MSNBC spent all that time pretending Trump would never go on trial. Now that Trump’s first criminal trial is starting, MSNBC is putting discredited prisoner Michael Avenatti on the air and letting him lie about the trial. MSNBC exists solely to bullshit you into staying tuned in. The problem isn’t simply that MSNBC is corrupt. The problem is that the cable news format doesn’t work. There aren’t 24 hours of political news a day. Some days there aren’t 24 minutes. So in order to keep you tuned in and keep the lights on, they have to bullshit you.

I said there was a chance Trump might get lucky with the bond. So be it. This ruling isn’t going to save him from his overall downfall. For that matter he still might not be able to come up with the bond. He’s broke, senile, and his first criminal trial is in 3 weeks. He’s toast. This is not “optimism.”

In spite of what some of you think, it’s not my job or my intent to “give you hope.”

I’m just trying to call it like it is.

Today was a rare win for Trump, but only an incremental one.

He’s still on a sharply downward trajectory overall. That’s a fact.

Trump spends his entire speech sounding senile, giving us soundbites we can use to convince persuadable voters that he has dementia. Yet all we can talk about is "oh no, he said the word bloodbath, there'll be a civil war, we're doomed!" We're only helping Trump with this talk. The entire reason Trump's handlers have him up there using words like "bloodbath" is to distract everyone from his senility. And it's working. Because we always tepidly and gullibly take the bait whenever Trump suggests he's magically able to overthrow the government.

The "intel briefings" that Trump would get as the nominee would be pedestrian info. Nothing like what a President would get. It wouldn't be anything he could sell or use to his advantage. This is all an imaginary doomsday scenario being hyped for ratings. Stop fretting over it. Besides, Trump got actual presidential intel briefings every day for four years. And then he stole a bunch of top secret classified information and read it in the bathroom.

There's nothing in his "nominee briefings" that would play on the level of the secrets he already knows.

You have to understand, this special counsel clown put that line in there about Biden's memory specifically to bait gullible suckers like you into defending Biden's memory, which keeps Biden's memory in the headlines. If you'd all just shut up about it, the story will go away. Trump says something completely senile every five minutes. There's no possible way that a one-time mention of Biden's memory in a report is going to get any sustained attention, as long as Trump is out there saying senile things every day like this.

Remember, while Judge Engoron said he was aiming for today for the verdict in the Trump fraud case, he’s not required to announce it today. Nor is he required to give us updates on his expected timeframe. But his verdict will come very soon, and it’ll be devastating for Trump. While Engoron can assign any dollar amount he wants, it’s not as simple as writing down a number. He and his team have to ensure that every dollar in penalties is specifically supported by the law in rock solid fashion, so that Trump can’t overturn it by appealing.

The more obvious it becomes that Trump is finished (senility, prison), the more his handlers try to cover for it by leaking scary things about what he’ll do when he’s magically in charge again. Their goal is to paralyze you with panic and fear. Don’t take the bait. Trump and his people want the messaging to be that he’s more dangerously powerful than ever. So your messaging about him should, obviously, be the opposite.

Now that the media has sufficiently hyped fake stories about Biden being behind in the polls (the polling averages say he's tied), the media is moving on to hyping fake stories about how Biden will step aside for Gavin Newsom. No surprise. We've seen the media pull this before.

Back in 2015, even as Hillary Clinton was utterly nominating Democratic primary polls by twenty points, the media simply lied and claimed she was behind her primary opponent in the polls. Then the media began making up fake stories about how everyone from John Kerry to Michael Dukakis was supposedly planning to enter the race because Hillary was no longer viable. And the whole thing was just pure fiction, made up by the media to drive ratings.

Now the media is doing it again. First they sell the lie that Biden is behind in the polls when he isn't. Then they sell the followup lie that other candidates are planning to step in because of how non-viable Biden's numbers supposedly are. The media can't find any real storylines about 2024 yet (because it's still 2023, duh) so it's making up fakes stories and then building other fake stories on top of them.

Remember, these lies aren't just coming from Fox News and the outlets you hate. These lies are coming just as thoroughly from the media outlets that claim to be on your "side" politically. That's because the major political news outlets are all only on the side of driving ratings. At this point they're all functioning like the National Enquirer. And it's been trending that way for years.

This won't stop until you push back and put a stop to it. Remember, the polls aren't the problem. The polling averages say Biden is TIED. Anyone can easily look that up and confirm it. The media is simply LYING when it claims Biden is way behind in the polls, so that it can build other lies on top of that lie.

All you have to do to push back is point out that Biden is tied in the polling averages. It takes all the air out of all the other phony claims the media wants to make about him. But don't let the media get away with this, or they'll only get more egregious about it. In reality Newsom is (obviously) gearing up to run for President in 2028, and that's great, he'll be a strong candidate. In the meantime Newsom is a powerful ally to Biden in 2024.

The media is being unfair to Biden, Newsom, and the public discourse by hyping this fake stuff.

Ten seconds of critical thinking and you realize that nothing could ever possibly work in the kindergarten level simplistic way that the political media and pundit class presents it to you.

But it's all designed to trigger an emotional response so you DON'T think it through. Aileen Cannon, one of the dumbest judges alive, has magically figured out how to cripple the entire Department of Justice and the entire Judicial Branch just by not issuing a ruling on something.

