Tag: trump

SEAL Team Six

Published on by thekingsnecktie8 Comments

So let me get this straight. One party is running a presidential candidate who has been convicted of 34 felonies, is an adjudicated sex offender, summoned a violent mob to try to overturn a free and fair election, and has promised to be a dictator who would openly shred the Constitution, to list just a few items on his CV. And it’s the OTHER CANDIDATE who is facing cries from his party to step off the ticket?

Now, that may seem like the start to a “Stick with Biden” plea. It’s not. The pro-democracy movement in this country is in a five-alarm emergency. But it is a good starting point for a survey of an absolutely terrible week for the prospect that we will be able to keep the dark night of fascism from descending upon these United States.

IRONY DIED IN ATLANTA

There is no denying what happened on the CNN debate stage in Atlanta last Thursday night.

For many months the Republican Party has been painting an outrageous portrait of Joe Biden as doddering and infirm and not mentally sharp enough to be leader of the so-called Free World. I have long been among those dismissing that as pure propaganda. But Biden’s performance was an enormous gift to Trump and GOP, confirming their caricature of him in front of some 51 million viewers in a display far worse than even the most pessimistic Democratic strategist could have imagined.

There’s no need to rehash it here in yet another agonizing post-mortem. We’ve seen them all, and from all the most respected pundits.(But if you want to wallow, I recommend David Remnick, Mark Leibovich, Tom Nichols, Jennifer Rubin, Ronald Brownstein, Jeet Heer, Fintan O’Toole, Melissa DeRosa, Matt Yglesias, and even an institutionalist like Peter Baker.)

In an already razor-close race, it felt like a death blow. Biden had one job and he blew it, giving the worst debate performance ever in what some rightly called the most important US presidential debate ever. Personally, I have not felt that sick to my stomach since Election Night 2016. And it’s hard to imagine that the memory of that horrific performance will be forgotten. “It’s like seeing your grandma naked,” James Carville later said, with characteristic élan.. “You can’t get it out of your mind.”

Like many people, I felt terrible for Biden, as honorable a man as there is in American politics, subjected to this humiliation in the twilight of his career. But in terms of its implications, I feel more terrible for the republic. The United States is in danger of collapsing into an autocratic white nationalist theocracy, and thanks to a confluence of factors, the pro-democracy forces working against that outcome have mustered a champion who is not up to the challenge.

Joe Biden is a national hero. He was probably the only Democrat who could have beaten Trump in 2020, and thank god he got the nomination. Once in office, he pulled us out of a historic pandemic that had been homicidally botched by his predecessor, revived a moribund economy and brought it roaring to life better than ever, restored sanity to US foreign policy and repaired our badly damaged reputation abroad, and enacted the most progressive and successful legislative agenda since FDR, despite outrageous Republican obstructionism and a defeated opponent who had convinced some 30 percent of the electorate that Joe wasn’t even a legitimately elected chief executive. Hats off, people.

But the cold hard fact is that we need a candidate who can beat Donald Trump, a world class grifter at the head of a fanatic fascist cult that poses an existential threat to American democracy and the stability of the whole wide world. As Mark Leibovich of the New York Times Magazine and The Atlantic has long been saying, if Biden insists on running for re-election and loses—a loss that seems more likely than ever now—he will be remembered only for his RBG-like stubbornness, and the fascist darkness that he allowed to settle over the country. And we will be complicit because we didn’t demand better.

FRANK SINATRA HAS A COLD

Setting aside Biden’s performance, David Frum made the salient point that the whole premise of the debate was a farce. Why did we let Donald Trump stand up there like he was any other legitimate candidate for the White House, and not a seditionist who had led a violent effort to overturn the last election, a crime for which he is awaiting trial, and yet has the gall to ask for his old job back? (Shades of CNN’s disgraceful Trump Town Hall last year. And I thought they’d fired Chris Licht.)

