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Sunday Dose of Democracy:
VIDEO OF THE DAY: Trump humiliates his own rally crowd to their faces
The president of the United States taunted and mocked his own rally crowd in deep-red Clarksville, Tennessee, bragging that "I could say the stupidest stuff up here and you'd clap."
The crowd laughed and clapped. But it's not a cult, right?
Take Action: Demand the Senate pass the John Lewis Voting Rights Act!
This is what Trump panic looks like
Alex Shephard, The New Republic:
"Is this what panic looks like?
President Trump has been barnstorming the country in recent days, as part of a tour that will take him across the United States until the midterms.
His rallies, he says, have been 'unbelievable,' generating 'unbelievable crowds and enthusiasm.'
They are 'flipping races all the time.'
News outlets—particularly old foes like The New York Times and CNN—may claim there are whole sections of empty seats, but they are lying.
In reality, Trump insists on Truth Social, 'the Rallies are ‘HOTTER’ than ever. They are all ‘happenings,’ and they never happened before, and will never be duplicated again.' Come the midterm elections, there will be a 'MIDTERM SURPRISE.'
There is little point in arguing with Trump about crowd sizes because you can just look at the event photos—there are many empty seats.
These rallies are also taking place at smaller venues than he’s used in the past, as noted in recent Daily Beast analysis. On Friday, Trump drew about 8,000 people to a basketball arena in Mobile, Alabama, that holds 10,000—whereas in 2015, he turned out more than 30,000 people to a football stadium in the same city.
But perhaps the biggest problem of all is that he was in Mobile to begin with: Why is the president campaigning in deep-red Alabama when his party is fighting for its life in swing states?
'I’m really here because, sometimes,' Trump said at Friday’s Alabama rally, 'you’ve got to pay respect to the people that loved you right from the beginning.'
It’s a good line, but the notion that Trump pays respect to anyone is laughable.
He is simply going where he’s still wanted—where he still has hardcore supporters, and where GOP incumbents and challengers still benefit politically from being seen next to him.
There aren’t many of those places left.
So maybe this is what panic looks like.
Trump really only has one mode: frenetic activity, for the sole purpose of focusing attention on him.
Even with the Republicans’ control of Congress in dire jeopardy, he’s more interested in his own adulation than his party’s survival.
Trump is eagerly making the race about himself because that’s all that he knows how to do.
Vulnerable Republicans, meanwhile, are doing everything they can to distance themselves from him—including breaking with him over Iran and immigration.
But those efforts are often drowned out by the president himself.
Trump will keep jetting from rally to rally, and keep jerking his arms as 'YMCA' blares in ever-smaller venues. He will keep reciting old grievances about Hillary Clinton and newer ones about trans people and Canadians.
He will keep doing what he’s always done because he doesn’t know how to do anything else. But there was a kernel to what he said in Mobile about seeking the company of the people who loved him all along.
As he becomes more unpopular and his party’s panic grows, these cozy rallies are his safe space—the last remaining place where he is still adored, still funny, and still winning."
Union ironworker takes on Big Lie-pushing MAGA radical in battle for critical House seat
Brian Poindexter for Congress:
Brian Poindexter is a union worker and city councilman who has worked hard his entire life in machine shops, on construction sites, driving trucks, and serving his neighbors.
He’s the perfect candidate to win over the working-class voters of Ohio’s 7th district, which is currently represented by a Republican who has spent his two terms in office towing the MAGA party line — and racking up a slew of nasty allegations, including domestic violence. Will you chip in to to help jump-start Brian’s campaign and help Democrats pick up this vital and winnable House seat?
MY COMMENT: THE REPUBLICAN OPPONENT IN THIS RACE IS MAX MILLER ABOUT WHOM THERE ARE ALLEGATIONS OF DOMESTIC VIOLENCE, AS WELL AS HIS YOUNG DAUGHTER'S BROKEN COLLAR BONE...LET THIS PLAY OUT IN THE COURTS NOT IN CONGRESS!
Does America First really mean Israel first?
Jeet Heer, The Nation:
"In February, Israeli settlers in the West Bank shot and killed a 19-year-old American named Nasrallah Abu Siyam. The youth had been trying to stop the settlers from stealing livestock. Abu Siyam’s killing wasn’t an isolated incident.
In the last four years, at least 1,500 Palestinians have been killed in the West Bank, sometimes by settlers but more commonly by the IDF (which acts as a de facto ally of the settler movement).
Nine of those killed have been American citizens. After Abu Siyam’s killing, 30 members of Congress, headed by Maryland Senator Chris Van Hollen, sent a letter to Secretary of State Marco Rubio decrying 'the impunity afforded to extremist Israeli settlers in the West Bank under the protection of the Israel Defense Forces' and demanding accountability.
It’s unlikely that the Israeli government will have to answer for its lawlessness, at least as long as Donald Trump is in office. While Trump ran on an America First platform, in practice his politics have aligned remarkably well with the Greater Israel project of hard-line Zionists, who believe that Israel has a biblical mandate to annex the West Bank (and perhaps also large chunks of neighboring countries such as Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Saudi Arabia). The Greater Israel agenda has made remarkable headway, even though Trump himself still pays lip service to the idea of a two-state solution and has said he won’t allow Israel to formally annex the West Bank. Trump himself might shy away from explicitly endorsing a Greater Israel program, but important figures in his government clearly believe in it. On Thursday, The New York Times profiled a key policy shaper, David Milstein, an aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. The newspaper reports that 'when members of Congress pushed for accountability over the killings of Palestinian Americans by Israeli settlers and security forces, [Milstein] suppressed a detailed report that the embassy staff had written, effectively stonewalling lawmakers’ efforts to gain information, according to multiple officials briefed on the matter. 'Trump himself might shy away from explicitly endorsing a Greater Israel program, but important figures in his government clearly believe in it. On Thursday, The New York Times profiled a key policy shaper, David Milstein, an aide to US Ambassador to Israel Mike Huckabee. The newspaper reports that “when members of Congress pushed for accountability over the killings of Palestinian Americans by Israeli settlers and security forces, [Milstein] suppressed a detailed report that the embassy staff had written, effectively stonewalling lawmakers’ efforts to gain information.'
