Deplorables of the Week
A target rich environment
We apologize for interrupting the non-stop coverage of Biden’s Fall, but there is some actual news out there: the Senate passed the debt deal, averting default, the GOP slap-fight seems to be escalating, the economy just added 339K new jobs, My Kevin throws the Outpatient Caucus some scraps, and we’re naming our latest Deplorables of the Week.
Happy Friday.
Some interesting reporting from Puck’s Tina Nguyen: “The Taliban 20’s McCarthy Red Line.”
Of course, the 20 will continue to fume that the debt-ceiling agreement is not ideologically pure enough. But using the motion-to-vacate nuclear option to kick McCarthy from speakership, at this point, would be received as little more than a MAGA temper tantrum, rather than a principled stand. “They’re not going to do it just to do it,” a Republican consultant familiar with the 20’s thinking told me. “They’re either going to have to get something from McCarthy, or [an ouster’s] going to be more planned out.”…
As with the speakership battle, where it only became clear afterward how many promises McCarthy had made privately to secure the vote, the debt ceiling drama might have a long tail. Sources I spoke to were adamant that McCarthy now has to give his critics some new shiny bauble to placate them—though even they don’t know what that bauble is quite yet.
Well, here is one bauble that My Kevin has already handed out, via Oliver Darcy:
Right-wing media favorite John Solomon disclosed on Thursday that House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has given him "unfettered access" to the Jan. 6 surveillance tapes….
Zooming in: The fact that McCarthy is releasing the surveillance footage to right-wing media and hiding it from news organizations says a lot about him. McCarthy, who is very familiar with the horror that unfolded at the Capitol that day, knows that the media personalities he is giving the tapes to will use it to push bogus conspiracy theories about what happened. He knows that they will use the footage to rewrite the history of that day. And yet, he still provides them with the tapes while withholding it from news organizations.
Lordy, there were tapes
In the latest episode of “The Trump Trials,” Ben Wittes and I discuss how Trump’s own recorded words appear to undercut his already weak defense that he had declassified the documents he took from the White House.
“This does follow the first rule of criminal behavior, which is do not record yourself doing it,” explains Ben. “And it’s not a hard rule to follow. I mean, we’re not talking about hidden cameras or somebody being, you know, don’t do the crimes in recorded medium.
“It’s just bad practice. If you’re gonna be a criminal and there’s, you know, arguments for and against that. But being a criminal on digital media is — yeah — really a bad idea.”
You can listen to the whole thing here.
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Make sure you read Kim Wehle’s analysis of the smoking tape in today’s Bulwark: “Why the Trump Tape Matters for the Mar-a-Lago Case.”
Deplorables of the Week
As we’ve mentioned before, there are certain candidates who are generally ineligible because they are just so thoroughly deplorable — folks like MTG and Trump — that they would dominate the list every damn week if we let them. So herewith is our admittedly incomplete weekly list of the worst of the rest: