nobility. So, while the president can name his son Barron, he can’t make him a baron."

And as you no doubt have seen, a shitstorm has ensued in which all the major assholes have portrayed Karlan's innocuous statement as an attack on a child. "Major assholes" includes mainstream media suckers, of course (usually from an "unforced error"/"civility harrumph" perspective); wingnut propaganda farms like the Washington Examiner are even worse. ("Karlan's comment was largely derided for bringing a child into a discussion about impeachment" -- "largely" being the paper's version of "bigly," I guess.)

There's not a lot to say about it beyond the usual: This is all bullshit, and to the extent anyone enables or accommodates it (and this includes Professor Karlan and whoever squeezed her to apologize) they are doing the devil's work.

Nonetheless it's an ill wind that blows no one some good and the incident has inspired me to a cracker-jack Oval Office scene starring Trump, Barron, and Melania, with a supporting role for Mick "Sad Sack" Mulvaney. Enjoy!

SHUT UP AND GET A GUY TO EAT BUGS.

The overthrow of the mainstream media has been a conservative dream for decades, but in recent years it seems the mission has changed: Now it has less to do with pushing rightwing ideas into public discourse and more to do with making that discourse so idiotic that no one who spends time in it will be able to tell a good idea from a bad one -- which, to be fair, is probably a better way to get the electoral results they want than airing think tank assholes to explain for the millionth time why rich people pay too much in taxes.

We've already seen the effect of long immersion in Fox News in recent polls finding Fox fans are likely to believe absurd conspiracy theories, but after a few years of exposure to Charlie Kirk and Candace Owens and their clones I imagine a President promoting bleach as a cure for a new disease will no longer be seen as an absurdity but rather as an arguable point over which intelligent people can disagree.

Which reminds me of the Bari Weiss New York Times column on Joe Rogan, in which she hips her readers to the new podcast thing which is totally taking down moldy ol' mainstream media:

Imagine if I had told you, a dozen years ago, that the former host of “The Fear Factor,” an MMA color commentator who loves cool cars and shooting guns and working out, a guy with a raw interview show featuring comedians, athletes and intellectuals, was more influential than the entire slate of hosts on CNN. 

You’d think I was nuts. But it’s true. His fans are everywhere — I’ve met them working behind the register and wearing loafers at hedge funds.

Wow, lazy signifiers for the high and the low -- he sounds even cooler than Cool Kids' Philosopher Ben Shapiro! I've only seen about 10 minutes of Rogan rappin' with Elon Musk, and he seemed to me not to have advanced much from his days watching people eat bugs. But maybe I'm just prejudiced. Who am I to judge? Maybe --

While GQ puts Pharrell gowned in a yellow sleeping bag on the cover of its “new masculinity” issue (introduced by the editor explaining that the men’s magazine “isn’t really trying to be exclusively for or about men at all”), Joe Rogan swings kettlebells and bow-hunts elk. Men are hungry. He’s serving steak, rare.

-- ugh, forget it, obviously I was right the first time. When Weiss says podcasts like Rogan's are causing a "world-changing, brain-rewiring transformation in how we consume information," she clearly means they are continuing the Great Work of making us all imbeciles.

Making everything worse as always is Rod Dreher, who's not only excited by Rogan's new status as a conservative intellectual, but angry that the snotty, limp-wristed cultural commissars of the MSM are giving jobs to uppities like Nikole Hannah-Jones instead of to Rogan:

Joe Rogan is one of the most popular and influential media figures in America, but he could never be hired at an American newspaper. Seriously, the little Robespierres in the cubicles would raise hell, and the lily-livered managers (like college presidents) would capitulate. Alas for journalism. [boldface in the original]

There are already newspapers with people like Joe Rogan in them. Doesn't Dreher get the Weekly World News? But I hope his column is a harbinger of class-A conservative journalism to come, and that we see the Washington Examiner, for example, running columns by Joe Rogan, Johnny Knoxville, Larry the Cable Guy, and Lee Greenwood. They can even run regular features about how stupid liberals are to take their political cues from celebrities, as an inside joke that no one, alas, will by then have enough brain cells to get.

STOP THE PRESSES.


This country sucks.