Milstein is not a rogue agent. He represents a powerful pro-Israel faction within the modern GOP. This faction supports not just the right of Israel to exist but also its right to conquer and annex neighboring lands.
Milstein is the stepson of right-wing talk-radio host Mark Levin, who often has the president’s ear, especially on Middle East policy. Milstein’s rise to prominence has been marked by the patronage of powerful political leaders defined by their Christian Zionism: Senator Ted Cruz, Governor Ron DeSantis, and Ambassador Mike Huckabee. Trump’s version of America First is clearly cracking up.
This ideological turmoil on the right is an opportunity for Democrats to take up the anti-war mantle and thus make an appeal to Republicans weary of war in the Middle East.
Democrats don’t need to claim to be America First, a political position poisoned by nationalism.
But they should make clear that their vision of national security is very different than the one promoted by Israel First zealots such as Milstein and Huckabee."
The war in Ukraine is spiraling out of control
Branko Marcetic, Jacobin:
"War is in the air in Europe. Over the four years and counting that it’s raged, the Ukraine war has often been compared to the two world wars, being the largest land war the continent’s seen since the second of those and having surpassed the length of the first this past June. But unlike those disastrous conflicts, the fighting in Ukraine has not become a true continent-wide affair that’s dragged the rest of Europe’s powers into the fray — so far. It is becoming alarmingly uncertain how much longer that will hold. For nearly five years, both Russia and European North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) states have been at pains to avoid being pulled into direct war with each other. But as Ukraine’s war effort falters, there are mounting signs of the conflict spiraling into generalized warfare. Between escalations, accidents, and a thick haze of sometimes purposeful misinformation, the risk that the conflict may spin out from yet another European bloodbath to something even more cataclysmic has perhaps never been higher.
The stakes of a direct Russian-European war are high. Experts have long argued that any such conflict would quickly turn nuclear, precisely because, as a 2022 Brown University paper argued, Russia’s conventional military weakness versus NATO makes it more likely to reach for the nuclear option. And yet hardly a month goes by these days without European and Russian officials openly threatening one another. This war of words is a function of what increasingly resembles a literal war. That risk became viscerally real last month, after a Russian drone destroyed part of a train near the Ukrainian-Polish border mere minutes after a group of US and European officials were shuttled away. Seemingly calibrated to be a near miss, the attack could have easily triggered what one ex-CIA official described as an 'escalatory chain' leading to war had it been slightly off.
'The Russian motivation here is to impose costs on Europe, to retaliate for the costs that Ukraine is imposing on Russia,' says Jennifer Kavanagh, director of military analysis at Defense Priorities. 'The Russians understand European money is funding Ukraine’s war effort and that Europe is giving it drones.”' Those drones have, by Putin’s own admission, been used to inflict damage on Russia worth 1 percent of its GDP, or, according to Kyiv, to knock out half of its oil refining capacity. NATO states have not just furnished the arms to do this but, through the US and French governments, provided the intelligence that Ukraine has used to select targets and help its drones evade Russian air defenses.
As heartening as this might be for Ukraine’s war effort, it has come with real risk, as the line blurs between simply providing military support, which NATO states view themselves as doing, and becoming full-on cobelligerents. 'Europe wants to believe they’re not combatants, that what they’re doing is normal and non-threatening,' says Kavanagh. 'Of course, the Russians don’t see it that way and want to make that clear. Europe sees all the escalation from the Russian side and don’t seem to recognize the ways in which their own behavior is contributing to the escalation spiral.'
The other reason is the extent to which European leadership has staked their own prestige on an increasingly unlikely outcome: Ukrainian military victory. The level of physical destruction inflicted on Russia notwithstanding, Ukraine’s drone campaign this past summer proved to be just the latest costly military gambit that failed to achieve its goals: when the dust had settled, they had not succeeded in pressuring Putin to end the war or in engineering political unrest within Russia. And while Ukraine has regained some territory since, the overall state of the battlefield hasn’t fundamentally changed in its favor. 'There has been tangible success, but at the tactical not strategic level,' says Russian journalist Leonid Ragozin. 'Ukraine is showing resilience on the battlefield, but there is no breakthrough. The picture isn’t rosy for the Russians, but it’s pretty dark for the Ukrainians.'
The Ukrainian government is now mired in a mushrooming political crisis of its own, suffering from serious (and sometimes literal) political infighting and looking at a massive budget shortfall — all as it weathers the most brutal Russian bombing campaign yet with little ability to defend itself, the US war with Iran having drained global supplies of missile interceptors. After years of European leaders insisting not only that Ukraine would win the war, but that it must, predicting a dark future for all of Europe if it didn’t, Ukrainian officials are now starting to openly say that their country is losing. According to Poland’s Tusk, Ukraine is suffering a staggering casualty rate of 27,000 killed or wounded per month, prompting talk of drafting women and leading to aggressive and unpopular recruitment tactics that have met with increasingly violent resistance from Ukrainians.
In other words, seeking a negotiated end to the war, however, unfair the terms, could not just help shut off the current escalatory spiral and avoid a Europe-wide catastrophe but may also in the long run benefit Ukraine. 'We should recognize any peace is going to be bad. No one is going to like it. It’s still better than continuing the war,' says Kavanagh.
Food for thought
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