Trump and DeSantis are no P.T. Barnums but they do play people for suckers

 By Hal Brown

Click above to enlarge image

Link to article in The Independent | HUFFPOST article

With American democracy at stake in the 2024 election the kind of silliness shown above would be a mere sideshow one wouldn't really mind missing if you came late for actual circus. 

Some of my fond childhood memories are of my parents taking my sister and me to the the amazing Ringling Brothers Barnum and Bailey circus at Madison Square Garden include not only watching the great clown Emmett Kelly, the trapeze artists, the elephant parade, and lion and tiger tamers but also going to the basement to see the sideshow attractions. I remember my parents paid a quarter for the giant to hand me one on his enormous rings.

This being said, it is hard not to be intrigued by Trump's juvenile but successful obsession with calling his adversaries silly names. However, is Trump the 21st century political P.T. Barnum?

Most people, myself included, didn't know that the man frequently quoted as saying that there's a sucker born every minute (no proof he really said this) was also a politician.

Barnum served two terms in the Connecticut legislature in 1865 as a Republican. He was also the mayor of Bridgeport. (More on his life in politics.)

Even though he switched parties from Democratic to Republican he'd be considered a liberal Democrat today:

Barnum was significantly involved in politics. He mainly focused on race, slavery, and sectionalism in the period leading up to the American Civil War. He opposed the Kansas–Nebraska Act of 1854, which supported slavery, so he left the Democratic Party which endorsed slavery and became part of the new anti-slavery Republican Party.

As a showman he was known for perpetrating hoaxes:

In 1842 Barnum introduced his first major hoax: a creature with the body of a monkey and the tail of a fish known as the "Feejee" mermaid. He leased it from fellow museum owner Moses Kimball of Boston who became his friend, confidant, and collaborator. Barnum justified his hoaxes by saying that they were advertisements to draw attention to the museum. "I don't believe in duping the public", he said, "but I believe in first attracting and then pleasing them."

If you want to call him a liar rather than a hoaxer one could compare him to Trump and DeSantis. Barnum would certainly make a better president than either of these two.

Nixon was brought down by tapes. It could happen to Trump

 By Hal Brown

The original Nixon White House tape recorder is shown in an undated handout photo. (National Archives via AP)

One word stood out in this Salon article:

Judge orders Trump lawyer to reveal evidence in “criminal scheme” — and there may be tapes: report

Judge rules Trump duped his own lawyers in Mar-a-Lago case, orders attorney to testify and turn over transcriptions

Howell also ordered Corcoran to turn over records related to what she described as Trump's alleged "criminal scheme," according to the report. The report also revealed that Corcoran may have recorded his discussions with Trump, noting that the records include "handwritten notes, invoices and transcriptions of personal audio recordings."

Corcoran is the Trump lawyer that has been order to testify and turn over documents.

Here's more from Salon:

Former U.S. Attorney Harry Litman said the evidence "could be absolutely dynamite."

"It appears that Corcoran took notes & maybe RECORDED Trump, his client (sense a pattern of mistrust by Trump lawyers?)," Litman tweeted. "If doc or taped evid shows Trump knows the subpoena is false, that is killer."

Note that the word "recorded" is in all caps.

Here's another article:

Prosecutors have said they have reason to believe efforts were made to "obstruct" their investigation. 

They want to ask Corcoran about an alleged call he had with Trump on June 24, 2022, around the time investigators were seeking to secure documents at Trump's home and video surveillance tapes of Mar-a-Lago, CBS News reported.

"Those could be very incriminating phone calls by themselves," Cunningham said. "If that material is handed over, that could be by itself enough to indict [Trump], quite possibly enough to send him to prison."

The word recorded and references to recordings immediately brought to mind the Nixon Oval Office tapes.

Hopefully everyone reading this is old enough to remember what they were or familiar with the history of Watergate. 

The release of the tape, 18 minute gap notwithstanding, led to this:

and eventually to this:

There was one recording of Trump that we know of that could have prevented him from becoming president in the first place. I don't need to reference it because I am not sure how many asterisks I should use in the word that showed how he objectified women. 

