Katie Britt

Trump has money problems

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 19, 2024

In Florida, Kansas, Ohio, Illinois, and Arizona, Republican voters chose their presidential candidate today. The results highlight the weaknesses former president Trump is bringing to the 2024 presidential contest.

Trump, who is the only person still in the Republican race, won all five of today’s Republican races. But the results showed that his support is soft. Results are still coming in, but as I write this, former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley, who has suspended her campaign, received between 13% and 20% of the vote, Florida governor Ron DeSantis—who has also suspended his campaign—picked up votes, and “none of the names shown” got more than 5% in Kansas. 

Even in Ohio, where Trump’s preferred Senate candidate won, Trump received less than 80% of the Republican vote. After NBC News conducted an exit poll in Ohio, MSNBC producer Kyle Griffin reported that of Ohio Republican primary voters—who are typically the most committed party members—11% said they would vote for Biden in November and another 8% said they wouldn’t vote for either Trump or Biden.

Trump has money problems, too. This morning, Brian Schwartz of CNBC reported that while Trump has pushed Haley voters away, Biden’s team has courted both voters and Haley donors to help Biden defeat Trump. Schwartz said that at least a half dozen former Haley fundraisers have decided to help Biden. 

Aside from the Haley supporters who are moving to Biden, Trump’s campaign faces a money crunch. As Schwartz reported yesterday, small donors have slowed down their financial support for Trump considerably, possibly because of fatigue after 9 years of Trump’s supercharged fundraising pitches. Big donors have also been holding back funds out of concern that they will not go toward electing Republicans, but rather will be used to pay Trump’s legal fees.

On March 14, Trump’s people organized a new joint fundraising committee, called the Trump 47 Committee. It is designed to split the money it gets between state Republican parties, the Republican National Committee, and Trump’s Save America Political Action Committee (PAC). As Schwartz notes, Save America spent $24 million on Trump’s legal bills in the last six months of 2023.

While running for president is pricey, so is breaking the law. The former president continues to rail against the law that he must deposit either money or a bond to cover the court-ordered $454 million he owes in penalties, disgorgement of ill-gotten gains, and interest, after he and the Trump Organization were found liable for fraud. “I would be forced to mortgage or sell Great Assets, perhaps at Fire Sale prices, and if and when I win the Appeal, they would be gone. Does that make sense? WITCH HUNT. ELECTION INTERFERENCE!” Trump posted on his social media channel. 

Lisa Mascaro, Mary Clare Jalonick, and Jill Colvin of the Associated Press wrote today that Trump is putting the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol at the heart of his presidential campaign, rewriting the five deaths and the destruction to claim that the rioters were “unbelievable patriots” whom he will pardon as soon as he takes office again. His new hires at the Republican National Committee to replace staff he fired are strengthening the idea that Biden stole the 2020 election. 

He’s being helped by loyalists in Congress who are trying to rewrite the history of that day to claim that Trump and the rioters have been persecuted by the Department of Justice. They are attacking the testimony of witnesses like Cassidy Hutchinson, former aide to former White House chief of staff Mark Meadows, about what she saw that day, although she testified under oath and they are not similarly bound to tell the truth. Trump has said former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, a Republican who served as vice chair of the House Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the U.S. Capitol, “should go to Jail along with the rest of the Unselect Committee!” 

But while Trump’s supporters are willing to sing along to a recording of incarcerated participants in the riots singing their version of the national anthem—the song lyrics are credited to “Donald J. Trump and J6 Prison Choir”—the fact that more than 1,200 people have been charged for their actions that day and many of them have been sentenced to prison seems likely to dampen enthusiasm for trying something like that again. 

Today, former Trump advisor Peter Navarro also had to report to prison, in his case a federal prison in Miami, for refusing to comply with a subpoena from the January 6th committee for documents and testimony. Last September, a jury found Navarro guilty of contempt of Congress, rejecting his insistence that he didn’t have to answer to Congress because Trump had invoked executive privilege over their conversations about overturning the 2020 presidential election. 

Navarro vowed to take the case all the way to the Supreme Court, but a federal appeals court agreed with the verdict, and yesterday, for the Supreme Court, Chief Justice John Roberts rejected Navarro’s plea to stay his sentence. “I am pissed—that’s what I am feeling right now,” Navarro told reporters just before he reported to prison for his four-month sentence. 

Trump is also facing renewed scrutiny on his past behavior. With the election interference case in Manhattan heating up, Trump sought to block his former fixer Michael Cohen, adult film actress Stormy Daniels, and former model Karen McDougal from testifying. All of them say Trump paid to keep voters from hearing negative stories about him before the 2016 election. Judge Juan Merchan denied those motions.

And there was a surprise announcement today. Tomorrow, the House Oversight Committee will hold another hearing in the Republicans’ ongoing attempt to impeach President Joe Biden. Today the Democrats on the committee announced they have invited Lev Parnas as their witness. The Ukrainian-born Parnas was an associate of Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani and was deeply involved in the effort to create dirt to smear Biden before the 2020 election. 