Why was the first question not, “Mr. Trump, considering what you did on January 6th, not to mention leading up to it and continuing after, why should any American trust you with the presidency a second time?”

I dunno. But it wasn’t.

After the debate the Democratic Party immediately cleaved into two camps—stay the course and dump Biden—who were at each other’s throats as bitterly as the intra-party divisions over Gaza. (Just what you want in the run-up to an election.)

When it comes to the Biden loyalist argument, there are two sub-groups.

One is naïve: “Trump is awful! And Joe is right on everything substantive!”

That is the kind of statement that begs for the reply, “Bless your heart.” In other words, it’s sweet and kind and innocent, and above all, true as the day is long….but it is also utterly irrelevant. If the issue were Trump’s personal ghastliness and horrific record versus Biden’s inherent decency and policy accomplishments over the past three years, we wouldn’t be in this mess in the first place. Joe would be cruising to re-election by a thirty-point margin. But reason is not in play here.   

Yes, absolutely, Trump is the one who should be under pressure to step down. Yes, Biden stumbled but Trump spewed outrageous lies with the force of a firehose (Everybody wanted Roe overturned?) which the CNN moderators, Jake Tapper and Dana Bash, didn’t bother to challenge. But too many Americans gladly buy his snake oil, not to mention the fact that he is the head of a party of craven, power-mad bootlickers who collectively don’t have an atom of integrity among them and wouldn’t stand up to him even if he called their wives ugly and claimed their dads shot JFK. 

“Anybody can have a bad night!” the stick-with-Joe camp says. Sure. But when Obama had an infamously bad debate against Romney in 2012, he was not already being relentlessly accused of suffering from dementia.

“Joe had a cold!” Please. And the dog ate my homework, and my girlfriend lives in Canada, and Tonya Harding broke her bootlace. You think that carries any weight with the voting public?

DREW BLEDSOE REDUX

Which brings us to the second “stick-with-Biden argument,” which is a pragmatic one: “There’s no realistic way to move Biden aside for another candidate, trying it would do more harm than good, and even then that mythical replacement would probably do no better.” As Joy Caspian Kang wrote in The New Yorker (in a piece called “The Case for Joe Biden Staying in the Race”), the backup quarterback is always the most popular man in town.

This is a somewhat more persuasive argument, but not necessarily correct. It’s true that there’s never been a change at the top of the ticket this late in a presidential race. But there’s never been an opposing candidate who staged a self-coup, who was a convicted felon, or who promised to be a dictator and build concentration camps either. It’s also true that there is no obvious heir, except Kamala Harris, who presents problems of her own given the racism and misogyny she already faces, as well as logistical and procedural hurdles concerning campaign finances and such. But none of those are reasons for mulishly sticking with a losing candidate, especially when the stakes are this high.

One voice calling for course-staying has been that of Rick Wilson, of the Lincoln Project, who argued that Democrats were being weak-kneed, and that Republicans would lock arms and defend Trump even if he had shat himself on live TV. He went on to ask what would have happened to Great Britain if the British people had given up at the first sign of Nazi bomber planes over that green and pleasant land in 1940.

I like and respect Rick Wilson a lot, but I think he’s dead wrong here. Sure, if Trump had explosive diarrhea onstage Republicans would still say it was the greatest debate performance in human history……but they are speaking to an audience of Kool-Aid drunk cultists. The same Jedi mind trick does not work in the reality-based world of the left, or for swing voters. To minimize the disastrousness of Joe’s performance is suicidal denialism. And for what it’s worth, the Battle of Britain analogy is flat-out wrong. No one I know is giving up the fight against Trump—on the contrary. A better analogy would be to ask: what if Britain had no RAF in 1940, only slingshots, and still thought it could beat the Luftwaffe, and opted to stick with that plan instead of upgrading at least to rifles.

