Putin knew what he was doing when he helped get Trump into the White House. To New Yorkers who had watched Trump in action since the 1970’s it was all too predictable— especially the chaos, authoritarianism and creeping anomie. Maybe it’s why 2016’s presidential election for New York City's “favorite” son-- the first since Teddy Roosevelt-- looked like this in each borough (keeping in mind that, culturally and politically, Staten Island has always been more New Jersey than New York and that now even New Jersey doesn't want them anymore):
Bronx- 9.5%
Brooklyn- 17.5%
Manhattan- 9.7%
Queens- 21.8%
Staten Island- 56.0%
With Putin's relatively small investment, his country's top global competitor slipped right into a spiral of doom. However, not all of that can be blamed on Trump though. As conservative former Australian prime minister Malcolm Turnbull noted this week, while commenting on the retirement of Australian Nazi Rupert Murdoch, “The anger-tainment ecosystem that Fox News, above all, has created in the U.S. has left America angrier and more divided than it’s been at any time since the Civil War. In order to keep its ratings up it has sought to enrage Americans, divide Americans… and it has knowingly— and Murdoch had a personal hand in this, as we know— it has knowingly spread lies, most consequentially the one where Donald Trump claimed to have won the 2020 election. And of course that created the environment that made the January 6 insurrection possible… Trump would never have been president without the platform that Fox News created.” Fox should lose all of it's broadcasting licenses and the entire Murdoch family should be tried for treason and... well, you know how I feel about people convicted of treason, especially billionaires convicted of treason.
And then there were the Trump enablers in the Republican Party, the people who normalized him… not the QAnon moron true believers like Marjorie Traitor Greene and Lauren Boebert but those willing to sacrifice their country to serve their own interests like… nearly every other Republican member of Congress, but especially Matt Gaetz, Gym Jordan and George Santos (hoping for criminal pardons) and Kevin McCarthy (hoping to attain his life’s dream, even as it now, predictably turns to shit). Speaking of which… yesterday, Jake Sherman, Andrew Desiderio, Mica Soellner and John Bresnahan reported that “while House Republicans are pointlessly grinding through their version of FY2024 spending bills next week, Schumer and Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell will likely send the House a bipartisan CR. And yes, it’ll probably include billions of dollars in Ukraine aid as well as disaster relief funding and plenty of provisions that [Russo-Republicans] abhor. At that point, McCarthy will have a choice to make. Will he bring up the Senate-approved CR and pass it with a mix of Democratic and Republican votes? Will he try to amend it and see if the Senate will bite? (They probably won’t.) Or will he ignore it and shut the government down? This is a decision that could define McCarthy’s speakership.”
They also noted that finally— although how many times have we described this as “finally— some of the non-MAGAt mainstream conservatives in the House “are also getting annoyed at the influence the right flank is having on the rest of the conference. Rep. Don Bacon (R-NE), who helped craft a bipartisan stopgap proposal with the Problem Solvers Caucus, said McCarthy needs to start working with Democrats. Bacon took a shot at the House Freedom Caucus, which he referred to as the ‘dysfunction caucus… Let’s stop chasing our tail with these five to 10 members who are making demands that will never become law,’ Bacon told us. ‘Let’s start working across the aisle and get the best deal we can.’”
Yes, annoyed; oh dear, oh dear. The GOP pussy-caucus is getting annoyed. Is it really possible that Bacon doesn’t understand that “these five to 10 members” have no interest in getting anything passed into law and that their ONLY intention is to serve the strategy of the Trump campaign by creating more chaos and more dysfunction. Notice the warnings from the stock markets this week? Imagibe Trump's glee at an actual crash!
Is Kevin McCarthy still speaker? is a question Semafor isn’t the only one asking. In some ways, Trump always held his leash and made sure he took orders from Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Traitor Greene when it came to anything that would impact Trump’s interests. Now Trump may think it’s time to install someone even less spineless that McCarthy, as hard as that is to imagine. You know the latest details already, but Jordan Weissmann reported yesterday that “House Republicans plunged their way into previously unexplored depths of dysfunction on Thursday, after a group of hardliners sank Speaker Kevin McCarthy’s latest attempt to pass some sort of budget legislation before a government shutdown… Afterwards, GOP leaders called off votes for the rest of the week as they sought to regroup.”
That worked out fine for me since I have an event with a Member of Congress tonight and for a moment there it looked like he was going to have to call it off because of a weekend vote cycle. McCarthy is probably seeing his psychotherapist instead. Weissmann noted that “Republican members described the state of their party as ‘chaos’ and ‘a total shitshow.’ ‘We are very dysfunctional right now,’ Rep. Tim Burchett (R-TN) told NBC, adding that leadership ‘obviously can’t count’ votes.” Neither Weissmann nor NBC thought it was appropriate to remind readers that Burchett has been one of the few Republicans to be explicitly calling for a government shutdown for months, something other neo-fascists mostly just whisper about among themselves.
There’s been rampant speculation about whether hardline Republicans will eventually try to oust McCarthy from his job, especially after Rep. Matt Gaetz, his most vocal antagonist, left a copy of a motion to vacate sitting in a bathroom this week. But even though he’s still holding the gavel for now, McCarthy already feels a bit like a speaker in name only.
For starters, he has forfeited control over the House floor. As many reporters noted today, past speakers have rarely lost votes on all-important procedural rules to tee-up bills (Nancy Pelosi never did once in her tenure). McCarthy has now lost rule votes twice this week, and three times since he took over in January. The norms that traditionally give speakers their power are collapsing beneath him.
McCarthy has acknowledged as much. “It’s frustrating in the sense that I don’t understand how anyone votes against bringing the idea up and having the debate,” he said Thursday. “This is a whole new concept of individuals that just want to burn the whole place down. That doesn’t work.”
Worse yet, McCarthy is currently forced to reward the arsonists for their handywork. Republicans are currently considering removing the $300 million in Ukraine funding that was included in the defense bill to appease Greene. Meanwhile, party leaders are now adopting a plan from Gaetz to spend next week passing a series of individual budget bills that are destined to die in the Senate, doing nothing to prevent an end-of-the-month shutdown. For the time being, the pirates have taken over the ship. McCarthy had better look at Gaetz, because he’s the captain now.
[More mainstream conservatives], meanwhile, have begun threatening their own sort of rebellion. Rep. Mike Lawler (R-NY) has said that if the House does not pass a short-term spending bill to prevent a shutdown, he’ll join with Democrats and sign a discharge petition forcing one onto the floor. As D.C. lobbyist Liam Donovan noted Thursday, there already appears to be a legislative vehicle sitting available for such a move.
This is the sort of governing breakdown that many in Washington expected under McCarthy after his humiliating battle to become speaker. He appeared to prove the doubters wrong earlier this year by pushing through a compromise debt ceiling bill over the objections of his right wing members. But the reality of a 5-vote margin in a conference dominated by tactical extremists appears to be catching up with him.
Is it imaginable for McCarthy to finally stand up to Trump and lead his party towards the light? Nope. On Wednesday Russell Berman looked at why Republicans can’t just keep the government functioning. The Trump faction won’t even allow McCarthy to open negotiations with the Senate until House Republicans are on their position… which is basically, at this point, that all investigations into Trump’s criminal behavior be defunded.