In 2022, Parnas was convicted of wire fraud, false statements, and breaking campaign finance laws by funneling money illegally to Trump and other Republican lawmakers. Since he broke with Giuliani, he has been eager to explain what happened and how. He will likely bring up stories that Trump would prefer that voters forget.

Representative Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the top Democrat on the Oversight Committee, told reporters: “Lev Parnas can debunk the bogus claims at the heart of the impeachment probe and, in the process, explain how the GOP ended up in this degraded and embarrassing place.”

The old Republican Party “no longer exists”

by

Heather Cox Richardson | Letters from an American

Heather Cox Richardson

March 11, 2024

As predicted, last week was an important one for the Republican Party.

The Republicans’ rebuttal to the State of the Union on Thursday stayed in the news throughout the weekend. On Friday, independent journalist Jonathan Katz figured out that a key story in it was false. Senator Katie Britt (R-AL) described a twelve-year-old child sex trafficked by Mexican cartel members, implying that the young girl was trafficked because of President Joe Biden’s border policies.

Katz tracked down the facts. Britt was describing the life of Karla Jacinto, who was indeed trafficked as a child, but not in the present and not in the U.S. and not by cartels. She was trafficked from 2004 to 2008—during the George W. Bush administration—in Mexico, at the hands of a pimp who entrapped vulnerable girls. Jacinto has become an advocate for child victims and has told her story before Congress, and she met Britt at an event for government officials and anti-trafficking advocates.

Britt’s dramatic delivery of the rebuttal had already invited parody and concern about the religious themes she demonstrated. The news that a central image in it was a lie just made things worse. “Everyone’s f*cking losing it,” a Republican strategist told The New Republic’s Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling. “It’s one of our biggest disasters ever.”

On Friday, the Republican National Committee (RNC) voted to replace former RNC chair Ronna McDaniel, who resigned effective Friday, with Trump loyalist Michael Whatley and Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara Trump. They will co-chair the organization and have made it clear their primary goal is to put Trump back in the White House. 

Friday night, on Newsmax, Donald Trump Jr. recorded a video announcing that the old Republican Party “no longer exists outside of the D.C. beltway…. The move that happened today…that’s the final blow. People have to understand that America First, the MAGA movement is the new Republican Party. That is conservatism today.”

Just what that means was crystal clear on Friday night, when Trump hosted Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán at the Trump Organization’s Florida property, Mar-a-Lago. The darling of the radical right, Orbán has spoken at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) and hosted former Fox News Channel personality Tucker Carlson, and his policies inspired the anti-LGBTQ+ legislation Florida governor Ron DeSantis has championed.

The right wing’s fondness for Orbán springs from his having rejected democracy and replaced it in Hungary with what he calls an “illiberal state.” Orbán and other far-right leaders working against democracy maintain that the central principle of democracy, equality before the law, undermines society. It permits immigration, which, in their minds, dilutes the “purity” of a people, and it requires that LGBTQ+ individuals and women have the same rights as heterosexual men. Such a world challenges the heteronormative patriarchal world traditionalists crave.

Orbán’s takeover of the press, elimination of rival political parties, partisan gerrymandering, capture of the courts, and control of Hungary’s government are not just ideological, though, but also economic. Corruption and the capture of valuable factories and properties for cronies have allowed Orbán and his allies to amass fortunes. 

“There’s nobody that’s better, smarter or a better leader than Viktor Orbán. He’s fantastic,” Trump said on Friday. Trump said that Orbán simply says, “‘This is the way it’s going to be,’ and that’s the end of it, right? He’s the boss and…he’s a great leader, fantastic leader. In Europe and around the world, they respect him.”

On Saturday, Republicans in Oklahoma County, Oklahoma, censured Senator James Lankford (R-OK) over his work negotiating the border security measure. In January, state Republicans claimed they had passed a resolution “strongly” condemning Lankford; others said the vote for the resolution was “not legitimate and definitely does not represent the voice of all Oklahoma Republicans.” 

Lankford is a far-right senator whom Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) tapped to represent the Republicans in the negotiations. House Republicans had demanded the border security measure before they would allow a vote on a national security supplemental bill that funds Ukraine’s defense against Russia’s invasion.

Because the Democrats are desperate to fund Ukraine, they were willing to give up things they had never laid on the table before, including a path to citizenship for those brought to the United States as children, making the bill that emerged from the negotiations strongly favor the Republican position on immigration. The Border Patrol Officers’ union, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, and the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal all endorsed it.

But the House Republicans’ demand for a border measure appears to have been an attempt to kill the national security supplemental bill altogether. As soon as it became clear that there would be a deal, Trump came out against it. He demanded that Congress kill the measure, and his loyalists agreed.

Lankford, who had helped to produce the strongest border measure in years at the request of the nominal head of the party, has now been censured because he crossed Trump.

