Today is a historic day. Don’t be fooled by the bluster — Trump and his cronies are scared. And let’s be clear: Trump didn’t care about investigating a political opponent. He wanted you all to be talking about an investigation of his political opponent. “But her emails” is a strategy, not a tiresome meme. And it’s not going to work this time, in part because of the facts and in part because of the chaotic response from the WH.
WaPo:
White House infighting flares amid impeachment inquiry
A dispute erupts between the Mulvaney and Cipollone camps over how to counter House Democrats’ impeachment push
Neither [Acting CoS Mick] Mulvaney nor [White House counsel Pat] Cipollone has broad experience navigating a White House through such a tumultuous period. But their actions have contributed to the White House’s increasingly tenuous response to the impeachment inquiry, in which public hearings are set to begin Wednesday in the House. Despite the high stakes, the White House moved slowly to hire a staff specifically dedicated to working on the impeachment issue, a concern that was expressed to the White House by multiple GOP senators, Capitol Hill aides said.
The pressure will only intensify.
He,y don’t lose sight of this, from the Roger Stone trial:
Roger Stone wasn't freelancing. Gordon Sondland wasn't either. Neither was Rudy Giuliani.Trump is responsible for cheating on elections and if we do nothing, he'll do it again in a heartbeat. So will the GOP. If they can't win fairly they cheat.
Greg Sargent/WaPo:
Trump just undercut his own spinners’ latest line of propaganda
President Trump’s propagandists have a problem. Some of them badly want to argue there was nothing wrong with Trump’s decision to withhold military aid from Ukraine, because he merely wanted that country to clean up its legacy of corruption.
In this telling, by using the funding as leverage to produce better outcomes in Ukraine, Trump was acting in the national interest.
But Trump himself has other ideas. He is unabashedly arguing that, yes, he absolutely did want Ukraine to investigate one of his leading 2020 campaign rivals — Joe Biden — because, after all, Biden is indeed corrupt. And that undercuts the GOP’s generic-corruption spin.
We just saw this dynamic play out to perfection. First Axios reported on a new and lengthy memo from House Republicans that offers their official arguments for the public impeachment inquiry. ...
But then Trump promptly undercut all that by tweeting that, yes, he did want Ukraine to investigate Biden. Trump claimed the summary of his July 25 call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky shows that there was “no pressure” on him.
“He and others also stated that there was ‘no pressure’ put on him to investigate Sleepy Joe Biden even though, as President, I have an ‘obligation’ to look into corruption, and Biden’s actions, on tape, about firing the prosecutor,” Trump added. Emphasis mine.
Oh and btw, Trump is self-impeaching, according to the NYT:
Trump Has Considered Firing Intelligence Community Inspector General
The president blames Michael Atkinson, whom he appointed, for finding the anonymous whistle-blower’s complaint on his interactions with Ukraine to be credible.
The president has said he does not understand why Mr. Atkinson shared the complaint, which outlined how Mr. Trump asked the Ukrainian president to investigate Mr. Trump’s political rivals at the same time he was withholding military aid from the country. He has said he believes Mr. Atkinson, whom he appointed in 2017, has been disloyal, one of the people said.
Mr. Trump’s private complaints about Mr. Atkinson have come as he has publicly questioned his integrity and accused him of working with the Democrats to sabotage his presidency.
That will go over well.
Michelle Goldberg/NY times:
To Exonerate Trump, Republicans Embrace Russian Disinformation
In this week’s impeachment hearings, expect a lot of G.O.P. conspiracy theorizing.
Some of these lies seem to have originated in Russia; documents from the Mueller investigation recently obtained by BuzzFeed News show that Manafort was blaming Ukraine for the Democratic National Committee hack back in 2016, a story he apparently got from one of his associates, a former Russian intelligence officer named Konstantin Kilimnik. (Hill testified that she’d encountered Kilimnik in a previous job, and “all of my staff thought he was a Russian spy.”)
A few of Trump’s more responsible aides have reportedly tried to disabuse him of Ukraine conspiracy theories, to no avail. Instead it appears that House Republicans, out of slavish fealty to the president, are going to use high-profile hearings to amplify them.
Jonathan Bernstein/Bloomberg:
Sorry, Republicans, Impeachment Isn't a Coup
The party’s latest defense of Donald Trump is inflammatory, illogical and highly unlikely to work.
