Putin's Apple 🌻 🌻 🌻 🍎 🍎 🍎

Fried Oreos: The Iowa Caucuses don’t take place until January but the pollsters and the people who report on their output are already busy marketing their wares which explains why we’re being inundated with news articles about poll standings.  About all you need to know right now is that Trump despite his two impeachment trials, plethora of indictments and his sexual abuse and defamation of EJ Caroll is leading by a mile.  Tomorrow night eight of those competing with him or trying hard to be selected as his running mate will take to the stage in Milwaukee for the first Republican presidential debate.  The qualifying eight include: other Florida guy Ron DeSantis, former VP Mike Pence, entrepreneur Vivek Ramaswamy, former South Carolina Governor/UN Ambassador Nikki Haley, NJ bridge gate guy/former Governor Chris Christie, South Carolina Senator Tim Scott, North Dakota Governor Doug Burgum, and former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson.  Quite a few others have missed the cut, including former Texas Congressman Will Hurd who like Christie and Hutchinson is part of the anti-Trump wing.  Trump, who described himself as the apple 🍎  of Putin’s eye during a tete a tete with Larry Kudlow of Fox Business News, will not be on the stage for this debate or any of the others instead he’s pre-taped an interview with former Foxy Tucker Carlson whose texts saying that he hated Trump “passionately” and that he was happy that as a result of the 2020 election he “truly couldn’t wait” to ignore Trump were revealed as part of the Dominion Voting Machines discovery but that was then and this is now and both of them need each other so apparently all is forgiven, at least for the moment.  The Tucker-Trump interview will “air” on X, the company formerly known as Twitter, on Wednesday night as counterprogramming to the debate.  As to the debate itself, we know a bit about DeSantis’s strategy via his super PAC which “leaked” and then quickly took down a tick-tock of what they told donors he should do.  That “slip” was less a slip than the way that super PACs which are prohibited from speaking directly with their preferred candidates communicate their messages, so the slip was that someone outside of DeSantis land saw the memo, not that the memo was posted for a very short time.  The PAC’s recommendation is that DeSantis defend Trump from expected attacks by Christie, that he “hammer” Ramaswamy who has been climbing in the polls and that he sneaks a few Biden attacks in for good measure.  There are a lot of reasons to hammer Ramaswamy, among other things he says that he’d cut the government workforce by 75%, he’d eliminate the IRS,  he believes that Russia should be able to keep the parts of Ukraine that it wants, he thinks abortion is murder and supports a six-week ban, he wants everyone to be able to carry a gun, he’d raise the voting age to 25, and he unabashedly” supports Trump but the real reason that DeSantis, who will likely also mention that Ramaswamy is Hindu to feed the fears and biases of the religious right, will go after him is because he’s closing in on him in the polls. Ramaswamy is a whole lot more personable than the wooden DeSantis but then again so is a pet rock so he’ll probably hold his own and might even emerge as the winner of this debate, but he’ll probably be more of a “flavor of the moment” than a real challenger.  Then again, there was a time when none of us thought that Trump would be president.

Weigh In? While the press is churning out their debate analyses, Trump will be heading to Atlanta where he is due at the Fulton County jail for finger printing and maybe to take a mug shot and get weighed. My guess is that he tips the scales around 300 pounds, yours? His lawyers have already agreed that he will post a $200,000 bond. Trump, or at least his lawyers say he has, also agreed to refrain from intimidating co-defendants or witnesses or otherwise obstructing the administration of justice and is prohibited from making “direct or indirect” threats on social media.  We all know that he is going to violate that agreement, last night he trolled DA Fani Willis about the $200,000 bond requirement and her “fears” that he would flee to Russia, we should be so lucky. The question is what will happen when he clearly violates his promises not to intimidate because even Fani isn’t going to try to toss him in the slammer.  At least Trump has the money to put up a bond.  His co-defendants not so much.  Taking a page from his one-time lawyer Jenna Ellis a number of them have posted go fund me type accounts because unlike him they don’t have the money to post a bond, nor can they afford lawyers.  One of those bleeding money is Rudy Giuliani, who in addition to listing his Manhattan apartment for sale, $6 million ask if you are interested, is selling Cameo video messages.  Only $325 if you want Rudy to wish you or a friend a happy birthday. More if you want him to do so while dripping hair dye?

War and Peace: Last Friday the lawyers representing Trump on the January 6 election interference case requested that Judge Chutkan reject Special Counsel Jack’s request for a January 2, 2024 trial date.  Instead, citing the volume of discovery material, which they compared to the height of the Washington Monument and the Statue of Liberty and to reading War and Peace repeatedly they proposed that the trial be postponed until April of 2026. Last night Jack’s team responded, calling their claims exaggerated, pointing to the availability of technology that searches documents for key words. The ball is now in Chutkan’s court and though Jack’s January 2 date might not stick, Trump’s witness intimidating social posts aren’t expected to please her as she has already said that she’ll accelerate his case as punishment. Also on Friday, via the release of documentary film aired by MSNBC we heard Roger Stone advocating the false elector plot as an option even before the 2020 election took place and via CNN that Kenneth Chesebro who pushed a more developed version of the plot after the election was at the Capitol on January 6^th hanging with conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

And:  The House Freedom Caucus, the broken toys that Kevin McCarthy needs to wrangle to pass anything through the House without an assist from Hakeem Jeffries’ Democrats have issued a series of demands that they want met before they’ll agree to continue funding the federal government.  Those demands include ending the “weaponization” of the DOJ by ending all investigations into Trump while presumably continuing with all those into the mired in increasingly deep doo doo Hunter Biden. They also oppose any short-term continuing resolution while details of a final budget are hashed out.  McCarthy is not going to have a good September which means that the rest of us might not either because despite Ramaswamy’s claim that we could live with drastic, Twitter level cuts in government, the reality is we can’t.  Not if we want passports, roads, tax refunds, social security checks, health benefits, clean water, and so on.