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Disgraced former president Donald Trump cut loose and let his fascist flag fly over the weekend, dooming his chances of returning to the White House in 2024 making a few members of his reactionary party vaguely uncomfortable for a minute.
- Trump continued to promote a false history of the January 6 insurrection during a Saturday night rally in Conroe, TX, saying that he would consider pardoning January 6 defendants if he claws his way back into power. “If I run and if I win we will treat those people from January 6 fairly. And if it requires pardons we will give them pardons because they are being treated so unfairly,” Trump said of the participants in an attack on Congress that injured 150 police officers and left five people dead, not counting the officers lost to suicide in the days that followed.
- Trump encouraged further political violence as he hinted at his prime motivation for running again: His keen desire to not go to jail. Trump directed his supporters to hold “the biggest protests we have ever had” in Atlanta, New York City, and New York state, “if these radical, vicious, racist prosecutors do anything wrong or illegal.” (Fascinating how the people investigating Trump became “racist” only after Alvin Bragg took over for retiring Manhattan DA Cyrus Vance, making all three lead prosecutors Black.) Prosecutors in Fulton County, GA, have asked the FBI for help providing security after Trump painted targets on their backs.
- To cap off Authoritarianpalooza 2022, Trump released a Sunday statement explicitly admitting that he sure did want then-Vice President Mike Pence to install him as the losing, unelected president on January 6, as he attacked the bipartisan effort to reform the Electoral Count Act against future coup attempts. “Actually, what they are saying, is that Mike Pence did have the right to change the outcome, and they now want to take that right away. Unfortunately, he didn't exercise that power, he could have overturned the Election!”
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Two Senate Republicans have bravely condemned Trump’s dangerous speech in the weakest terms possible.
- Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME) said on Sunday that Trump should not have promised pardons for January 6 rioters, but declined to rule out supporting him for president again. “We’re a long ways from 2024,” Collins told George Stephanopoulos, a year after voting to convict Trump in his second impeachment trial. Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called Trump’s pledge “inappropriate,” before immediately trying to bothsides it under the rug by bringing up Kamala Harris’s support for Black Lives Matter protesters.
- Meanwhile, far-right candidates across the country are enthusiastically parroting Trump’s calls for election subversion and violence. Michigan GOP gubernatorial candidate Ryan D. Kelley told a crowd of prospective poll workers to unplug tabulation machines if they suspect fraud in the 2022 election, only to be one-upped by Trump-backed Senate candidate Mike Detmer urging them to “show up armed”: “If we can’t change the tide…we need to be prepared to lock and load.”
Trump has shrugged off any pretense that he respects American democracy or rule of law, and his Republican allies have lost any shred of cover in their failure to call him what he is and oust him from the party. If Trump and the GOP won’t stop threatening the country, it’s up to Democrats to make sure voters hear them.
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Check out the latest episode of Offline on YouTube! This week, Jon talks to Abbie Richards, a TikToker and disinformation researcher, about how she uses her platform to break down disinformation, and why this current moment has seen the rise of so many new conspiracies. New episodes of Offline drop every Sunday in the Pod Save America feed and on the Crooked Media YouTube Channel. Listen wherever you get your podcasts.
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Another week of diplomatic efforts to prevent Russia from invading Ukraine is off to a rocky start. Russian and American ambassadors had a sharp exchange at a U.N. Security Council meeting on Monday, with each accusing the other side of lying about Russia’s troop buildup along the Ukrainian border. Russian Ambassador Vassily Nebenzia blamed the West for “whipping up tensions” and bringing “pure Nazis” to power in Ukraine, while U.S. Ambassador Linda Thomas-Greenfield pointed out that the buildup of 100,000 troops on the border marked “the largest mobilization” in Europe in decades, and accused Russia of “attempting, without any factual basis, to paint Ukraine and Western countries as the aggressors to fabricate a pretext for attack.” In the latest hint that Moscow might not be completely on the level, U.S. officials said there were indications that Russia had positioned blood supplies near the border, which it would need for treating casualties in the event of a conflict.
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- A federal judge has rejected a plea deal that would have allowed Gregory and Travis McMichael, two of the men convicted of murdering Ahmaud Arbery, to serve their time at a cushier federal prison. Arbery’s parents said they were "vehemently against this deal,” and opposed it at a Monday hearing.
- House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn has been loudly pushing South Carolina District Court Judge J. Michelle Childs to be Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer’s successor. Less promisingly, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) praised Childs on Sunday, saying he “can't think of a better person for President Biden to consider.”
- The dean of Georgetown Law said he has placed incoming administrator Ilya Shapiro on administrative leave pending an investigation into his racist tweets about Biden’s pledge to nominate a Black woman to the Court.
- Some of the White House documents that the National Archives turned over the January 6 committee had been ripped up and taped back together, revealing that Trump continued to shred his perfect, unincriminating records in violation of the Presidential Records Act.
- A winter storm dumped almost two feet of snow onto Boston on Saturday, tying the city’s single-day snowfall record. The storm knocked out power to over 100,000 homes in the northeast, mostly in Massachusetts.
- Special Counsel John Durham said in a mid-blizzard Friday night filing that he forgot about a key piece of evidence he had reviewed in 2018, after claiming earlier in the week that it was brand new to him.
- The FDA has granted full approval to Moderna’s COVID-19 vaccine. Huge news for any deeply odd vaccine holdouts who were waiting for that milestone, specifically.
Two Long Island nurses have been charged with selling forged vaccination cards and entering those fake records in the state’s database. The nurses allegedly raked in more than $1.5 million with the help of one of their husbands, an NYPD officer.
- The British government’s report on Party Boy Prime Minister Boris Johnson just dropped, and the Metropolitan Police force said it was reviewing more than 300 photos in its criminal investigation into the worst Downing Street COVID rule violations.
- Rihanna is pregnant and presumably very cold!
- A desperate German prince has adopted a grown man to preserve his lineage, taking what has somehow become the most normal page out of the Matt Gaetz playbook.
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Joe Rogan responded to a growing protest of coronavirus misinformation on Spotify by completely missing the point. Rogan apologized to Spotify for causing them headaches, defended his shitty, dangerous guests, and pledged to balance them out with other, less shitty guests: “If there’s anything that I’ve done that I can do better is have more experts with differing opinions, right after I have the controversial ones.” Joni Mitchell joined Neil Young in pulling her music off of Spotify in protest, and in an effort to nip further boycotts in the bud, the company announced it would add a “content advisory” to any podcast episode discussing coronavirus, with a link to an informative “COVID-19 hub.” Importantly, Spotify isn’t just declining to remove Rogan’s harmful content, like a social media company struggling with content moderation—it has an exclusive podcast deal with Rogan, reportedly worth $100 million.
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States where the Omicron wave hit latest appear to be seeing declines in case numbers, a sign that the U.S. may be through the worst of the surge.
New York City residents can now order COVID antiviral pills for free, same-day delivery.
New York Democrats proposed an aggressive congressional redistricting map, netting Democrats as many as three more seats.
Maus has returned to the top of bestseller lists after a Tennessee school district voted to ban it.
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