If the White House resorted to such a talking point, I’d say it was badly overwrought. But for McCarthy to do so is much worse. He isn’t just saying that Democrats are mounting a coup; he’s implying that at least 20 Republicans would be in on it, since removing Trump requires a bipartisan supermajority of 67 votes in the Senate. It’s all the more inflammatory since under any plausible scenario in which Trump was removed, the vote would likely have overwhelming support and a solid majority of Republicans behind it. That’s what happened with Nixon in 1974: Although conservative Republicans and most moderates had stuck with the president for months, virtually all of them abandoned him at the end, at which point he resigned.
Politico:
Trump’s bluster crashes into a barrage of impeachment facts
The president’s confident, solo style is set to collide with Democratic efforts to publicly expose his actions over Ukraine aid.
“Whether it is cutting taxes or regulations, or skating through the Mueller probe, he has propelled through each time doing it his own way,” said Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary and communications director. “He has done it his own way for three years, and it has worked.”
But Trump’s tactics of speaking directly to supporters, branding catchphrases and casting critical information as fake might not work as well on impeachment as Democrats gather testimony and evidence from top officials not beholden to the Trump orbit. Even Trump himself is not sure he can beat impeachment, said a person close to the White House.
“This is a lot different than doing ‘Low Energy Jeb.’ When it does not involve smearing and innuendo, and it does not play solely on people’s emotions, then he is in trouble,” said Timothy O’Brien, author of the biography “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.” “He doesn’t argue well when there is an obvious fact pattern at play. That is his Achilles’ heel.”
SPLC:
Stephen Miller’s Affinity for White Nationalism Revealed in Leaked Emails
In this, the first of what will be a series about those emails, Hatewatch exposes the racist source material that has influenced Miller’s visions of policy. That source material, as laid out in his emails to Breitbart, includes white nationalist websites, a “white genocide”-themed novel in which Indian men rape white women, xenophobic conspiracy theories and eugenics-era immigration laws that Adolf Hitler lauded in “Mein Kampf.”
Hatewatch reviewed more than 900 previously private emails Miller sent to Breitbart editors from March 4, 2015, to June 27, 2016. Miller does not converse along a wide range of topics in the emails. His focus is strikingly narrow – more than 80 percent of the emails Hatewatch reviewed relate to or appear on threads relating to the subjects of race or immigration. Hatewatch made multiple attempts to reach the White House for a comment from Miller about the content of his emails but did not receive any reply.
The news isn’t that Mayor Pete is leading this poll, it’s that IA voters are far from settled on their choice.
Nate Cohn/NY Times:
Five Polling Results That May Change the Way You Think About Electability
Our battleground surveys had some outcomes that upended the conventional wisdom.
The party’s leading candidates have not yet reached the real missing piece of the Democratic coalition: less educated and often younger voters who are not conservative but who disagree with the party’s cultural left and do not share that group’s unrelenting outrage at the president’s conduct.
This basic conclusion follows from what registered voters told us in Michigan, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, Arizona, North Carolina and Florida.
Here’s what stood out to me.
Joe Biden has no special strength with white voters without a college degree.
It would have been reasonable to expect, as I did, that “middle-class Joe” from Scranton, Pa., would show strength by winning back the white working-class voters who defected from the Democrats in 2016. If he could do so, he would rebuild the so-called blue wall of traditionally competitive states across the Midwest. Add to this the college-educated white voters whom Hillary Clinton won in 2016, and Mr. Biden would have a commanding lead.
But there is no sign that Mr. Biden has any special appeal to white voters without a degree in these states. Instead, he runs a bit ahead of Mrs. Clinton across the board, among college-educated and working-class white voters alike. (He led by an average of two points over Mr. Trump among registered voters across the six states.).
It seems that all but a sliver of the white voters without a degree who backed Mr. Trump in 2016 will stick by him in 2020.
and...
There is not much difference between a strategy based on turnout and persuasion.
It’s commonly assumed that there’s a simple choice between persuasion and turnout in elections: A candidate can either aim to flip moderate voters or to rally a party’s enthusiastic base.
In a high-turnout presidential election, this choice doesn’t really exist. Virtually all of the ideologically consistent voters will be drawn to the polls, at least in these crucial states where the stakes are so high.
As a result, the voters on the sidelines are often also persuadable. With the exception of one key chunk of persuadable voters — affluent voters repelled by the left on economics — the persuadable voters wind up looking fairly similar to the low-turnout voters.
They aren’t particularly ideological. They’re a bit conservative on cultural issues, at least compared with the Democratic base. They’re less likely to be college graduates, but they don’t love the president. They’re likelier to be young and nonwhite, demographics that would ordinarily be a big Democratic advantage. But because they don’t tend to be partisan, it diminishes that advantage.
That’s who persuasion is aimed at.