Of course nobody uses tapes these digital days, but you get the idea. It is possible that the recording from attorney Corcoran added to the recording Trump made to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger (which you can lister to here) is a different case end up leading to the beginning of the end for Donald Trump.

One thing is for certain, if he goes down and ends up being given jail time, he won't be leaving Mar-a-Lago on a Marine helicopter (designated as Marine One if the president is onboard). 

Venomous GOP House committee chair was just amazingly honest

 By Hal Brown

Update, new article in Salon blasts NY Times writers: N.Y. Times offers grotesque whitewash of Rep. James Comer, GOP's new attack dog

Lengthy profile of Oversight Committee chair James Comer is loaded with folksy details — but misses the real story

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There is a short Salon article by Amanda Marcotte. In it she refers to James Comer, the Kentucky member of the House, as the "newly crowned chair of the House Oversight Committee" hence my illustration above.

.

The first half of the article before Marcotte went into what is in the title struck me as amazing because it describes the candor and forthrightness of a Republican who is only recently in the public eye, or at least in the eyes of people who follow politics closely.

"You know, the customer's always right."

Rep. James Comer gave this juicy quote to Jonathan Swan and Luke Broadwater for their New York Times profile of the Kentucky Republican. He was explaining his affection for right-wing conspiracy theories. The "customer[s]" in this case, as Swan and Broadwater write, are the "vengeful, hard-right voters" who "propelled Comer to stardom" in the GOP.

It's quite an admission from the newly crowned chair of the House Oversight Committee. When asked why he is so intent on using his powers, as Swan and Broadwater write, "to investigate unhinged claims about President Biden and Democrats," Comer could have played political word games, pretending either to take these conspiracy theories more seriously than he actually does. He could have feigned outrage at the suggestion that his motives are anything less than honorable. Instead, Comer seems unconcerned to be seen, to the readers of the New York Times anyway, as a huckster for disinformation scraped out of the darkest corners of the internet.

"They don't know that it's QAnon," he even told Swan and Broadwater, "but it's QAnon stuff."

Former senior Obama adviser Dan Pfeiffer tweeted that “Jim Comer has a Trumpian blend of incompetence and malice”. Comer is described as the an "aggressive promoter of sinister-sounding claims about the president and his family" in The New York Times. The Times also says he "has gone from being a favorite Republican among Democrats in Kentucky’s Legislature to a commander of the G.O.P. war machine in Congress."

Credit...This is from the Times article:

Appearing on Fox News in January, Mr. Comer implied, without evidence, that there was a connection between Mr. Biden improperly holding on to classified documents when he was a private citizen and his son, Hunter, receiving a diamond from a Chinese tycoon. In another segment Mr. Comer lamented that Beau Biden, the president’s other son, who died of cancer in 2015, was never investigated.

His embrace of such statements reflects how Mr. Comer, who voted to certify Mr. Biden’s victory and was a favorite among Democrats in Kentucky’s Legislature, has transformed himself to command the Republican war machine in Congress — becoming a high-profile example of what it takes to rise and thrive in the Fox News-fed MAGA universe.

It also underscores the cutthroat instincts of Mr. Comer, who presents himself as an affable country boy of limited abilities, but who has proved to be a methodical and transactional political operator, willing to go to great lengths to crush his adversaries.

During his campaign for governor in 2015, facing allegations of abuse from an ex-girlfriend who also said he had taken her to get an abortion, Mr. Comer worked to discredit a blogger reporting on the claims and a campaign rival he believed was behind them, leaking private emails between the two. Mr. Comer denied the woman’s charges but lost the race anyway.

The honesty shown in the interview with Swan and Broadwater is surprising, but it also may be an example of his incompetence. Why would he want to put it out there that he is deliberately manipulating people who voted him into office with lies? Whoever runs against him in the future would be stupid if they didn't use this against him.

What are we to make about how honest he was with Jonathan Karl and Luke Broadwater interviewing him for a newspaper he'd probably refer to as a purveyor of fake news? Does he assume that none of the Kentuckians who elected him four times to represent them will ever read it? After all he basically just called them ignoramuses.