Oct. 4 Open Thread: That’s Justice Partisan Ratfucker to You

Knowing what he knows now, Donald Trump probably would have nominated someone other than Brett Kavanaugh for the Supreme Court. We know that from the Washington Post, which laid out how Kavanaugh is Don McGahn’s last act in the White House, and reports that Trump is furious (when is he not?) with McGahn for dropping this wet turd in his lap.

At this point there are myriad reasons to reject Kavanaugh’s candidacy, but the first and most salient has been there all along: Kavanaugh never tried a case in his life, and never worked in a courtroom before becoming a judge. He was, as Charles Pierce lays out for Esquire, a partisan ratfucker, employed to give legal advice to people doing borderline-illegal things. Lies are the least of his transgressions.

The Nazi comparisons won’t stop because the similarities between Republicans and Nazis are too obvious, but the most important point of agreement is the most chilling: for Trump lovers, the cruelty is the point. Adam Serwer drives the point home.

Lucian Truscott, a fourth-generation Army officer, has written before about toxic male privilege, from the viewpoint of one who was selected for grooming and rejected the “honor.” He sees that, for Republicans, the Kavanaugh-or-bust fanaticism represents the Privileged White Male’s Last Stand. They know damn well that their power is fast eroding, and they’re too mean and dumb to react any other way.

A few conservatives, like Max Boot, have learned some hard lessons from the rise of Trump, mainly that GOP voters have never been interested in supply-side economics or states’ rights or any policy position. They are, as Boot says in this Mother Jones interview, pure and simple racists. Boot’s family fled the Soviet Union when he was a child, so maybe he has a clearer view of Republican pieties than most of that pitiful clan.

Lots of follow-up today from the business press on the crooked foundations of the Trump fortune. The consensus seems to be that, while every developer plays fast and loose with the law, few were as creatively crooked as Fred Trump.

You might want to party with Elon Musk, but do you want him running your company? The SEC didn’t come down too hard on Musk for his market manipulations because they think giving him the boot permanently would harm the company — yet another example of the cult of the CEO.