Voters Will Choose The Lesser Evil In This Ultimate Showdown
In an essay this morning about how Biden could win reelection next year, Ron Brownstein noted that “it hasn’t been easy for modern presidents to persuade large numbers of voters disenchanted with their performance to vote for them on the theory that the electorate would like the alternative less… The silver lining for Biden is that in Trump he has a polarizing potential opponent who might allow him to do just that. In the 2022 and 2023 elections, a crucial slice of voters down on the economy and Biden’s performance voted for Democrats in the key races anyway, largely because they viewed the Trump-aligned GOP alternatives as too extreme. And, though neither the media nor the electorate is yet paying full attention, Trump in his 2024 campaign is regularly unveiling deeply divisive policy positions (such as mass deportation and internment camps for undocumented immigrants) and employing extremist and openly racist language (echoing fascist dictators such as Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini in describing his political opponents as ‘vermin’). Eventually, Trump’s excesses could shape the 2024 election as much as Biden’s record will... [T]the Biden campaign urged the political press corps ‘to meet the moment and responsibly inform the electorate of what their lives might look like if the leading GOP candidate for president is allowed back in the White House.’ That sentence probably says as much as any internal strategy memo about how Biden’s team plans to win a second term… With that exhortation the campaign made clear that it wants Americans to focus as much on what Trump would do with power if he’s reelected as on what Biden has done in office.”
Veteran GOP pollster Bill McInturff told Brownstein “nearly three-fifths of voters said that their most important consideration in a Trump-Biden rematch would be their views of the former president… Through the last decades of the 20th century, the conventional wisdom among campaign strategists was that most voters, contrary to what incumbents hoped, viewed presidential elections primarily as a referendum, not a choice… Alan Abramowitz, an Emory University political scientist, said the principal reason presidents now appear more capable of surviving discontent about their performance is the rise of negative partisanship. That’s the phrase he and other political scientists use to describe a political environment in which many voters are motivated primarily by their belief that the other party represents an unacceptable threat to their values and vision of America. ‘Emphasizing the negative results of electing your opponent has become a way of unifying your party,’ Abramowitz told me.”
[W]hile Biden may notch some improvement, many strategists in both parties believe that it will be exceedingly difficult for him to restore his approval rating to 50 percent. Historically, that’s been viewed as the minimum for a president seeking reelection. But that may no longer be true. The ceiling on any president’s potential job rating is much lower than it once was because virtually no voters in the other opposition party now ever say they approve of his performance. In that environment, securing approval from at least half of the country may no longer be necessary for an incumbent seeking reelection.
…Current polling is probably not fully capturing that resistance, because Trump’s plans for a second term have received relatively little public attention. On virtually every front, Trump has already laid out a much more militantly conservative and overtly authoritarian agenda than he ran on in 2016 or 2020. His proposals include the mass deportation of and internment camps for undocumented immigrants, gutting the civil service, invoking the Insurrection Act to quash public protests, and openly deploying the Justice Department against his political enemies. If Trump is the GOP nominee, Democratic advertising will ensure that voters in the decisive swing states are much more aware of his agenda and often-venomous rhetoric than they are today. (The Biden campaign has started issuing near-daily press releases calling out Trump’s most extreme proposals.)
But comparisons between the current and former presidents work both ways. And polls show that considerable disappointment in Biden’s performance is improving the retrospective assessment of Trump’s record, particularly on the economy.
…The problem for Trump’s team is that he constantly pushes the boundaries of what the public might accept. Holding his strong current level of support in polls among Hispanics, for instance, may become much more difficult for Trump after Democrats spend more advertising dollars highlighting his plans to establish internment camps for undocumented immigrants, his refusal to rule out reprising his policy of separating migrant children from their parents, and his threats to use military force inside Mexico.
After the 2021 attempted coup, there were few GOP members of Congress who worked harder to try to overturn the election than the Louisiana member Trump nicked-named MAGA Mike, now the Speaker of the House. A true believer in the pursuit of power for the sake of partisan power, Johnson, like Trump, is a real danger to American democratic traditions. Last night, Luke Broadwater, Alan Feuer and Angelo Fichera reported on his role in the newest onset of off-the-wall— and motivating— conspiracy theories, the release of thousands of hours of footage from Jan, 6 meant to rewrite the history of the insurrection, already fueling a renewed effort by Republican lawmakers and far-right activists to “exonerate the pro-Trump rioters who took part.”
Marjorie Traitor Greene, for example, “was among the first lawmakers to post false information about the newly released videos. She claimed on [Twitter] that surveillance video showed a rioter holding a law enforcement badge in his hand, suggesting that he was an undercover police officer ‘disguised as a Trump supporter’ and the attack was an inside job. But the item in the man’s hand in the screen grab she circulated appears, upon closer inspection, to have been a vape pen. And the man who is seen in that image, Kevin Lyons, was in fact a heating-and-cooling technician— not a police officer— who was later convicted at a public trial of multiple federal charges and sentenced to more than four years in prison. Greene later edited her post to remove the false claim, but not before it had spread widely among Trump supporters.”