And here’s the proof: The Trump campaign seems privately terrified Biden will drop out, which is why they are acting as if it’s impossible. Republicans were crowing with delight as soon as the red lights went off at the end of the debate, but they won’t be crowing if a more electable candidate takes over as the Democratic nominee. Lara Trump told Fox News that the Dems can nominate only Kamala, which is a tell that they would love that, rightly or wrongly. She went on to say that skipping to another candidate would be a violation of “the democratic process”—which is quite a statement from the people who tried to storm the Capitol in 2021.

Of all the Joe-steps-down scenarios, an abdication in favor of the Vice President might actually be the most plausible. There have even been calls for Biden to resign before the election, which would give Kamala (some) of the advantages of incumbency. Adam Serwer made a cogent case for that in The Atlantic, as did Jeannie Suk Gerson in The New Yorker, Lydia Polgreen in the New York Times, and her fellow Times columnist Jamelle Bouie. Tellingly, Rep. Jim Clyburn, the South Carolina eminence grise who saved Joe’s nomination in 2020, tactfully told MSNBC that he would support Kamala as the nominee were Joe in fact to step down.

Will Biden be convinced to step aside, perhaps as the result of a somber, come-to-Jesus intervention by the likes of Obama, Bill and Hilary Clinton, Clyburn, Schumer, Klain, et al, not to mention Dr. Mrs. Jill, who so far seems to be very much inside the bubble? I don’t know. God knows what’s going on behind the scenes even as Democratic leaders put up a brave front. Maybe they’re awaiting the polls, which are beginning to come in and are not good. Maybe negotiations are ongoing.

Or maybe the Democrats will just move on in hopes that the debate will have little impact and be soon forgotten, that the two sides are already calcified and it won’t matter (much), that Trump’s impending sentencing will further change the conversation, that it’s all about turnout, etc etc. That strikes me as self-deluding madness, but hey, what do I know? I do know, however, that Biden’s lack of public urgency on the matter, and his all-is-well bonhomie, is reportedly making top Democrats even more concerned, as a sign of detachment from reality.

So we shall see. But I’m worried anxious nervous scared terrified.

If Joe will not stand down, I will be by his side and do everything I can to re-elect him. But in this life-or-death crisis for the republic, we progressives and Democrats and others on the left have made our task far more difficult than it had to be by running a candidate with such liabilities, and it got exponentially harder last Thursday night.

Which brings us to the other front on which American democracy—already hanging on by its fingernails—took a baseball bat to the ribs this past week.

WITH AN ASSIST FROM THE POTOMAC SIX

Trump had a very good week not just with the debate, but because the bought-and-paid-for legal arm of his campaign—er, I mean the Supreme Court—finally handed down a pair of decisions that helped him immeasurably, both in his effort to stay out of prison, and in terms of the hell he will be able to unleash should he manage to regain the presidency.

The first was  the Court’s decision in Fischer vs. United States striking down an obstruction charge used to convict hundreds of January 6th insurrectionists, and at the heart of two of the four charges Jack Smith has brought against Trump in his own J6 case. We already knew that case would not come to trial before the election, thanks in part to SCOTUS’s feet-dragging, and now, when it does, half of the charges will have been wiped away. Unless Trump is already president by that time and orders it dropped altogether.

The statue in question, 18 U.S.C. §1512(c)(2), clearly states that 20 years in prison await anyone who corruptly “obstructs, influences, or impedes any official proceeding, or attempts to do so.” Sounds like January 6th to me. But the court twisted itself into knots to find a way to argue that that’s not really what it says. Even Amy Coney Barrett thought that was ridiculous, and dissented. (Oddly, KBJ joined the majority, temporarily trading lunchroom chairs with ACB.)

But the second and far more reaching was the Court’s decision in what election expert Richard Hasen called “the most important case in this Nation’s history,” aptly named Trump vs. United States. That case addresses The Former Guy’s absurd claim that he is a once-and-forever king who has total immunity for everything he ever did or will do.  