Honorable mention: The headline on Brian Hughes' article at the Washington Examiner, "Obama still faces daunting challenges as Libya changes," is even better in the paper edition I received outside the Metro station* this morning: "Obama challenged by chaos in Libya." It's time to pull out of that quagmire, which will never be the success our led-from-the-front victories such as Iraq have been.

* Oh, yeah, the quake: Kia and I were downtown. As a former Californian, she was unfazed (she says such a dinky temblor would rate a two-inch squib in the Cali papers). It was my first, and I'm glad the Earth was gentle. All office drones got the rest of the day off, so we had a few drinks at the St. Regis and went down to look at the MLK Memorial:



Not sure I like the hewn-from-the-rock effect -- it's very literal, and puts me in mind of a Ray Harryhausen special effect in which King bursts out of the rock and inches forward, roaring, as the earth shakes. But the quotes along the wall are effective, and King's face is very good; when we first saw it, it looked stern and schoolmasterish, but it softens as the light and angle change.

The other visitors seemed to like it fine. Don't know what they thought about the aesthetics, but they were certainly happy to see it there.

FROM A WHISPER TO A SCHEME.

Everyone's pissed at the shitty Obamacare replacement Trump's minions rammed through the House, and the damage control isn't looking good. This looks like a job for the White Working Class Whisperer!

At the Washington Examiner, WWCW Salena Zito starts out by telling us that Hillary Clinton deserved to lose in 2016. Proof point: instead of going there herself, Hillary sent her stupid Hollyweird friends Mary Steenburgen and Ted Danson to Rosedale, Michigan, where they "scolded voters about climate change." She seems to be talking about this event, which the Detroit News says the celebs attended to "thank Clinton volunteers and staff members for their campaign work and give them a pep talk" -- not to go down to Ye Olde Mill-Worker Tavern, look around snootily, remove their white gloves and wag their manicured fingers at the Salt of The Earth WWC hunched over their frosty mugs. I bet the Clinton crew didn't mind hearing about global warming.

But never mind; Zito's got hot quotes from a WWC source -- a "petite blonde" named Dawn Wilson whom we meet at "a strip mall with a Walmart, a Dollar Tree, a jewelry pawn shop..." Plus which she just lost her job of 17 years! Can you even get any more WWC! And boy has Dawn Wilson got something to say about Hillary and her Hollyweird friends:

Your message and your optics are everything when you are trying to persuade people to buy something from you or vote for you. Does this look like somewhere that needs to be schooled on climate change? she asks.

No quote marks in the original, BTW. Is it a paraphrase? If someone asks, maybe!

Zito also harshes on Clinton because "she conceded to mistakes during the campaign... and then blamed it all on FBI Director James Comey." This she offers as a contrast to Trump, who always takes responsibility for his mistakes... ha ha, kidding! Zito's idea of a relevant contrast is this:

Last week two politicians made news for the ways they communicated to Americans: Clinton's words were crafted, deliberate and dishonest; President Trump's words were a string of thoughts bouncing everywhere — with no craft, no massaging and they contained great gaps of context.

The press reacted wistfully to the former; to the latter, it went into full meltdown. Again...

Now, that doesn't mean Trump is always accurate in what he says, but he says (or tweets) what he truly thinks at that moment.

We in the press are just not accustomed to this type of honesty.

To recap, Hillary's great sin, beyond dishonest self-assessment, was that she was coherent, a sure sign of duplicity, while Trump talks like a developmentally-disabled princeling who blurts whatever richochets into his frontal lobe.

But at least he's honest, right? Actually, not; as James Poniewozik notes, Trump has a habit of saying what he thinks his audience wants to hear, which sometimes requires a quick switcheroo, like he's had to do on jailing women for abortions and funding for historically black colleges and universities.

Anyway, who needs Trump to be coherent, or Wilson to have quote marks, when Zito has "Bruce Haynes, founding partner of the bipartisan Purple Strategies consulting firm," to fill several grafs on the record, telling us why Trump rules and Hillary drools. Haynes is a longtime Republican functionary working for a typical D.C. hired-gun nightmare; like Zito he mystically communes with the WWC and divines that they hate the media weenies who insist on characterizing Trump's emissions on the basis of elite standards of truthfulness and dignity, when what they should be reporting is what the WWC wants to hear:

"Meanwhile, most voters just roll their eyes and wonder why they are not hearing about whether their sons will be in military conflict because of North Korea, or whether tax reform will give them a shot at a better job, or what's in the health-care bill on preexisting conditions because their cousin has cancer."

