Coop Scoop: "The Great Grift And Retribution Tour Edition"
March 10: Send the money only to me says the Great Grifter
Issue #67
March 10, 2021
By Marc Cooper
Former President Trump has been scurrying to launch what will be his two-tear National Grift and Retribution Tour. The 292 lb. gorilla that stalks Mara-A-Lago has the full stated intention of using the 2022 primaries to take off the board the 15 or so Senate and House Republicans that voted for his impeachment along with all other suspect Republicans who have failed to fully submit to His Greatness.
No idle threat. We learned last Saturday that, in an unprecedented move in American politics, his team of legal goons sent cease and desist letters to the Republican National Committee, the National Republican Senatorial Committee and the National Republican Congressional Committee warning then to no longer use his likeness in fundraising appeals. Instead, Trump said publicly, send the money to my Save America PAC and nobody else.
These three targeted groups are the primary portals of Republican donations and we also know that their most effective gimmick is always about Trump: Trump Hats, Trump Shirts, Trump Banners, even Trump Shrines!
Trump made clear in his letters that this party was now the Trump Party and that only he would be allowed to hold the Republican small-donor base up by the feet and shake the last nickels out of their pockets.
“I fully support the Republican Party and important GOP Committees, but I do not support RINOs and fools, and it is not their right to use my likeness or image to raise funds,” Trump said, using the acronym for “Republicans in name only.”
“So much money is being raised and completely wasted by people that do not have the GOP’s best interests in mind. If you donate to our Save America PAC at DonaldJTrump.com, you are helping the America First movement and doing it right. We will WIN, and we will WIN BIG! Our Country is being destroyed by the Democrats!” he added.
Trump has no legal authority to ban the use of his likeness as he is a public figure. But proving that its relationship to Trump echoes that of the Vichy Gendarmerie to the Gestapo in occupied France, the RNC immediately capitulated and announced it would be holding the party’s next big confab in…yes…Mar-A-Lago, (enabling Trump to soak the attendees for several million more dollars in room and food charges).
Trump’s strategy is twofold: primarily to keep alive the Big Lie which he has been able to monetize was beyond his own dreams; he has already pocketed more than $250 million since the election and can probably triple that up before the midterms.
This is his real profession and he’s pretty good at it. Remember that more than a president or an ex-president he has always been and will always be a grifter.
He needs this money for two pressing matters: the near billion dollars he owes in personal and commercial loans coming due, and the funding he wants to invest in Trumpian primary candidates to complete his stranglehold on the party by humiliating the party’s internal critics, or what’s left of them.
It’s really the straggling and mild critics that he has inside Congress that constitute the foco of what laughingly might be called his Republican Critics. They are few, weak and mostly doomed.
Trump long ago harvested the support of almost all the state Republican parties as his slates easily triumphed over the years.
Like the national party and the Great Leader himself, these state parties have slimmed down their traditional platforms to just two major planks: oppose and obstruct any and all Democratic initiatives; and do everything possible to suppress the Democratic vote…and not in that order. Just as Trump is serving up payback on those who opposed him, Republican-led state legislatures are now taking revenge on Democratic voters, mostly younger ones and voters of color, who had the temerity to show up in massive number in November and defeat them.
The Trump Party no longer aspires to become a majority party which it knows it cannot be. It can never win a national popular vote again. So the party’s electoral strategy is crystal clear: focus on the cult members in key swing states, suppress the vote of opponents, and count on the radical bias of the electoral college to achieve victory. Get 46% in the right places and you are home free.
While our attention is often cast upward toward the national stage, there’s a whole lot of ugliness already taking place at the state and local level. As I have mentioned twice in the past few weeks, there are 253 voter suppression bills under consideration in 43 states, all pushed by Republicans. Talk about retribution!
Iowa led off the anti-voter, anti-democratic marathon on Monday when its Republican Governor Kim Reynolds signed a law that cuts back early and absentee voting and, in a jaw-dropping turn, forces the polls to close an hour earlier. Go explain this, please, in an already solidly red state that had a perfectly trouble-free election. I suppose it’s more of performative tribute to the Old Bastard in Florida than anything else as Democrats represent only a minor threat in Iowa.
The most insidious attack to date on voting rights, predictably, takes place in Georgia where the Republicans control both houses of the legislature and were they are still smarting over the January loss of the two US Senate seats to insurgent Democrats.