Seems like a no-brainer, right? To say that the president is above the law defies the fundamental democratic principle on which this country was founded, as I wrote last March, in a piece called “History Will Shake Its Damn Head”:

It boggles the mind that the highest court in the land is even bothering with this ridiculous appeal, one that has been thoroughly debunked by lower courts, and the consideration of which poses vast dangers to the republic. But bothering it is….

At the time, the chief consequence of the Court granting cert seemed to be the delay it caused.Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, called it “the approach that helps Trump the most while appearing not to,” tweeting, “The Court effectively granted Trump immunity for his alleged crimes, regardless of whatever ruling they make later.”

But few observers thought the Supreme Court would actually endorse Trump’s imperial claim. One who did was the highly respected retired federal judge and conservative anti-Trump icon Michael Luttig, who back in March argued that the only plausible reason the Court took the case was because at least one or two justices (read: Clarence and Sam) believed Trump was in fact immune. Now Judge Luttig had been proven right, and the delay has turned out to be a sideshow compared to the astonishing decision itself.

The Supreme Court has said that a sitting US president has total immunity for any official acts he or she undertakes, no matter what the motive and even if for a corrupt purpose. That is a tectonic reinterpretation of the Constitution. (Originalism rocks, amirite people?)

The devil is in the “official acts” part. The SCOTUS’s right wing cabal knew it could not say “Presidents have total immunity.” A sixth grader knows that’s unconstitutional. So it has seized on this fig leaf, opening the door for Trump and any criminal successors (Don Jr.? Ivanka?) to claim that any given act was “official,” no matter now criminal or corrupt, and therefore beyond the reach of the law, even when those acts are patently NOT official. Good news for fans of the Unitary Executive Theory!

Back in March, my friend Scott Matthews predicted that SCOTUS would rule this way, allowing Trump to claim that his actions regarding overturning the 2020 election were part of his duties as chief executive, or at least sufficiently close, placing them in an area where presidential immunity is already settled law. (That was what—hold onto your red baseball hat—the Wall Street Journal thought, too.) Of course, it’s risible that trying to overturn an election would fall under a president’s official duties, but not inconceivable that a Supreme Court with a right wing supermajority would rule that way. It wouldn’t be the first time those folks in black robes reached in and decided a presidential election.

Here’s what I wrote back in March:

If the Court makes an honest assessment of Trump’s immunity argument, I’m betting on a 7-2 ruling against him, delivered at the very end of its term, in early July. But if the majority takes the coupmaking-is-an-official-act position, it could go 6-3 the other way.

So two cheers for me and my own prognosticatory skills.

In an incredible two-fer, the Court not only handed down this endorsement of monarchy, but with it also managed to create further delays in the Trump case by sending it back down to Judge Tanya Chutkan of the DC District Court to distinguish between immune and non-immune presidential conduct in this matter, which (ahem) is something else I predicted last March. So having already gifted the GOP by taking that case at all, when it could easily have let the lower court’s decision against Trump stand, and by taking as long as humanly possible to decide it, the Court’s right wing supermajority has now continued acting as an arm of the Trump campaign by kicking the case back down, creating further delay. Even Trump’s state-level conviction for electoral fraud in the Stormy Daniels case is now in question, with sentencing—which was supposed to take place next week—now pushed to September, so his lawyers can claim that the SCOTUS decision somehow applies to actions he took even before he was president. Chutzpah, thy name is Donald…..but who can blame him and his Republican allies when these batshit claims have consistently gone their way? (Look for Aileen Cannon to find a way to throw the Florida documents case out, too, even though much of what Trump is charged with was post-presidency.)

That is why Leonard Leo and the Federalist Society spent forty years getting control of the US justice system in the first place.

HAIL CAESAR

The impact of the SCOTUS decision on Trump’s January 6th case and other legal troubles is one thing. But the implications for a corrupt president in terms of the havoc he can wreak in office are far more chilling.