Nearly everything Trumps says on these subjects is either gibberish or obvious bullshit, and it's made freely available by the press at all times; but Haynes finds it unsatisfactory, and it can't be Trump's fault because he polls better than the media so it's theirs.

I don't think even this expert whispering is going to do it for the White Working Class -- who, by the way, are observably well-represented at the town halls where Republicans are getting their new assholes torn. Maybe whispering time is over.

PARDON MY FRENCH.

Are you shitting me:

Conservative columnist Bill Kristol is working to recruit David French, a writer for National Review, as a third-party presidential candidate, CBS News has confirmed.
"A group approached French, he's considering it seriously and is in contact with lots of serious people," a source with knowledge of the effort told CBS News.

I have followed French's career at National Review for years and will just quickly tell you that he's not only against gay marriage, he's also against Griswold v Connecticut, the decision that invalidated laws against contraception ("Is there a single legal doctrine that can stand against the quest for personal sexual fulfillment?" French thundered); that he denounced the widespread mourning of Prince's death on the grounds that "Prince was ultimately just another talented and decadent voice in a hedonistic culture... notable mainly because he was particularly effective at communicating that decadence to an eager and willing audience"; that he has compared Kim Davis, that crazy clerk who refused to sign gay marriage licenses, to "men like Martin Luther, John Calvin, and John Knox — the men who first put the 'protest' in 'Protestant'"; that he -- well, I'm out of time for the moment, but you can peruse the archive for more if you can stand it. The point is, he makes Trump look like Eisenhower.

UPDATE. I see Kristol's plan to elect David French President of the United States is getting a lot of press, from reputable outlets as well as from rightbloggers. Already there has been some controversy and an accusation of dirty tricks.  T. Becket Adams of the Washington Examiner announces, "Politico reporter badly mangles anecdote about David French's marriage, Iraq deployment." Kevin Robillard of Politico, it turns out, posted a screenshot -- a screenshot! -- of a passage from a Kathryn J. Lopez item on French in National Review that claimed French wouldn't let his wife communicate with men by email or use Facebook at all while he was deployed overseas because "David knew, with his 'stomach clenching,' that 'the most intimate conversations a person has are about life and faith' — and that 'spiritual and emotional intimacy frequently leads to physical intimacy.'" The screenshot is not faked, but Adams claimed Robillard "badly misrepresented" the passage  on the grounds that... well, he has no grounds; maybe he meant it was quoted out of context, but Adams reproduces more of Lopez's story and it doesn't make it look any less weird. I guess Adams means that when a wingnut's own words make him look bad, it's a smear job. (Update: A commenter notes the issue is the implication that Pere French laid down the rules for Mere French, as it was portrayed as a mutual decision. Good point, but still weird, and The Federalist's Mollie Hemingway doesn't make it less weird, raging that the Liberal Media think "David and Nancy French coming out of a deployment with an intact marriage is something we need to highlight and scoff at," whereas Bill Clinton had sex with an intern etc.)

Anyway I don't care about the guy's personal life, I only care about his ideas, which are insane. I'll be back with more, but for now I'll leave you with another screenshot, which I assure you is also not faked:

 

I know, authors don't choose their heds or graphics, but believe me, the article doesn't redeem it.

UPDATE 2. For French newbies, more on his interesting beliefs: After Dylann Roof's racial mass murders in Charleston, French wrote a post called "If One of the Churchgoers in Charleston Had Been Armed . . ." and it's just what you imagine, ending in a Paean to The Gun:

Don’t just carry. Don’t just go to the state-mandated training, buy a weapon, and then forget about it... Practice with a handgun until you can take it from a position of safe carry to active engagement within seconds. Then practice that again until you’ve beaten your best time. Then practice again. And realize that practice isn’t a burden but a joy...

Shudder. When people started feeling creepy about Confederate symbols because of Roof, French offered a qualified defense of the Lost Cause ("We of course agree that the Confederate states should not have left the Union, but it should be noted that the notion of secession was hardly universally condemned, even in the North").