The Republican-backed SB 241 would abolish absentee voting unless a valid excuse can be verified; it would force voters to produce legal I.D. not only when they vote and they turn in the ballot.
Most appalling, and most revealing, is the provision in the law that would make it a misdemeanor to offer food or water to anybody standing in a voting line. In other words, the legislature is doing everything it can to create eight hour voting lines and then arrest you if you give someone in it a drink of water.
These are the depths to which the Trump Party has stooped in modern American to literally stop voting, And anybody who ignores what is already taking place, does so at the peril of democratic rule.
It’s not an accident that some of the more reasonable, if not exactly moderate, Old Guard Republican Senators have announced their coming retirement: Rob Portman, Roy Blount, and Pat Toomey. I suppose they have tired of being in Trump’s harem and now their influence has been reduced to nil. Pity poor Mitch McConnell who is now surrounded by Trumpers itching to take his scalp too. And they will.
The move to suppress voting seriously threatens the integrity of the next election, and if the next election goes off the rails there is an even chance that rule of law will go with it.
At a local and state level, we must be organizing to defend voting rights, work our butts off building turnout capacity TODAY (not 15 months from now) and we must also give support to national legislation that begins to federalize election standards, and prevents discriminatory suppression.
There is a “fix” for this. The omnibus For The People Act (H.R.1) approved by the House last week and the John Lewis Voting Act (H.R.4) to be approved a few months from now, would revolutionize, bolster and enrich American voting rights and the election process. These are landmark bills that In this area are as crucial as the COVID relief bill was in battling the pandemic and its fallout.
Look, it’s not my fault, but any serious consideration of these crucial bills, demands a serious consideration of nuking or at least modifying and reforming the filibuster, or else these and all other Democratic initiatives are DOA in the Trump-tainted Senate. I’m not going to go on about it, as, unfortunately, there will be many opportune moment to come over the next few months to sound off.
Suffice it to say, for the moment, that there is finally some, if minor movement, on the filibuster issue. The powerful House leader Jim Clyburn (S-SC) who basically elected Biden, said this week that there should at least be a “carve-out” in the filibuster so it can be skirted on issues of voting and civil rights. Co-President Joe Manchin who has sworn to never ever cross-my-heart nuke the filibuster has, nevertheless, cracked the door open to making it more “difficult” more “painful” to carry out. And no less than a mainstream Democratic apparatchik as Rahm Emmanuel this week came out in favor of nuking it.
Perhaps, the most salient comment on this issue comes from veteran Democratic election lawyer Marc Elias – mastermind of many of Trump’s legal defeats this year—who, in arguing for the striking of the filibuster, said: “Senate rules should not be a suicide pact.”
A few words about the mondo COVID relief package approved today by the House and on its way to Biden for signing: it truly is an historic raft of legislation that will provide tangible, much needed economic relief to millions of Americans. To some, $1400 per person might seem like not very much but put in the context of 50% of Americans not having $400 in hand for an emergency puts it in a different light. Even more important is the wonderful idea of giving a generous CASH tax credit of $3000 or more a year for each dependent child, a sort of universal basic income for children, or as other has called it, social security for children. This is quietly one of the most advanced social insurance programs since the New Deal and the War on Poverty and it promises to cut child poverty in half. This provision sunsets in a year, 6 months before the midterms, and it will be a spectacle to watch the Republicans try to not make it permanent. Good luck with that, Mitch!
Kudos to Bernie Sanders, Pramila Jayapal and other progressives who held the line as tight as possible against the interventions of the Manchins and other conservatives who wanted to significantly water this down. Grudgingly, credit also to Chuck Schumer who also helped hold it together.
There’s a big lesson in this bill that has zero support among Republican Senators and a whopping 60 percent support among Republican voters. That’s the only definition of “bi-partisanship” we should accept and urge.
When Democrats control both houses of congress and the White House and, crucially, when progressives have real influence, really good things can be fished out of that cesspool on Capitol Hill. Let’s break that filibuster, escalate local and national mobilizations for more reform putting more pressure on recalcitrant Democrats, ignore completely the seditious and perverted Trump Party and let’s get on with similar ground breaking legislation on wages, immigration, voting and civil rights, criminal justice reform and climate change.
It’s a slow arduous and uneven process that requires both patience and endless tenacity The only enemies are complacency and indifference. And the filibuster. +++
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