COME ON.

You'd need to have an IQ of zero to actually believe something this dumb.

Nate Silver, who years ago taught us all to look at the polling averages instead of doomsday hyperbole, is now such a desperate has-been that he’s cranking out doomsday hyperbole that ignores the polling averages. I trust everyone knows to ignore his every word at this point. For those asking how this happens, it’s pretty straightforward. His predictions were the best in the business. But no one’s predictions can be right 100% of the time. So when he occasionally got it wrong, the public (unfairly) decided he was a fraud. It went downhill from there.

If Jack Smith thought that Judge Cannon was actually trying to delay the trial past the election, don’t you think he’d be taking it up with the court of appeals?

Our side’s pundits always try to bait us into believing that our side’s leaders are hapless rubes. We’re supposed to believe that Cannon, whose responses in this trial suggest she has the legal savvy of a fourth grader, is somehow carrying out a secret evil genius four dimensional chess master plan to push ALL of Trump’s trials until after the election? This is giggle worthy.

Trump sure did a good job of getting his testimony delayed.

Oh wait, he ended up having to testify exactly when he was supposed to, and everything in this trial is happening on schedule, because there’s no such thing as running out the clock? Someone had better tell the media. Now that Trump has failed to delay this trial, failed to get out of testifying, and failed to find any antics to help him while on the stand, the media is moving on to the narrative that he’ll just magically get away with it all on appeal. But that’s also not reality.

When Mike Johnson became Speaker, I predicted that we’d quickly learn he was hiding serious financial and personal scandals. Sure enough he claims he has no bank accounts and he has a secret adopted son. Right wing politicians pretty much always have these kinds of scandals. And so now his time as Speaker won’t consist of building his influence or advancing his party’s agenda. It’ll mainly consist of playing defense on these kinds of scandals.

And there will be more Mike Johnson scandals. This is just what the media could dig up in the first week.

Mitch McConnell is now calling out Tuberville over military promotions. McConnell deserves zero credit for this. But it shows that Senate Democrats have won this battle, by somehow managing to get McConnell on board behind the scenes. Never discount Chuck Schumer’s savviness. This comes after Schumer also managed to get Republicans to back down behind the scenes and allow the new Senator from California to join the judiciary committee, after Republicans had previously vowed to block it.

Senate Democrats are now subpoenaing the people bankrolling Clarence Thomas. This is great news. But 95% of you will misunderstand why this is happening, and will just end up angrily ranting about the Democrats. Instead, take a minute to educate yourself with this thread: First, why didn’t this happen sooner? Because *congressional* subpoenas are NOT legally enforceable. The courts don’t take them seriously, and let people run out the clock on them, because congressional probes are not criminal probes.

If the Democrats win all the "Lean D" Senate races in 2024 (the ones they're expected to win), and they win two out of the three "Toss Up" races, they'll keep a 50 seat de facto majority. All these headlines about how they're likely to lose the Senate are... not based in reality. Today a major political site suggested the Democrats could lose as many as six senate seats in 2024.

There are no race ratings, no modeling, no basis whatsoever for predicting such a scenario.

But ‘Democrats may lose six senate seats’ will get panic clicks, so they run with it.

We’re seeing endless debate on here about whether Ivanka will sell out her family or “plead the fifth to protect them” but that debate is all gibberish because the fifth amendment doesn’t even work that way. You can only plead the fifth if you reasonably fear that your answers could be used to prosecute you.

The courts already ruled that Ivanka has no liability in the Letitia James probe because of the statute of limitations.

For the last time: there is no such thing as “delay delay delay” or “run out the clock” when it comes to trials. Trump’s nonsense filings haven’t delayed any of his trial start dates by a single day. There is no magic “delay” wand, no matter how many times MSNBC claims there is. One of the reasons a judge always initially sets the trial date several months away is so that there’s time for the nonsense motions to come and go. None of them actually delay anything. These filings are just filler so attorneys can tell their clients they’re “doing something.”

HOLY SHIT: Mark Meadows cut an immunity deal with Jack Smith awhile back and has since testified against Trump to the grand jury, per ABC News. Even more people will feel compelled to flip now that they know Meadows flipped awhile ago. This explains why Meadows was so desperate to get his Fulton County case moved to federal court. He must have believed it would get him off the hook on those charges. But he blew that play by lying under oath during the hearing.

No, Trump is not trying to get himself locked up on purpose to benefit his campaign. He’s scared to death of getting locked up. And his base would see him as weak, not strong, if it happens.

This is a silly nonsense narrative that you all need to stop lazily repeating. This is one of these nonsense narratives that falls apart after ten seconds of scrutiny, and you realize it’s obviously not the case.

But the outrage addicts on our side *want* it to be true (because they want to believe he’ll get away with it all), so they keep chanting it.

Judge Engoron handled things correctly today. You don’t throw Trump in jail over a syndicated social media post that he didn’t even know was still up. Wouldn’t hold up on appeal anyway. You wait until Trump actually violates the gag order, then you throw the book at him. The $5,000 fine was an appropriate proportional response for this kind of unintentional violation. It’s what would have happened to anyone else in Trump’s situation today.