I wanted to give you a brief update on the server outage we had off and on for much of Tuesday afternoon.
First, we apologize that this happened and especially on such a news packed day. As members you pay for us to bring you the news and for the site to be online. We take that responsibility very seriously. Unfortunately, we do not yet know the precise cause of Tuesday’s outage. It appears to have originated on our server host’s side. So that left us for much of the afternoon in the uncomfortable position of largely having to wait on their team to figure out and fix the problem. (If you had a problem accessing the site, believe me it was extremely frustrating on our end too.) We ended the day making some triage changes to keep the site online until the underlying cause is determined.
My words here may seem lawyerly or overcautious. It’s not that. We just don’t want to say more than we know or speculate and have to correct the record later.
Once we know the precise cause we’ll report back to you.
Let’s grant the Trump lawyers their point and say Michael Cohen is the “MVP of Liars.” He’s certainly an accomplished liar. But even though I’m probably preaching to the choir, let’s look at this. This is Donald Trump’s argument, the guy who is plagued by all the turncoats, morons, liars and criminals who he’s hired to work for him. Again, Donald Trump is insisting someone is a liar and can’t be trusted. If Michael Cohen is the MVP, what is Donald Trump? The Babe Ruth of Liars?
A very ill-timed site outage deprived many of you of Josh Kovensky’s liveblogging of the closing arguments in the Trump trial. Our vendor is still working under the hood to stabilize things, but the liveblog is back up now. Thanks for your patience. I promise it has been as frustrating for us as it has been for you.
This morning, Punchbowl has an item about Republican senators pledging not to tamper with the filibuster if they win control of Congress and Trump wins the presidency in November. (Yes, unfortunately we have to discuss these things.) Democrats don’t believe them. But Republicans insist they’ll say no to Donald Trump if he demands it. And they can point to 2017 and 2018 when he made those same demands and they refused.
Let me start by noting that Democrats absolutely shouldn’t believe them. Trump is Trump, after all, and Republican senators are Republican senators. But with that said, it is worth reminding ourselves that quite apart from believing Republican pledges or thinking Republicans are invested in values other than power, Republicans actually have interests in the filibuster that Democrats do not.
TPM’s Josh Kovensky will be liveblogging closing arguments in the Trump trial beginning at 9:30 a.m. ET Tuesday. Join him and us for a big week, with the jury finally getting the case.
Today I got an email from a publication you know the name of telling me that they’re very excited to announce that they’re starting a membership program. They’ve already been taking contributions for a number of years despite being owned by two megacorporations and having a history as an aggressively funded VC start up. This isn’t a publication I tend to read often, but it’s one many people do. And they employ lots of first-rate journalists.
(They addressed me as a former contributor, which I’m pretty much certain isn’t accurate. Which suggests some of the slapdashedness of the pivot to membership and doesn’t bode well for the corporate overlords’ patience with this new direction.)
But it suggested to me a small policy idea that could be a part of the solution to some current woes of the journalism industry. It’s no silver bullet. And there other policy ideas people are backing. But here’s mine.
I want to commend to your attention this article from Nate Cohn at the Times. It looks at the weak point for the NYT-Siena poll, and, indeed, many other polls this election cycle. In short, Donald Trump’s current lead is heavily focused on people who didn’t vote in 2020 and tend not to vote in general. They tend not to follow politics closely or pay much attention to traditional news sources. This isn’t new to our discussion. It’s sort of the internal anatomy of the gap between polls of registered voters and likely voters.
This is a fairly big deal. It has always struck me as inherently unlikely that what many suspect will be a relatively low turnout election (relative to recent cycles) will be determined by voters who tend not to vote and didn’t vote in 2020 — voters who, in this election, are supporting Trump in greater numbers. It’s not impossible. But it’s hard to figure. And this is what Trump’s current lead in most polls is based on. To be clear, this isn’t some hidden defect in the NYT-Siena poll or Cohn’s earlier logic. He’s discussed this issue throughout. And this article today focuses on it.
We have our first arrest tied to the vigilante attacks on the UCLA Gaza encampment on April 30th. In some ways it illustrates how slow and incremental the process has been. The arrestee is an 18-year-old high schooler named Edan On. He appears to be either Israeli or Israeli-American. I base this in part on his name but more on the fact that his identity was originally uncovered in part by his mother’s boasting about his role in the attack in Hebrew on Facebook. (Many American Jews know some Hebrew, or even a lot of Hebrew. But they don’t tend to use it as a casual posting language on social media unless they’re from Israel or have a family background in Israel.)
Below I noted that one obvious way to steal the election for Republicans, if we have a 270-268 Biden win, is to reallocated Biden’s (probable) Nebraska elector to Trump. But TPM Readers ED and JP noted that when Republicans tried to change the law in advance, Maine Democrats made clear they’d do the same to even the score. I didn’t realize they’d been so public about it. But it’s very good that they did. Changing the law in advance is very different from illegally doing it after the fact. But this gives me some confidence that if Nebraska Republicans tried this and got SCOTUS to say it was okay then Maine would say “count us in too.” As they should. Still worth keeping an eye on. But this gives me a bit more peace of mind.
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NEW YORK — The first-ever criminal trial of an American president barreled to a close on Tuesday in a marathon day at Manhattan Criminal Court — the last day of testimony before the case goes to the jury, and one to which both sides brought everything they had.
Activist Jenny Beth Martin’s involvement in Speaker Mike Johnson’s ‘non-citizen’ voting push shows how it’s rooted in the effort to keep Donald Trump in power.
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