Trump Tirades Take Unhinged Turn as His Epic Poll Collapse Rattles GOP
Left
GOP discomfort with Donald Trump is growing. Republicans have effectively blocked taxpayer money for his ballroom, revolted against his corrupt slush fund for insurrectionists, and turned against his war. GOP panic about the his cratering approval and the midterm elections has reportedly escalated amid the ballroom and slush fund dramas. Amid mounting GOP opposition, Trump let out a strange, self-pitying Truth Social rant about his ballroom. Then at a rally he unleashed a weird tirade about the stock market and another bizarrely manic-sounding one about affordability. The rants only underscored how disconnected he is from the reality of voters’ economic experiences. We talked to New Republic deputy editor Jason Linkins, who’s been writing well about Trump’s corruption as a major political vulnerability. We discuss Trump’s growing mania, why these stories are uniquely difficult for Republicans to defend, and why Americans’ experience of the economy poses a potentially unsolvable political problem for the GOP. Listen to this episode here.
After President Donald Trump announced Saturday that an Iran peace deal was within reach, “hawkish Republicans” targeted the president with a campaign designed to convince him he would "look foolish and weak" for pursuing it – a pressure campaign that appears to have worked following fresh U.S. strikes on Iran Monday, Zeteo reported Tuesday.“Two sources with knowledge of the situation told [Zeteo] that hawkish Republicans flagged for the White House media coverage, social media posts, and other material arguing that reported peace terms would hand the Iranians victory and make Trump look foolish and weak,” Zeteo’s Martin Pengelly wrote in the outlet’s report. “And then came the apparently inevitable news: reports of renewed violence. And so, Trump’s Iran fiasco continues.”Trump’s announcement on Saturday was met with a wave of criticism from right-wing figures, with the president lashing out at said critics on Sunday as “losers” who knew “nothing” about the ongoing negotiations. Whether motivated by the “extreme internal pressure” he’s reportedly under or other factors, Trump did ultimately authorize strikes on targets in southern Iran on Monday, sinking two boats and attacking a missile launch site.Bloomberg has previously reported that the president has also been under extreme “outside” pressure to resume the Iran war as well, notably from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and billionaire media mogul Rupert Murdoch.
When Joe Biden defeated Donald Trump in Georgia in the United States' 2020 presidential election, there were two very different reactions among Republicans in the Peach State. Gov. Brian Kemp and Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, much to Trump's chagrin, acknowledged Biden as the legitimate winner — while then- State Sen. Burt Jones (now lieutenant governor) promoted Trump's repeatedly debunked claim that Georgia was stolen from him. And according to New York Times reporters Danny Hakim and Richard Fausset, Georgia will have a major election denier in the governor's office if Jones replaces Kemp in January 2027.With Kemp term-limited, Georgia Republicans are having a gubernatorial primary race that finds Jones competing with Rick Jackson (described by Hakim and Fausset as a "brash, pro-Trump billionaire") for the nomination. A runoff primary election is scheduled for June 16."Burt Jones, the Republican frontrunner in the Georgia governor's race, presents his considerable efforts to overturn Donald J. Trump's election loss in 2020 as a badge of honor," Hakim and Fausset report in the Times. "On the stump, he even boasts about it…. Last week, Mr. Jones, with the help of an endorsement from President Trump, was the top vote-getter in the first round of Georgia's Republican primary for governor. "Jones, according to Hakim and Fausset, "still carries the baggage — or as some would have it, bragging rights" — from the 2020 election and played a major role in "efforts to keep Mr. Trump in power" even though he lost Georgia to Biden."Mr. Jones tried to organize a special state legislative session to overturn Mr. Trump's electoral loss," the New York Times reporters recall. "He helped arrange public hearings in the State Senate, where Rudolph W. Giuliani demonized Atlanta election workers and advanced false claims that the election had been stolen. He joined a fake Electoral College contingent from Georgia that sent its false votes to Washington as part of a multi-state effort to try to derail the certification of Joseph R. Biden Jr.'s victory."Hakim and Fausset continue, "He backed Texas litigation challenging his own state's election results…. If elected governor, Mr. Jones would join several Republican governors who are 2020 election deniers just as the Trump Administration is using the Justice Department to seize 2020 ballots and revive old conspiracies."When Trump "amped up his unsubstantiated claim of a stolen election" in 2020, there was "vigorous pushback from some state Republicans, including Gov. Brian Kemp, Lt. Gov. Geoff Duncan and Mr. Raffensperger." But Jones "attacked the state's Republican leaders, including Mr. Duncan, for asserting — accurately — that there was no credible evidence of widespread voter fraud."
Over the last few weeks, the United States right loudly claimed victory in a battle that few people on earth knew was happening. The National Review’s Editorial Board gloated, “Science Has Spoken Against Climate Alarmism.” Several papers owned by Rupert Murdoch ran similarly hyperventilating headlines that scientists had reversed “doomsday predictions” and “quietly scrapped the apocalyptic forecasts that have terrified policymakers and the public.” Donald Trump wrote on social media that the United Nations’ “TOP Climate change committee,” the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, “admitted that its own projections (RCP8.5) were WRONG WRONG WRONG!”That isn’t what happened. And it’s hard to overstate the gulf between the scale of the right’s triumphalism and the size of the thing they are ostensibly talking about. The alleged victory in question is in reality an academic paper published last month by a team of Earth system modeling experts convened by the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project, or CMIP, an initiative of the UN’s World Climate Research Program. The paper describes several new forward-looking climate scenarios created to help researchers understand how and why the earth warms, and what might happen as it does. Such scenarios have been a mainstay of climate science since the 1980s, and are updated frequently to account for new research and observations. “These scenarios are not prediction machines,” said Detlef van Vuuren of the University of Utrecht, a veteran of emissions scenario development and the lead author on the CMIP paper. “They are simply ways to explore possible futures.” As the present changes, so too do researchers’ models of possible futures.So what exactly was Trump celebrating? The CMIP paper—which was published in April—notes that its researchers now consider one older scenario “implausible.” First created in the early 2010s, RCP8.5 outlines a world that is between 4.2 and 5.4 degrees Celsius warmer by 2100, thanks to extremely high levels of coal burning. Somewhat confusingly, the “8.5” in RCP8.5 doesn’t refer to temperature degrees but to specific levels of radiative forcing—a measure of change in the earth’s energy balance caused by human-caused greenhouse gas emissions. It was also developed at a time of rapidly rising fossil fuel use and relatively expensive renewables. “RCP” itself stands for “representative concentration pathway,” meaning that it was chosen to represent a range of similarly dire preexisting scenarios. Importantly, RCP8.5 was always intended as a “low-probability, high-risk” scenario among several others that show much lower radiative forcing, emissions, and warming. RCPs 2.6, 4.5, and 6.0 appeared prominently alongside RCP8.5 in the fifth assessment report of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, released in 2013. In 2017, modelers replaced RCPs with something called “shared socioeconomic pathways,” and used RCP8.5 to inform the high-end SSP that appeared in the IPCC’s sixth assessment report in 2023. (The IPCC does not create its own scenarios or conduct original research, but relies on largely volunteer experts to synthesize the latest-available climate science across a range of topics every few years.)Some 15 additional years of observable data about climate change, real-world climate policy, and the relatively recent, rapid proliferation of cheap renewables have now made the coal-heavy world of RCP8.5 look much less likely than it did in 2013. “We’re now in a very different position than RCP8.5 would have taken us, which is good,” van Vuuren said. “That doesn’t mean that RCP8.5 was wrong.” Continually updating scenarios to account for new data and understandings, he says, “is just the regular way we do our climate research.”The reasons why RCP8.5 seems to have struck such a nerve on the right stems back to a series of wonky debates among academics that started nearly a decade ago. Two researchers at the University of British Columbia—Justin Ritchie and Hadi Dowlatabadi—published a pair of papers back in 2017 arguing that the modelers relied too heavily on coal, and that extremely high coal usage in RCP8.5 entailed burning through more coal than exists in the world’s recoverable reserves of that resource. Subsequent entries into this debate cautioned against treating RCP8.5 as a “business as usual” outcome when the world looked increasingly on track to warm by roughly 3 rather than 4 or 5 degrees Celsius by 2100.Right-wing think tanks and climate skeptics glommed onto this debate to make a handful of bad-faith arguments that have relatively little to do with the generally good-faith academic discussions about the merits of RCP8.5.
CEASEFIRE INTERRUPTED: The U.S. military said the ceasefire with Iran remains in effect, even though it has been in a running battle with Iranian forces, after spotting what it assessed as an Iranian small boat laying mines near the Strait of Hormuz. The two Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps boats were “eliminated,” and surface-to-air missile sites […]
Trump said he would be “mandatorily requesting” several Muslim nations sign the Abraham Accords and recognize Israel as part of any peace deal with Iran.
A number of Democratic lawmakers believe they’ve uncovered a “secret” effort by Republicans to “meddle” in Democratic primary elections, one involving “next-level obfuscation” to conceal the identities of those behind the effort, Punchbowl News reported on Tuesday.“We don’t know who’s speaking, we don’t know what their real motivations are, and the things that they do talk about may be completely different from why they’re involved,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), speaking with Punchbowl News. “It really degrades public discourse and just creates paranoia and uncertainty.”That effort is the rise of “mysterious” and “stealthy” super political action committees (PACs) this election cycle that have dumped millions of dollars into Democratic primary races in an effort to, Democrats suspect, boost candidates viewed as “less formidable or even toxic” so as to give Republicans a better shot in the November general election, Punchbowl News reported.The practice of groups linked to a particular political party dumping money into primary races of an opposing political party became more commonplace with the Supreme Court’s 2010 decision in Citizens United v. FEC, which eliminated restrictions on campaign spending. However, this election cycle, those engaging in the practice have gone above and beyond to better conceal their identities.“These super PACs have to file statements of organization with the FEC, report these independent expenditures and place orders with TV and radio stations. Typically, all this offers clues into who is running the group and their partisan affiliation because the treasurer is a known political operative,” Punchbowl News’ report reads.“But not this time. The treasurers of these groups have no apparent online footprint. The addresses listed are post offices, Staples stores or similar sites. These groups will have to disclose their donors eventually, but they can hide those donors by transferring money from a 501(c)(4) nonprofit. This is next-level obfuscation.”Speaking with Punchbowl News, Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX) highlighted funding from a mysterious super PAC supporting Democratic candidate Maureen Galindo of Texas, who recently vowed to turn an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention center into a “castration processing center for pedophiles,” whom she said would likely be “most of the Zionists.”“You have an openly bigoted person who has no business in elected office getting boosted by a Republican PAC,” Casar said. “So the Republican leadership here, of course, is going to go to great lengths to hide that.”
Scandal-plagued Ken Paxton has won Trump’s backing – can he defeat John Cornyn in a high-stakes primary runoff? Ken Paxton, the state attorney general, takes on four-term incumbent John Cornyn on Tuesday in the ugliest primary election of the year. The winner of the Republican Senate runoff in Texas will contest November’s general election against Democrat James Talarico.Paxton and Cornyn have spent months coveting the most valuable endorsement in Republican politics: Donald Trump. Last week, scandal-plagued Paxton got it, with the US president describing him as “a true Maga warrior”. Continue reading...