Writing in The American Prospect, Robert Kuttner called the decision “an invitation to dictatorship,” noting that “Had the Supreme Court ruled similarly on Richard Nixon’s claims of being above the law, Nixon never would have been forced from office.” Kuttner also called it another cost of Trump’s having been allowed to name three justices, writing, “The Court is now a corrupted institution and a shameless enabler of a corrupt president.”

I quibble only with the word “now.”

In her dissenting opinion—joined by Kagan and Jackson, which pointedly did not include the adjective “respectfully­— Justice Sonia Sotomayor wrote: “The President of the United States is the most powerful person in the country, and possibly the world. When he uses his official powers in any way, under the majority’s reasoning, he now will be insulated from criminal prosecution.”

Here’s the legal scholar Kim Wehle, in The Bulwark:

We don’t need to imagine the threats that Sotomayor is foreshadowing here. We lived through a president who acted with the mindset of a tyrant, one who stoked a bloody insurrection after other machinations to steal an election failed. At the end, even the Republicans who had tired of Trump were making the case that the legal system would serve as a check on him. 

Now, that guardrail has been significantly diminished. And the American people will be left to rely on the delusional belief that future presidents will choose to act in good faith with their own conscience as a guide rather than abuse the virtually unlimited power the radical majority just gave them.

Republicans, naturally, praised the decision, scoffing at the risks. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson actually said with a straight face: “No one who is elected (president) is going to be prone to this kind of crazy criminal activity. What the court is saying here follows common sense and, of course, our Constitution as well.”

(Pause to take in crippling irony.)

The obvious question is: Would the Court or its right wing amen corner give Biden the same immunity? Of course not.

It did not take long for progressives to seize on that idea by suggesting—in jest—that Biden should just order SEAL Team Six to assassinate Trump, since the Supreme Court had just ruled that that was totally kosher. Less tongue in cheek, some called for Biden to test the limits of this eyepopping expansion of executive power he has been given, say, by appointing ten new Supreme Court justices (we control the Senate, right?) and daring the GOP to stop him.

Or hell, he could just call the election off altogether, right?

For his part, Trump doesn’t need SEAL Team Six when he’s got six toadies on the highest court in the land happy to do his bidding and kneecap his political opponents and shield him from criminal accountability for his actions.

The Court—painstakingly bought and controlled by the American right—is shameless in abetting the march of fascism. And why wouldn’t it? A third of the justices owe their jobs to Trump, and two others who pre-dated him are even more radically in his camp. The sixth, John Roberts, seems to flatter himself to believe he’s a moderate and an honest broker (“Balls and strikes!”) while consistently bowing to the wishes of his archconservative fellow travelers, making him either a coward or so deep in his own self-delusion that he’s feckless.

If Trump regains the presidency, the Supreme Court has already given him the “steal home” sign to do whatever the fuck he wants, secure in the knowledge that he will never be prosecuted. Don’t doubt for a second that he will. You think you saw criminality and corruption and neo-fascism in his first term? The second will make that look like a garden party.

Adam Serwer, in The Atlantic:

If Trump wins, he will have the presidency Nixon wanted, one in which nothing the president does is illegal. Kevin Roberts, the president of the Heritage Foundation, which aspires to staff a future Trump administration, has made clear that the MAGA right contemplates using this newfound imperial power to employ political violence against its opposition. “We are in the process of the second American Revolution, which will remain bloodless if the left allows it to be,” Roberts told the far-right network Real America News. Trump’s supporters seem less to wish to govern than to rule indefinitely by force, and they believe that the Court has given them its blessing.

Eight years ago this month, the joke around Great Britain was that England just had its worst week since 1066, with the Brexit vote and a loss to Iceland (Iceland!) in the 2016 Euros. Someday we may look back on this week as the worst one America’s had since….well, the week of November 8, 2016.

KICK SAVE AND A BEAUT

Earlier this spring, Bill Kristol wrote in The Bulwark that we should not expect the courts to save us from Trump, any more than Bob Mueller or the House J6 Committee did, let alone the Senate in his two impeachments. Only we can save ourselves. “After all,” he wrote, “here the people rule.”

