This article is part of TPM Cafe, TPM’s home for opinion and news analysis. It was originally published at Balls and Strikes.
On Tuesday, President Donald Trump held one of his trademark rallies at a casino resort in Mount Pocono, Pennsylvania. As is usually the case when Trump has a microphone and a captive audience, he spent most of the night delivering a campaign-style stump speech peppered with references to everything he hates: President Joe Biden (“a sleepy son-of-a-bitch who destroyed our country”), Representative Ilhan Omar (“whatever the hell her name is, with her little turban”), Minnesota Governor Tim Walz (“one of the dumbest governors ever in our history”), and Haiti, Somalia, and other countries where people are not white (“shithole countries…filthy, dirty, disgusting, ridden with crime”).
At one point, Trump jokingly acknowledged that he’d wandered a good distance from the topic he’d planned to address, which was “how he plans to continue to bring down prices,” according to the Republican Party of Pennsylvania’s announcement. “I haven’t read practically anything off this stupid teleprompter,” Trump told the crowd, reassuring his concerned supporters that he has no trouble remembering how to do off-the-cuff racism in public.
Trump’s rally, in other words, was not the sort of thing that a typical federal judge would choose to attend. But Emil Bove, Trump’s former criminal defense lawyer and Department of Justice fixer whom Trump promoted to the Third Circuit earlier this year, is not a typical federal judge. And when MS NOW spotted Bove in the audience on Tuesday and asked what he was doing there, Bove responded, “Just here as a citizen coming to watch the president speak.”