Meanwhile, on Saturday, Biden signed into law one of the consolidated appropriations bills that must be finished to fund the government. The other must be finished by March 22. 

Biden has continued to ride the momentum built by Thursday’s State of the Union speech. His campaign has released a number of advertisements, and today he was in Georgia, where the largest political action committees representing communities of color—the AAPI Victory Fund, the Latino Victory Fund, and The Collective PAC—endorsed him and pledged $30 million to mobilize communities of color to vote in 2024.

The Fundie Baby Voice

by

Senator Katie Britt, (R) Alabama
Senator Katie Britt, (R) Alabama

As soon as Senator Katie Britt started speaking, I knew exactly who she is. She is so many of the pastor’s wives and Sunday School teachers I knew growing up in an Evangelical church. Be sweet. Obey.

By Jess Piper

I was about to head to bed after the State of the Union last night, when I heard a voice coming from my television that stopped me in my tracks. I didn’t know who was speaking, but it really didn’t matter—I recognized the voice. It was so many voices from my childhood. It was so many Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. It was potlucks, and baby showers, and graduations, and birthday parties.

It was Senator Katie Britt using her well-practiced fundie baby voice.

I threw so many folks for a loop last year when I discussed the voice in a video. I used my “training” as a former Evangelical, a Southern Baptist, to describe the breathy cadence and the soft, child-like high pitch. Folks outside of Fundamentalist culture had never heard the term—they just knew the voice made them uncomfortable.

I know that voice well…in fact I can’t shake it myself. It was engrained in every woman I knew from church and every time I speak about it, folks will point out that I sound that way myself. Yes, friends. That’s the point.

Be sweet. Obey. Prove it by speaking in muted tones.

You all know Michelle Duggar. Remember her voice? Too high pitched? Too much like a little girl? Too breathy. That’s purposeful. Michelle has to show submission to her husband in all interactions public. She stared at Jim Bob anytime he spoke. She was quiet until given a question or prompt. She was also harboring secrets and that’s something I can’t forget. Terrible secrets behind that voice.

Christian nationalist Speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is married to a woman who also uses the voice. I first heard her speak in a Fox News interview. I had the same reaction I had to Senator Britt. I turned the video up and listened…and got a cold shiver. Kelly Johnson says nothing too awfully problematic during the interview, but we all know she holds anti-LGBTQ views and even once correlated gay folks with bestiality and incest.

Johnson removed a document from her Christian Counseling site that said, ““We believe and the Bible teaches that any form of sexual immorality, such as adultery, fornication, homosexuality, bisexual conduct, bestiality, incest, pornography or any attempt to change one’s sex, or disagreement with one’s biological sex, is sinful and offensive to God,”

Some women use their fundie baby voices from habit. From years of lessons, but some have something to hide which they cover for in fundie baby voice and a good-natured temperament. From an abusive husband, to a drinking problem, to hiding a pack of cigarettes in the kitchen, it was often something.

Many of these women also couldn’t keep it up at all times, and I saw lots of masks slip when these women spoke to their children. I remember staying the night with a friend and her mom dropping the voice at home. It can be a little creepy to watch the venom spewed at a child who has spilled his milk when his mother was dripping honey from her mouth just the instant before. It feels cold.

Back to Sen Katie Britt and the Republican response to the State of the Union speech; it was filled with Fundamentalist ideology and the fundie baby voice. The setting was her kitchen—that is not by accident. It is likely that she thinks this is where most women should spend their time. She’s wearing a modest shirt, opened just far enough to see her cross necklace. She started her speech by indicating that she’s “just a mom” mentioning her children’s names to assure other fundamentalist Christians that she understands her role in society.

Her face says as much as her voice in fundie culture—that hyperbolic wince that she performed each time she said “Biden.” It means, “I’m going to say something here that isn’t very nice, but y’all know I’m going to keep it sweet.”

The bless your heart effect.

The breathless speech, the incongruent facial movements and smiles. The cadence of condescension. I am better than you, and here are the ways. I have children. They are perfect. I have a marriage. It is perfect. I am pretty and well-educated. I am a Christian—I am god fearing and I prove it by holding hands with my family and praying for the rest of you. I am better than you.

Now that you know the term and what to look for, I want to warn you that the voice doesn’t always equate to a terrible woman or even a submissive one. I grew up with so many who used the voice because they were trained to use it. They are kind women who show up for others in sickness and in need. They take care of their families and their neighbors and their church sisters and brothers. They are living the life they feel called to lead—I give them grace and understanding. They are not out to harm others.

But, I pay attention to the voice when I hear it from folks in power. I am jolted awake when I hear the voice dripping sugar from a mouth that claims to love all while stripping rights from many.

I know that they believe proximity to power, submitting to men in power, will save them and their families and keep them in the good grace of the men truly in power.

I know they are wrong.

Source: The Fundie Baby Voice