Good morning.
Sunday in Whitewater will see light snow, mostly cloudy conditions, and a high of 38. Sunrise is 7:04 and sunset is 7:02, for 11 hours, 58 minutes of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 95.1 percent of its visible disk illuminated.
On this day in 1935, Hitler orders Germany to rearm itself in violation of the Treaty of Versailles. Conscription is reintroduced to form the Wehrmacht.
Schimel’s supportive costume1:
And for years, Judge Schimel has repeated some of Mr. Trump’s talking points about Wisconsin elections.
During an April 2018 interview with one of the state’s leading conservative talk-radio hosts, Judge Schimel said it was not clear that Mr. Trump, who carried the state in 2016 by fewer than 23,000 votes, or Senator Johnson, who won by about 99,000 votes that year, would have prevailed had the state’s voter identification law not been in place.
In January, he said he did not object to Mr. Trump’s pardons of supporters who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
Then there was the Halloween party last year.
In the final week before the election, President Joseph R. Biden Jr. appeared to call Trump supporters “garbage.” Mr. Trump responded by dressing up in a sanitation worker’s reflective vest and driving a garbage truck.
Two days later, when Judge Schimel’s cover band, 4 on The Floor, played a Halloween gig at Michael’s Funky Monkey bar in Waukesha, he wore a reflective vest just like Mr. Trump’s and rocked out while playing the Rolling Stones classic “Sympathy for the Devil.”
See Reid J. Epstein and Steve Eder, The Trump Loyalist Aiming to Swing Wisconsin Back to the Right (‘Brad Schimel, a judge who is so supportive of the president that he dressed up as him for Halloween, is hoping to flip the Wisconsin Supreme Court for conservatives’), New York Times, March 13, 2025.
There are many ways to describe Schimel’s costume choice, some supportive (identifying with his political hero and that hero’s supporters who believe they’ve been insulted), some not (a weak man’s choice, identifying with an autocrat who stokes the narcissistic insult that a populist horde too quickly feels).
Both can be true, but the latter tolls more strongly.
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- The link to the New York Times story is open, and one can play the clip of Schimel with maracas
standing around awkwardlygroovin’ to the vibe. ↩︎