For now.

But we are not asking the courts to “save” us. We are simply asking them to apply the law fairly, and not act as Trump’s personal law firm.

As I wrote last March, “Maybe Kristol is right. Maybe even if all the trials are delayed, Biden will beat Trump anyway….But the ‘system’ is sure giving Donald every possible advantage to avoid that fate.”

And that is why Biden’s disastrous debate performance is so worrying. The Supreme Court has again helped Trump’s re-election prospects, and on top of that, laid the groundwork for a horrific far-right wing autocracy should he win. Are we going to throw up our hands and let that happen?

I don’t know the right path forward re the election, and smarter people than me presumably are at work on that even as we speak. But I do know that we appear to be on the verge of allowing an entirely preventable tragedy to unfold out of sheer incompetence, inertia, and unwillingness to get up and do what needs to be done.

*********

Photo: Six key members of the Trump campaign, Legal Division.

It Does Matter

Published on by thekingsnecktieLeave a comment

Last night I was proud to be a New Yorker.

Actually, I’m proud of that most of the time. (Exceptions: Kitty Genovese. The ’95 Knicks.) But I was especially proud when twelve brave and honest ordinary New Yorkers had the courage to do what the Republican-controlled US Senate would not—twice…..what the entire craven, erstwhile GOP has been unwilling to do….what the US justice system at large had been unable to do for more than 60 years, and that is hold Donald J. Trump accountable for a few of his many crimes.

While Congress and the federal judiciary are mired in the grip of the neo-fascist Federalist Society, New York State got ‘er done, as they say in Real ‘Merica. So hats off to that jury, and to Alvin Bragg and his team, and to Judge Juan Merchan, who presided over this fraught case masterfully and fairly, despite constant attacks from the defendant and his army of brownshirt wannabes.

What follows from here is anyone’s guess, but for one fleeting moment, we got a W. Which is more than the Knicks managed in Game 7 of the ’95 Eastern Conference Semis.

FLORIDA MAN CONVICTED

As David Leonhardt of the New York Times succinctly put it this morning, the long of the law has finally come up with Donald Trump. After 77 years of outrageously undeserved good luck, combined with a Roy Cohn-like willingness to manipulate the system, and all the benefits that obscene inherited wealth and privilege bring, not to mention a cult of fanatics and one of our two major parties defending him, he was no longer able to dodge at least this one situation.

Leonhardt:

(Trump) has spent decades on the edge of legal trouble. First, he was a New York businessman whose company violated discrimination laws, failed to repay debts and flirted with bankruptcy. Then, he was a president who impeded an investigation of his 2016 campaign, tried to overturn the result of his re-election defeat and refused to return classified documents he took from the White House.

Throughout, his central strategy was the same: delay. Try to push off legal problems for as long as possible and hope that a solution somehow presented itself. It usually worked, too. And it seemed to be on the verge of working again this year, with two federal trials and one state trial in Georgia all unlikely to finish before Election Day.

Yesterday, however, a criminal jury judged Trump for the first time. The verdict was guilty, 34 times, pronounced late in the afternoon in downtown Manhattan. The prosecutors argued that Trump had falsified business records to hide a sexual affair from voters and corrupt the 2016 election. After two days of deliberation, the 12 jurors agreed. Trump has become the first former president of the United States to be a convicted felon.

Barring a reversal on appeal, or some weird intervention by the Supreme Court (don’t rule it out), Trump will now carry the scarlet F for the rest of his miserable life. That’s especially important as this looks to be the only one of Trump’s multiple criminal trials that will take place before Election Day.

And the beauty of it is, because this is a state conviction, even if Trump somehow goes on to win the presidency despite this historic stain, he can’t pardon himself because it’s not a federal case. (So let’s keep a Republican out of the governor’s mansion in Albany, shall we?) Apparently he could, however, sue to have the conviction vacated on the grounds that imprisonment would keep him from fulfilling his constitutional duties as president. But we’ll cross the Francis Scott Key Bridge when we come to it.)