French is also sour on academic tenure because it lets liberal professors teach without getting fired, but doesn't want it ended until he and his buddies are done "overhauling departments" (i.e., stuffing them with conservatives affirmative-action hires). He thinks you shouldn't worry that black people get killed so often by cops because, after all, so many of them are criminals, or at least suspected of crimes. And Lord how he hates them Mooslims.

In short, he's wrong about everything -- sometimes in entertainingly loony ways, but always wrong, which may explain his attraction for William Kristol. Nothing else does, though. The only thing French's candidacy can possibly achieve is the further normalization of the psychosis on the right.  Hmm -- maybe Kristol's smarter than he looks and this was his plan all along?

UPDATE 3. Well, he's got the crucial Quin Hillyer endorsement.

GUILTY WITH A (REALLY BAD) EXPLANATION.

You may have seen White Working Class Whisperer Salena Zito’s obsequious interview with Donald Trump, and perhaps learned about the bizarre part of the interview, which does not appear in the print version, in which Trump wondered aloud what the Civil War had been about. Zito was interviewed about this in a podcast with the Washington Examiner’s own Michael Graham, and to spare you good people I have transcribed a large chunk of it.

The preliminary logrolling is pretty terrible. “When I read your piece and saw his schedule and how much he had — I was exhausted!” enthuses Graham. “I was exhausted,” agrees Zito. “It was about 3:30, 4 in the afternoon — he had already been up for 12 hours.” True, some fast-food workers get up before dawn, too, but look what Trump had accomplished with his waking hours: He “had met with the President of Argentina along with his wife, along with the first lady Melania, he had signed two executive orders, he had had dozens of children in the White House for Take Your Child to Work Day, and then he was doing a series of interviews that began with me, and there was a line of journalists out the door waiting to get in.” “Incredible, particularly the kids part!” says Graham. Whew! All that signing, talking, and staring at young life forms wondering how much their parents would sell them for. Whatever Trump's getting in grift, it’s not enough.

Then Zito gets into the history lesson:

Before the tapes were rolling, he and I were discussing the portraits that hung behind him, which was of Andrew Jackson and Thomas Jefferson. Jefferson was to his right as he’s sitting at the Resolute Desk, and Jackson to his left. And, in very vintage Trump style, he bounced back to that, apropos of nothing, and that’s sort of how those quotes were inserted in the conversation — now, if you were in the earlier conversation it makes sense --

At that point I was really interested to hear how some earlier conversation made Trump’s ravings coherent, but alas, that's where Zito falters (there’s no video, so you can’t tell whether Jared Kushner was holding a gun on her family):

— but you know — if you’re following — I mean — let’s face it, he just bounces around when he talks. He is very much a businessman in his display of language —

Huh? Who thinks businessmen talk like that? If you were arranging a large wholesale order with a guy and he started talking that way, wouldn’t you maybe say you had to go to the bathroom and then skip out the back?

It’s very different than your typical politician or journalist who use very crafted, very vetted words and sentences and that’s not who he is. He’s not a politician. That’s largely why he was elected president. But it doesn’t always serve him well in interviews because he’s all over the place.

You littlebrains are expecting him to make quote-unquote sense, like a schoolteacher or something, but supermen like Trump are beyond your puny sequential thought and sentence structure!

Graham asks Zito what Trump was trying to say.

He was projecting strength.

Holy Mary mother of God.

He was talking about Andrew Jackson’s strength as a leader, you know, as first a general, he referred to him as a swashbuckler, and then as a leader. And he felt confident that had Jackson been in office later in the 19th Century — I think he left off as, no, he was elected in 1828 — he may have been able to thwart the Civil War.

Jackson was as strong a Union man as ever lived and even threatened to hang John C. Calhoun over the threat of secession. So it’s just possible that, had he served later, he might have kept the slave power alive a little longer to preserve that Union. But, if you take Lincoln’s analysis of the situation more seriously than Trump’s or Zito’s, you know he could not have held it off indefinitely. And of course that alternate history would have meant more slaves, but with this crew I figure that's more a feature than a bug; in fact, maybe that's the message Trump was trying to get out to his hardcore supporters.

Last word to Zito:

Y’know, as I always say, context is everything. Anything outside of context is a lie.

Well, glad I was able to help, then.