Deny, Deny, Hate ✡️🌻✡️🌻✡️🌻

Trump Trials:  The big news on Friday was about former Trump aide Hope Hick’s testimony.  The 35-year-old Hicks, who hasn’t spoken to Trump since the end of 2022 and who, fun gossip, is now engaged to 58-year-old Goldman Sachs banker Jim Donovan, is one of the few former Trumpers whose legal expenses aren’t being paid for by Trump. Though the one time pants presser/Girl Friday/Communications Director has done her best to divorce herself from the taint of serving in the Trump White House, unlike some of the other young women who served in the Trump orbit like former Mark Meadows aide Cassidy Hutchinson or Deputy Press Secretary Sarah Matthews, or many of his former top aides and cabinet members and national security advisors, she hasn’t raised alarms about what went on in his White House, likely because she remains fond of Trump and never really cared all that much about the bad things she witnessed. We don’t know much about her political views, in fact Sarah Matthews reports that unlike the other young Republicans in the White House, she didn’t seem to have many, rather she was just happy to have serendipitously landed in the lucrative Trump universe, luck that more to do with her looks, fashion background and association with Ivanka than any long-term political goals. The press has made a big deal about her crying during the defense’s cross examination, but her tears aren’t the story.  The story is what she said.  She testified that in the days before the 2016 election Trump told her to deny the veracity of the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal stories which she did. Though he initially said that he wanted the stories denied to protect Melania and his family, in 2018 when addressing the details of the hush money payments, he said “it was better to be dealing with it now,…. that it would have been bad to have that story come out before the 2016 election,” particularly in the aftermath of the Access Hollywood tape that had hit like a category 4 hurricane.  As to Michael Cohen’s advancing the hush money for Trump, she said that despite Cohen’s initial claim that he made the payments to Stormy out of the goodness of his heart to protect Trump, that wasn’t true, largely because Cohen didn’t do things out of the goodness of his heart.  Like other’s who have testified, she doesn’t harbor fond memories of dealing with Cohen who she said was only a fixer because he messed up a lot and then had to fix what he’d done,  but neither does she doubt that those payments, which constitute the falsifying of business records crime at heart of the case, were made at Trump’s direction to benefit him.  Moreover, she said that Trump was a micromanager, another indication that the payments would have needed his approval.  Of course, since we live in news silos, the Fox universe has portrayed Hicks’ testimony and her tears as a good thing for Trump while the rest of mainstream media mostly says that her testimony was damning and that those tears were due to her realizing that she’d just thrown Trump under the bus.  Of course, all that matters is how the jury interpreted them, and we won’t know that for weeks.  Michael Cohen will be testifying soon.  The prosecution strategy is to have other witnesses and expert validated tape recordings corroborate everything he says.  The defense strategy will be to eviscerate him.  Fireworks 💥 to come.  

Veepstakes:  All of Trump’s potential vice president candidates, including dog killer Kristi Noem, joined him at a Mar a Lago fundraiser over the weekend.  Many of them followed up the festivities with Sunday morning news appearances where, like Trump, each refused to promise to recognize the results of the 2024 election.  Déjà vu? Noem, who will not be selected as Trump’s running mate doubled down on her dogicide, adding that if Biden had any balls, he’d have shot his errant German Shepherd.  She also kind of walked back the assertion in her soon to be released book that she’d had a meeting with North Korean dictator Kim Jung un, a claim that is so demonstrably false, that her book which is due out momentarily is already being edited and reprinted.  As to the rest of the potential VPs, three of them including Senator Marco Rubio, Representative Byron Daniels, and Governor Ron DeSantis, suffer from a Florida problem. Simply put, the Constitution prohibits Electoral College members from casting their votes for a President and a Vice President from the same state.  In a close election, where losing any electoral votes matter, having two Floridians on the ticket would put Florida’s 30 Electoral College votes in jeopardy.  That’s why Dick Cheney who, like George W Bush, resided in Texas, changed his residency to Wyoming before the 2000 election.  The easiest solution would be for Trump who has homes in three states to shift his residency to NJ or NY but that’s not going to happen.  DeSantis and Daniels don’t appear to be near the top of Trump’s list, but these days Rubio may be. Rubio appears to be willing to move out of state, which probably would mean that he’d have to give up his Senate seat to run as Trump’s running mate, not that state residency is a problem for Republican Senators.  Alabama’s Tommy Tuberville resides in Florida and the Republican candidates for Senator in Pennsylvania, Montana and Wisconsin don’t reside in those states so there’s that.  In other political news, Texas Congressman Henry Cuellar, a Democrat, was indicted on Friday. He and his wife were accused of accepting $600,000 in bribes from a bank in Mexico City and an oil and gas company owned by Azerbaijan.  For now, while he’s staying in the House, he has stepped down from his leadership role on the Homeland Security Appropriations subcommittee.  Maybe because it doesn’t fit with his assertions that the Department of Justice is biased against all things Republican, an assertion that the also indicted NJ Democratic Senator Bob Menendez probably finds suspect, Trump defended Cuellar this weekend, instead saying that the Texas Democrat is being persecuted for being supportive of more border security, the same security that Trump wouldn’t let his House Republicans vote for.  In any case, Cuellar, the only anti-choice Democrat remaining in Congress, is frequently primaried so there’s probably a line of Democrats waiting to assume his seat should it come to that.       

Fog:  Anti-Semitism, frequently called the oldest hate, is out in full force these days which combined with a slew of bomb threats this weekend likely explains why the police standing guard outside my local synagogue aren’t made up of the usual cadre of ordinary officers but instead include only members of the NYPD Counter Terrorism unit.  While many of those demonstrating for the Palestinians are students solely concerned with events in Gaza, CNN and other outlets report a significant percentage are outsiders with no campus affiliations.  Worse, the written demands being made by the demonstrators’ leaders reveal far more than a concern for Gazans.  Specifically, as evidenced by a list presented by those at one college in California, the demands call for the ending of any association with anything that has anything associated with Israel AND Jews, including the cutting of ties with university Hillels.  The Hillel demand is the anti-Semitic tell because if this is only about Israel and Gaza, why call for the elimination of centers for Jewish life on campus? To be clear, it’s not about religious outposts in general, they’re not calling for the elimination of Newman Centers, just Hillels.  Why is that?  Moving to Israel and Gaza, that much called for ceasefire, not happening.  Nor are the hostages getting released anytime soon.

Today is Holocaust Remembrance Day which makes Trump saying this weekend that President Biden is running a “Gestapo” administration that much more offensive.  

#BringThemAllHomeNow