Former Congressman Adam Kinzinger (R-Illinois), excommunicated from the GOP for opposing Trump and serving on the House J6 Committee, wrote in The Bulwark:

It is a sad day for our nation….this isn’t a point of pride. Despite this verdict, America still looks like so many struggling democracies, where strongmen violate laws and bend the system to their will. The anti-Trump coalition, this uneasy and awkward alliance, must stand together, united to defend the sanctity of our system and the presidency.

He’s right of course. But at the same time, it is a point of pride that we were able to overcome the Republican gaslighting and Trump’s own legal maneuvering and at last hold him accountable in a court of law, the way most reasonable nations do with corrupt former leaders. (See; France, Italy, South Korea, Peru.)

Trump now faces 20 years in prison:. (That’s four years apiece for each of the 34 charges, to be served consecutively, not concurrently, though New York state has a 20 year cap.) Of course, with no prior convictions, and a non-violent crime, and at his advanced age, it’s unlikely he’ll do any time at all. Still, it’s sobering. And let’s not forget that the judge who will decide his sentence is a man whom he has spent weeks attacking and insulting. His family members too.

There also remains the principle that the boss of a conspiracy deserves at least as much punishment as his foot soldiers. Michael Cohen got three years for his role in this exact scheme….and he expressed remorse and cooperated with prosecutors, neither of which Trump did in the slightest, of course.

So we’ll see on July 11. Meanwhile, the Times reports: “Before sentencing, Trump will sit with a psychologist or a social worker and have a chance to explain why he deserves a light punishment.” What I wouldn’t give to be a fly on the wall in that room, a scene that is BEGGING to be a “Saturday Night Live” sketch….except that what Trump will say is already beyond parody. Witness his rambling, unhinged speech at Trump Tower the morning after the verdict was announced.

I know a lot of people—Trumpies, and even non-Trumpies, and a number of hardcore anti-Trumpies—have pooh-poohed the New York case as trivial. It was a “mere” hush money trial, involving a porn star, and did not exactly have the epoch-shattering gravitas of the Florida documents case, or the January 6 case in DC, or even the election interference case in Georgia. Right?

Wrong. This is not a “hush money” case, except insofar as that payoffs were part of election interference. Which is how we should always always always—correctly—frame it. The whole case hinged on the fact that the payments to Stormy Daniels were designed to avoid damage to Trump’s presidential campaign. If it were just about hiding a one night stand from Melania, he would have been acquitted. This case was anything but trivial. It is of a piece with the election interference cases in Georgia and DC.

THE ART OF THE (IM)POSSIBLE

So that’s the legal end of it. Politics is a different matter.

There is of course a lot of wild speculation about whether the convictions will hurt Trump, help him, or have no effect. In the words of Tevye, I’ll tell you:

I don’t know.

But first of all, it doesn’t matter.

Just like the impeachments which we correctly carried through with despite the fact that we knew there would be no convictions by the cowardly Republican-controlled Senate, Trump has to be held accountable for his various crimes if we have any hope of maintaining the rule of law in this country. That is true even if his convictions have no effect on the election: we do not pursue criminal prosecution for political purposes, no matter how much Trump and his fans want us to believe that we do. That’s what they do.

I would even go so far as to say we had to pursue this prosecution even if we knew or feared that conviction would help Trump politically, again, just as we did with the impeachments. Because in long run, doing otherwise would be worse for American democracy. Please recall: Trump’s two impeachments, even absent convictions, did not cause him to be re-elected as Republicans had warned, Br’er Rabbit-like.

So, having just said that the as-yet-unknown political fallout of yesterday’s events doesn’t matter, let me simultaneously argue that it does. Very much.