Another dangerous fascist crackpot, Utah Senator Mike Lee “recirculated the same clip and false allegation that the man pictured had flashed a badge, adding that he looked forward to questioning Christopher Wray, the FBI director, about the matter. ‘How many of these guys are feds?’ he asked in a separate post that included video of a violent clash between rioters and the police.”
“Heads up,” former Representative Liz Cheney of Wyoming, who was the top Republican on the special House committee that investigated the Jan. 6 attack, responded to Lee. “A nutball conspiracy theorist appears to be posting from your account.”
Still others, such as Donald Trump Jr., have shared video of rioters walking through the Capitol hallways doing nothing violent, suggesting that those who entered the building were entirely peaceful. But other videos from that day show some of the same people at other moments storming the building and attacking police officers.
“This is consistent with what they do,” Soumya Dayananda, who served as a senior investigator for the House Jan. 6 committee, said. “It’s just cherry-picking what they think is going to further their conspiracy theory.”
… [MAGA Mike] strongly suggested that the videos would contradict the public understanding of what happened on Jan. 6, 2021, when hundreds of supporters of Trump violently attacked the Capitol, inspired by his lie of a stolen election, disrupting Congress’s certification of the 2020 election results.
“When bureaucrats and partisan activists withhold data to advance a narrative, it erodes trust in our institutions,” Johnson posted on social media. “We must restore that trust.”
On Monday, Johnson sent out a fund-raising email trying to capitalize on the move.
“When I ran for this position, I made a promise to release the footage from Jan. 6, so Americans could see for themselves what happened that day, rather than the opinions of the partisan Jan. 6 Committee,” he wrote. “And I am delivering on that promise.”
…The videos show massive crowds assembled at the Capitol, and mobs committing violent acts and assaulting the police. They also show other moments when protesters behaved peacefully while they trespassed through the building, which was closed to the public.
Selective clips focusing on seemingly peaceful moments, and posts using them to cast doubt on what occurred that day, have racked up hundreds of thousands of views across mainstream and alternative social media platforms in recent days.
In one 48-second clip widely shared online— including by Lee— a detained man appears to fist-bump a police officer after his hands are freed from handcuffs and he is released near a door. The vast majority of posters have cited it as proof that Jan. 6 was an “inside job.” It is unclear exactly what happened in that moment, but officers released many defendants that day because they lacked the manpower to hold and charge the participants. The clip was plucked from a nearly 10-minute file that also shows officers tussling with protesters.
The man in question was later arrested and charged with assaulting police officers.
“The amplification of these narratives by high-profile figures, including public officials, one, gives a sense of validity to these narratives,” said Katherine Keneally, the head of threat analysis and prevention at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue, which has examined Jan. 6-related disinformation. She added: “With this increase in perceived validity, we also have a potential for an increase in threats, especially to public officials.”
Some social media users have used the false claims surrounding the released footage to call for specific members of the Jan. 6 committee to be imprisoned, accusing them of treason.
The Justice Department has charged more than 1,200 people in connection with the attack on the Capitol. The charges show a range of culpability. Some, including the leader of the Oath Keepers militia, have been convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to lengthy prison terms; others have been charged with merely trespassing and received no jail sentence.
“Of course there are people who just followed the crowd and entered the Capitol,” Dayananda said. “But that doesn’t exonerate the people who stormed Nancy Pelosi’s office, destroyed her property and beat on the cops.”
The videos also show a range of approaches by police officers in different situations. Some fought a bloody battle to keep rioters from breaching the building; some attempted to use persuasion to get people to leave the halls of Congress; others, badly outnumbered, are shown merely monitoring the crowd.
Six Capitol Police officers, out of a force of 2,000, were disciplined for their actions during the Jan. 6 riot, including for unbecoming conduct and failure to comply with directives. But many more fought strenuously to keep the rioters out. About 150 police officers were injured during the assault.
…Attempting to rewrite the history of the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol has been central to Trump’s campaign to reclaim the White House. He has used footage from the Capitol riot at his rallies, suggesting the mob violence was patriotic, and recorded a song with Jan. 6 rioters held in jail.
“Congratulations to Speaker of the House Mike Johnson for having the courage and fortitude to release all of the J6 tapes, which will reveal completely what really happened on January 6,” Trump said in a video release on Tuesday.
The median household income in Alpine, Utah is $129,239. It's where Senator Mike Lee lives. How much would you enjoy seeing this crowd visit his family home there? Or would you prefer America just reject QAnon/Kremlin-stoked political violence once and for all?