Eve Fairbanks/WaPo:
No, Trump voters aren’t incapable of changing their minds about him
When we claim that Trump’s supporters are immovable, we’re saying more about our own assumptions and anxieties than we are about their beliefs
These are people who blew off early Trump lies as either minuscule or necessary. But they’ve been worn down over time. I was visiting one of these relatives in New York on the Friday when the search warrant was unsealed. She was glued to her phone — not to watch Fox News or Trump’s furious incitements on Truth Social, but to read the plain content of the warrant. “This is so bad,” she kept murmuring. “It looks inappropriate or wrong.”
She and my other relatives are more disturbed than I expected them to be. And they’re also shy about that, and ambivalent in expressing it, which is revealing in its own way. A recurring media motif in the last few years has been the reporter who ambushes a Trump voter at a restaurant hours after some new allegation lands and asks them whether they’re ready to forswear their vote. They’re almost always defensive, even defiant.
But defensiveness is everybody’s first instinct when their beliefs are challenged. Think of how people insist online that their marriages are picture-perfect just as those marriages head toward collapse. Bravado can be a tell — it often belies worry and ambivalence.
How often do you see climate concerns top abortion and crime? And threat to democracy, that’s a new one.
WaPo:
Court orders release of DOJ memo on Trump obstruction in Mueller probe
The unanimous panel decision issued Friday echoes that of a lower court judge, Amy Berman Jackson, who last year accused the Justice Department of dishonesty in its justifications for keeping the memo hidden.
The panel of three judges, led by Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan, said that whether or not there was “bad faith,” the government “created a misimpression” and could not stop release under the Freedom of Information Act.
The memo was written by two senior Justice Department officials for then-attorney general William P. Barr, who subsequently told Congress that there was not enough evidence to charge Trump with obstruction of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s inquiry. A redacted version was released last year but left under seal the legal and factual analysis.
Department officials argued that the document was protected because it involved internal deliberations over a prosecutorial decision. But the judges agreed with Jackson that both Mueller and Barr had clearly already concluded that a sitting president could not be charged with a crime. The discussion was over how Barr would publicly characterize the obstruction evidence Mueller had assembled, the Justice Department conceded on appeal.
Scott Maxwell/Orlando Sentinel:
Military veterans already teach in Florida schools. They say they too are disrespected
Florida has a teacher shortage that just won’t quit — thousands of vacancies affecting students throughout the state.
So Gov. Ron DeSantis, scrambling for solutions, wants to tap veterans, firefighters and police officers to fill the classrooms.
I think it’d be great to help more veterans launch second careers. But here’s what the governor doesn’t seem to realize:
Veterans have been in Florida classrooms for years. Yet many got the hell out, saying the same thing other teachers say — that teaching in this state stinks.
Houston Chronicle:
Flood of 2,300 departing workers leaves Texas child welfare agency scrambling: ‘Absolutely a crisis’
In interviews and at public town halls, more than two dozen current and former employees described a department that has been stretched thin for more than a year, needlessly losing passionate workers who carry decades of experience and knowledge. From dangerous overtime shifts watching children in hotels to political drama to problems with their supervisors, workers say the agency has lost its mission — and in the end, it’s Texas kids who suffer for it.
Matthew Cooper/Washington Monthly:
Does Liz Cheney Have a Future?
Despite the admiration she’s earned for her courage and resolve, Cheney doesn’t have a lot of ways to bring down Trump—except maybe one.
Ironically, Cheney could take a page from Charles Lindbergh’s America First movement, a popular uprising led by the famed aviator that galvanized antiwar sentiment (and antisemitism) in America leading up to the U.S. entry into World War II. In both name and spirit, today’s America First zombies echo the 20th-century ones that Lindbergh led. Perhaps Cheney can forge some kind of virtuous analog, a “Truth Now” movement, with placards, a logo, and rallies. That’s hard but possible. The Lincoln Project had the right idea, and Cheney could make it less sophomoric.
Cheney’s best shot at taking down Trump may come between now and January in her guise as the vice chairman of the January 6 Committee. The panel has elevated Cheney and wounded Trump with killer anecdotes. It’s impossible to put the ketchup back in the bottle, but the revelations haven’t slayed the beast nor convinced Republican voters and officeholders to jettison him. To get Cheney’s white whale, she’ll need a legal harpoon to jam into the hungry, pale monster. As a University of Chicago Law School graduate, Cheney wants to hand Merrick Garland findings so lethal that the mild-mannered attorney general will not only indict Trump but also convict him. Making the committee stronger is her last, best chance to take out Trump. Trump ended the Clinton, Bush, and Cheney electoral dynasties, but Liz’s turn in public life isn’t over. Even if she were to return to private life in McLean, she has honored herself in a way that’s rare in life, let alone politics.
NY Times:
Ukrainian Strikes May Be Slowing Russia’s Advance
A new strategy of attacks on logistical targets in Russian-held territory is having an impact, analysts say, symbolically as well as militarily.
Paula J. Dobriansky, a former American diplomat specializing in national security affairs, said that by threatening Russian supply lines and underscoring Moscow’s tenuous grip on Crimea, the strikes in Crimea were “both operational and symbolic.”
The strikes may also represent a deliberate strategy not only to disrupt Russian logistics and supply lines but to put the war back on the Russian domestic political agenda, said Christopher Miller, an associate professor of international history at the Fletcher School at Tufts University.
Tech Policy Press:
“Exhausting and Dangerous:” Is Election Disinformation a Priority for Platforms?
Time is short for a rethink, and the temperature is rising. The same day that Twitter announcement was made and the Oversight Committee majority staff report was published, an armed man named Ricky Shiffer attacked an FBI field office in Ohio. Social media posts under accounts with the same name– on Facebook, Twitter, and Truth Social– suggest Shiffer may have been motivated to carry out the attack due to anger over the FBI’s search of former President Donald Trump’s Mar-A-Lago property, an event that provoked extreme rhetoric from right wing influencers, media personalities and some politicians. Posts indicate Shiffer’s rage was also driven by the belief that the 2020 election was stolen from Trump, and that he was present at the Capitol building in Washington DC on January 6, 2021.
As the violence played out in Ohio, Rep. Pete Sessions, R-TX, used his moment as Ranking Member on the Oversight Committee panel to raise doubts about whether the FBI has properly investigated what he regards as improprieties in elections, even vaunting the discredited film 2000 Mules, which advances a range of conspiracy theories about the 2020 cycle. “We have been incapable to hear back from elections officials and federal law enforcement on this issue,” he said.
Exhausting and dangerous, indeed.
Politico Playbook:
Voters ranked “threats to democracy” as a more important issue than cost of living. In May, high prices topped voters’ list of concerns. A few important things have happened since then. (1) Gas prices have gone down substantially. (At the end of May, the national average for a gallon was $4.62, per AAA; as of Sunday, it’s down to $3.90.) (2) The first set of Jan. 6 committee hearings wrapped up, with a barrage of new revelations and allegations against former President DONALD TRUMP and his allies. (3) And then came the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago, which again threw Trump into the spotlight.
Democrats are hopeful that the FBI/Trump ordeal will give them an opportunity to further differentiate themselves from Republicans with voters. But it can be a mixed bag: Trump often takes up all the oxygen in the room, preventing Democrats from getting proactive attention for the issues of their choosing.
Many people in Biden world insist they aren’t overly concerned that they won’t be breaking through. “People don’t watch MSNBC and CNN all day. They watch their local news, they read their local paper,” one adviser to President JOE BIDEN told us Sunday night. “No offense, but not everybody wakes up in the morning and reads Playbook.” (Offense taken!)
ANOTHER SIDE EFFECT OF THE FOCUS ON MAR-A-LAGO — Some Republicans are warning that the recent focus on the FBI’s Mar-a-Lago search allowed Democrats’ massive reconciliation bill to go largely unanswered in the public sphere, Meridith McGraw and Caitlin Oprysko report this morning . The bill passed so quickly, in the end, that conservatives had little opportunity to build grassroots opposition and outrage like they did for the Affordable Care Act and other big legislation. “Whereas conservative activism has, in past cycles, been driven by opposition to Democratic-authored policies or actions … the modern version has been fed by culture-war issues and, more often than not, Trump himself.”
CESAR YBARRA of FreedomWorks: “We got rolled.”