Opinion

Donald Trump's 2018 defense of his older daughter may incriminate him in his latest scandals over the National Archives recovering official documents from Mar-a-Lago and flushed papers allegedly clogging the White House sewer pipes when he was president.

In 2018, after it was revealed White House advisor Ivanka Trump used private email to conduct official government business, her father was asked how that differed from Hillary Clinton's private email server, which was a major Trump talking point in the 2016 election.

New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman's new book claims, among other things, that former President Donald Trump had to call in an engineer to handle the White House toilets. It was allegedly because he was trying to destroy documents using his personal toilet.

The news harkens back to a 2019 speech where Trump ranted about how terrible toilets are and how it takes him so many times to flush. It's unclear how far back Trump was flushing documents, but it certainly puts his frustration with low-flow toilets into new light.

Our own Sen. Ron Johnson, who is running for re-election in one of the most high profile Senate races in the country, is a fascinating example of GOP wingnuttery.

Johnson became famous for downplaying the Jan. 6 insurrection even before the RNC declared that the rioting cop killers in the Capitol were merely practicing “legitimate political discourse.” He organized press conferences to warn people that getting vaccinated could have dire health consequences and has spent much of the pandemic touting the merits of horse dewormer and other unproven COVID remedies.

Nevertheless, that’s what we’re seeing from many Ohio Republican Statehouse politicians confronted with the possibility they may have to finally actually compete in competitive elections.

The childish temper tantrum being thrown by Ohio politicians upset they’ve been stopped from cheating their way into reelection with rigged districts is sadly completely unsurprising.

You don’t need that fancy virtual reality headset. You can simply listen to testimony and be taken far, far away. Be sure to ignore any fact checking, as it may prompt a jarring return to reality.

The first of two recent hearings was held Feb. 1 by the Senate Federal and State Affairs Committee. Douglas Frank, an associate of Mike “My Pillow” Lindell and a math teacher from Ohio, was the star attraction.

The Republican National Committee's censure resolution against Reps. Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger continues to reverberate through the halls of congress. That ill-advised phrase "legitimate political discourse," referring to the Jan. 6 insurrection, has GOP officials tied up in knots, not wanting to offend their base while at the same time wanting nothing more than to change the subject.

You wouldn't know any of this by the coverage on Fox News, however. As Aaron Rupar notes in his newsletter, Public Notice, the formerly fair-and-balanced network is barely covering the story at all. Instead, Fox hosts are focusing all their attention on the anti-vax trucker protests in Canada, which they are cheering on hour after hour. Former President Donald Trump has been egging the Canadian truckers on as well, sending out a statement of support on the letterhead of his supposed new company, Trump Media Technology Group, inviting them to use his new social media company (assuming it ever gets off the ground) and announcing that "thankfully the Freedom Convoy could be coming to DC with American Truckers who want to protest Biden's ridiculous Covid policies."

U.S. Rep. Madison Cawthorn is having a bad week and it’s only Tuesday.

Today news broke that the North Carolina State Board of Elections filed a motion Monday declaring it indeed does have the legal authority to determine if candidates should be disqualified for violations of the Fourteenth Amendment (more on that in a moment). About the same time that news broke, Senate Republican Minority Leader Mitch McConnell broke with Donald Trump and almost the entire Republican Party, declaring January 6 was a “violent insurrection” – yes, he used those very words.

Two stories straight out of Alabama this week really encapsulate how the panic over "critical race theory," the war on schools and the war on democracy itself are all a piece of a singular racist right wing movement. Last week, AL.com reported that school officials across the state say parents are freaking out over the very existence of Black History Month, accusing schools of promoting "critical race theory" by mentioning it or honoring it in any way. And on Monday, the Supreme Court declined to enforce the 1965 Voting Rights Act in response to a plainly racist gerrymander in Alabama, on the grounds that doing so would interfere with the state's control of their elections systems. Yes, even though federal oversight of state election systems is literally what the Voting Rights Act was designed to do.

It's been 13 months since Donald Trump incited an insurrection on the Capitol, one that was clearly driven by white supremacy and the belief that the votes of Black Americans simply shouldn't count as much as those of white people. There continues to be a struggle between various factions of the GOP over how to portray the violent insurrection itself — to call it a glorious MAGA revolution or pretend it was a random event unconnected to the larger party — but these two stories show the sentiment that drove it has now taken root in every corner of the GOP. From the school board to the Supreme Court, Republicans are determined to stomp out anything that stands in the way of white supremacy, from history to the law to democracy itself.

Donald Trump is a highly skilled white-supremacist propagandist. There's nothing natural about that skill. It has been taught, learned and internalized over many years. In all likelihood, it came from his family upbringing. Fred Trump, Donald's father, was arrested at a Ku Klux Klan riot. In the 1970s, the Trump family's real estate company was sued for housing discrimination against Black and brown people.

In 1989, Trump took out full-page ads in major New York newspapers calling for the execution of five Black and Latino young men who were accused of brutally beating and raping a white woman in Central Park. Those men were convicted based on coerced confessions and spent years in prison before being exonerated and released. Trump has refused to apologize or even admit he was wrong.

While Republican successes in blocking legislation, judges and even presidential nominations may seem like the Party is on a roll, the reality is that the GOP is in the midst of an existential crisis as severe as any party has seen since the Whigs died out in the early 19th century.

Billionaire Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal is now openly calling them out in an editorial from the publication’s editorial board itself:

On Friday, the Republican party completed its journey from a normal conservative party into an outright fascist organization intent on overthrowing democracy. In censuring Republicans Rep. Adam Kinzinger and Rep. Liz Cheney for participating in the January 6 investigation, the Republican National Committee declared that the Capitol insurrection — which led to the deaths of four rioters and five police officers, as well as injuries to another 140 officers — is "legitimate political discourse." This affirms what close observers have been pointing out for a year now: Republican officials across the country are using Donald Trump's Big Lie as an excuse to rig the 2024 election, by rewriting laws to make it easier to throw out election results they don't like and running Big Lie proponents who are campaigning on unsubtle promises to steal the next election for Trump.

Democrats currently control Congress and the White House, but so far their efforts to stop the slow-moving coup have amounted to very little. To be certain, both President Joe Biden and the vast majority of congressional Democrats support legislation meant to block these Republican attacks on democracy, but their efforts to pass such bills through the narrow majority in the Senate have been blocked by two centrist Democrats, Joe Manchin of West Virginia and Arizona's Kyrsten Sinema. Without a bigger majority in the Senate, Biden and other federal Democratic leaders have little power to stop the GOP's coup train.

The January jobs report from the Labor Department is heightening fears that a so-called “tight” labor market is fueling inflation, and therefore the Fed must put on the brakes by raising interest rates.

This line of reasoning is totally wrong.