a growing number of Republicans say Bannon’s continued embrace of Moore .. could undercut his ambitions to play kingmaker in 2018.
.. “It introduces a different variable for the candidates he supports,” said Kurt Bardella, a former spokesman for Breitbart News, the ultraconservative website run by Bannon. “They’re going to be asked how they feel about being supported by someone who stood by a sexual predator. All of that baggage now follows Bannon politically.”
.. A political operative close to Bannon said Bannon continues to support Moore because he believes Moore’s denials about the most serious charges leveled by the women who have come forward.
.. “He’s got people banging down his door to talk with him,” said one Bannon associate
.. The Mercer family, a major financial patron of Breitbart and an array of other Bannon projects, does not appear to be fully on board.
.. Sheldon Adelson said through a spokesman that he would not be supporting Bannon’s efforts to remake the Senate and was instead “supporting Mitch McConnell 100 percent.”
.. Bannon praised him during a Zionist Organization of America dinner in New York, saying Trump’s victory “wouldn’t have come” without the help of Adelson, a major donor to the organization.
.. the real question is whether Bannon will be able to attract significant funding beyond the Mercers.
.. “I don’t know a single major donor who’s interested in funding this,” Holmes said, referring to Bannon’s efforts as a “vanity project.”
.. “It’s thrown all of Donald Trump’s agenda into flux, for a race in a state that should be a put-away for Republicans,” Holmes said. “Right now, it’s not about winning, it’s not about accomplishing the president’s agenda. It’s about Steve Bannon.”
.. After the initial Moore story broke, he said, Bannon associates were on cable TV talking about the age of consent in Alabama when party leaders should have been spending their time touting plans for tax reform.
.. After the initial Moore story broke, he said, Bannon associates were on cable TV talking about the age of consent in Alabama when party leaders should have been spending their time touting plans for tax reform.
.. Bannon has also claimed two other Republican “scalps” this year with the announced retirements of Sens. Jeff Flake of Arizona and Bob Corker of Tennessee, two races he had said he was targeting.
.. One Bannon friend said he told him that he would be better off picking a few races where he could post early wins rather than announcing he was taking on the entire Republican establishment at once.
Trump wants to upend 230 years of constitutional principle
Okay, it’s official. President Trump wants to upend 230 years of constitutional history and principle to run the U.S. justice system like a banana republic, or perhaps more aptly like what now passes for the rule of law in the country he aspires to emulate, the Russian Federation.
.. For months, Trump has been trying to divert attention from the walls closing in on his former campaign chairman, his former national security adviser and his own son Donald Trump Jr., who are caught up in the investigation by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III. Trump has practiced some of the favorite tactics of his role model Vladimir Putin, labeling any damaging revelation as “fake news” and practicing a refined form of “whataboutism.”
.. This is what authoritarians and tyrants do. They use the instruments of state power, particularly the wrath of the prosecutor, to rain opprobrium down upon citizens with whom they disagree... The first line of defense against authoritarianism is an independent Justice Department committed to the rule of law. In 1940, Attorney General (and future Supreme Court Justice) Robert Jackson, in a famous speech to U.S. attorneys in the Great Hall of the Department of Justice warned that when “the prosecutor picks some person whom he dislikes or desires to embarrass, or selects some group of unpopular persons and then looks for an offense, that [is where] the greatest danger of abuse of prosecuting power lies. It is here that law enforcement becomes personal, and the real crime becomes that of being unpopular with the predominant or governing group.”
General Mattis, Stand Up to Trump or He’ll Drag You Down
He even seemed to explain how the president’s phone call to the widow of a Green Beret killed in Niger got garbled.
.. Trump needs to know that it is now your way or the highway — not his. That is how you talk to a bully. It’s the only language he understands.Tell him: No more
- ridiculous tweeting attacks on people every morning; no more
- telling senators who forge bipartisan compromises on immigration or health care that he’s with them one day and against them the next; no more
- casual lying; no more
- feeding the base white supremacist “red meat” — no more
- distracting us from the real work of forging compromises for the American people and no more
- eroding the American creed.
.. if you can’t together force Trump onto an agenda of national healing and progress, then you should together tell him that he can govern with his kids and Sanders — because you took an oath to defend the Constitution, not to wipe up Trump’s daily filth with the uniform three of you wore so honorably.
The Trump Fog Machine
The Trump Fog Machine erased all his Tweets supporting the other guy in Alabama. No need for that. We do it for him, by following the fresh distractions. Trump is not Teflon. Things do stick to him. But he survives by saying or doing something so outrageous, so regularly, that we forget the last atrocity, and turn on one another.
.. So, this week his cabinet official charged with taking away health care from the poor and cutting the budget for cancer research is using our money to fly private planes at his pleasure. The multimillionaire treasury secretary wanted the same perk for his honeymoon.
.. He’s already tweeted the word “loser” 234 times, “incompetent” 92 times and “pathetic” 72 times. Call them projection tweets, showing the man for what he truly is.
.. He’s already lied about whether his tax plan will benefit the rich and his own family. It will, by eliminating the estate tax, and ensuring that the top 1 percent will get nearly 50 percent of the windfall.