Good Tuesday to you,
Todayâs big story is The New York Timesâ report with new details on how Donald Trump wanted to impound voting machines. In December 2020, he directed Rudy Giuliani to call the acting head of Homeland Security to press him about whether he had the legal authority to impound voting machines. This was a man named Chad Wolf. Thankfully, Wolf said no, he had no such authority.
The Times also reveals, for what it says is the first time, that this order came shortly after Trump pressed Attorney General Bill Barr to do the same thing. Barr also said no. Thereâs also the previously reported (by Politico recently) effort to make the Pentagon do the same thing. Finally, the story says that Trump âalso tried to persuade state lawmakers in contested states like Michigan and Pennsylvania to use local law enforcement agencies to take control of them.â Those lawmakers said no.
So picture it in your mind: Trump, frantically counting down his days in the house he once called âa real dump,â trying four different ways to get voting machines impounded so that he and his people could find a way to cheat and change the outcome. Four ways. The order seems to have been: Justice Department, state lawmakers, Pentagon, Homeland Security. The lesson Trump surely took away from all this? Next time, if there is a next time, install people whoâll say yes.
Now let us turn to Madison Cawthorn, the North Carolina House Republican who once tweeted a chirpy selfie from a notorious elite Nazi lair in Bavaria, which he was interested in visiting for historical purposes only, of course. He gets a little less attention than Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, but he is arguably the most fascist of them all. Last summer, he warned of âbloodshedâ if the next presidential election was, um, shrouded in doubt. Monday, in a video interview with the Daily Caller, he averredâperhaps in honor of Black History Month!âthat during Black Lives Matter protests in 2020, âwe had all of our major cities burned to the ground.â He also said he talks to Trump âjust about every single day.â
Pausing here for a way-too-early pondering of this disturbing question: Who might be Trumpâs 2024 running mate if heâs the nominee? Cawthorn has to be on that list. If Trump is being strategic, heâll find a Latino running mate. My guess is he wonât feel the need to be strategic (Mike Pence was a strategic choice, given Penceâs closeness to evangelicals, but now Trump has that base covered himself).Â
On the somewhat lighter side of life, it appears that Joe Theismann let slip the new name of the Washington Football Team, which is set to be announced officially Wednesday. In a radio interview, the former Washington quarterback said the team will be called the Commanders. Eh. In this age of reappropriation, they really should have gone with the Generals. Cuz, you know, Washington was a general. Yes, thereâs that Globetrotters history, but nobody under 40 even knows what that means. The real question here is whether they keep or cashier the burgundy-and-gold color scheme. One advantage of an oft-bruited name that I kind of likedâthe Red Hawks, named after a Black air regiment in World War II, which would have been a nice corrective to the franchiseâs deeply racist historyâwould have permitted keeping the color scheme. The guess here is that Dan Snyder wants to change it. It doubles the marketing possibilities, after all, as they can get older sentimentalists to keep buying burgundy gear while the youngs eat up the new stuff. By the way, for as thorough an account of that racist history as youâll ever need to read, check out my 2011 piece in The New York Review of Books on the topic. I think itâs one of my better ones.
Finally today, Twitter asks the timeless musical question: Who is this Paul McCartney guy?
At NewRepublic.com, Alex Shephard takes a deep dive into the mystery thatâs had the publishing world wondering whoâs been stealing all those manuscripts for the last five years. Well, we knowâitâs Filippo Bernardini. What we donât know is why, but Alex gets us closer to the answer than anyone has. Kate Aronoff reports that the planned Ukraine defense bill in Congress has some green provisions but in fact could end up promoting fossil fuels. And from the magazine, Sophie Pinkham reviews a memoir from an academic who grew up in Stalinist Albania that is very unlike the standard somber fare of that genre.
Thanks for reading, âMichael Tomasky, editor |
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