Because regardless of what people say, genuinely or with an agenda, it’s kind of a big deal when a former US president is convicted of 34 felonies. Democrats and other anti-Trump forces should shut that from the rooftops and never let the Republican Party or American voters forget it.

What will Trumpists say? They’re already saying it: that it was a sham trial, politically motivated, orchestrated by Biden, blah blah blah. All lies, and total projection of what they want to do. But let’s not let them get away with that and control the narrative. We have to counter it with our own message, which is the truth. And you can tell that Republican leaders are afraid of that truth because of the desperate ferocity of their outrage over the verdict and their pathetic efforts to show Donald Trump how much they are on his side.

POLL POSITION

For some time now polls have shown—remarkably—that a small but significant number of would-be Trump voters have said they would abandon him (or at least consider abandoning him) if he were convicted of crimes. That always surprised me. Why would that be the thing that changed their minds after sticking with him through so much else? Especially when one could easily see MAGA Nation chalking a conviction up to the Deep State unfairly going after him, which is exactly what Donny & Co. pre-emptively claimed, and have doubled down on overnight?

Yet now that it’s happened, we’re instantly seeing a Joey Chitwood-style, screeching rubber, tire-smoking 180 to the received wisdom that of course it won’t have any effect.

The pessimism is understandable, because we’ve been burned before, over and over. There have been so many things over the past nine years that should have sunk Trump, beginning with “McCain’s no hero,” all the way through Access Hollywood, revelation of the Stormy Daniels incident itself, Russian interference in 2016, wanton corruption while Trump was in office, the Zelenskyy call, telling people to drink bleach, and on and on all the way up to and including an attempted coup. So we can be forgiven for being beaten down, and jaded, and—Charlie Brown and the football-like—bearish on the notion that this at last will be the camelback-breaking straw.

But it might be. And we shouldn’t forfeit the chance to make it so. If not, it risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy, which is exactly what the right wing would like.

Here’s Bill Kristol in The Bulwark:

Inflection points don’t inflect themselves. We have to act to make certain moments inflection points.

Later on, long after the struggle is over, commentators will say this or that moment was an inflection point. But it only became an inflection point because people at the time, in real time, made it an inflection point.

So Trump has been found guilty by a jury of his peers of 34 felony counts. But it’s up to the rest of us to make sure our fellow citizens know this, understand this, grasp the significance of this. It’s up to us to make sure Trump and his apparatchiks don’t succeed in gaslighting Americans about this.

The coming weeks—and there only about 20 of them before Election Day—are uncharted waters, and promise to be rough ones. (Eddie would go? Yeah. But in this case, we are all Eddie, and we have no choice.) No one knows how any of it will shake out, including the consequences of yesterday’s verdict.

But one thing we should absolutely not do is cede the fascists an advantage and downplay how damning yesterday was for Donald Trump, and the starker-than-ever electoral choice that is now before the American people.

**********

Photo: Justin Lane/Pool Photo via AP

Grilling The King’s Necktie

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

This month marks seven years that I’ve been writing this blog, and with mathematical convenience, my 300th essay in it.

It has been my great pleasure—and therapy—to vent more or less weekly lo those many years, and I am grateful to everyone who has supported this labor of love and self-care on my part….by which I mean everyone who reads it, or even just diplomatically moves it into the trash folder every week without bothering to unsubscribe. Your kindness and tact are much appreciated.

To commemorate this anniversary, I’m turning the tables and letting myself be interviewed by my good friend Isabella Tuttisanti del Barilla, the renowned Italian photojournalist, internationally famous sunglasses designer, award-winning amateur pastry chef, and professional parkour competitor. (Good luck at the 2028 Olympics in LA, Isa!)

Edited for clarity and vetted against libel by The King’s Necktie’s crack legal team of Saul Goodman, Esq. and Dewey Cheatem & Howe LLP. (Note to self: This month’s retainer is overdue.)

TLDNR

ISABELLA TUTTISANTI DEL BARILLA: It’s nice to see you again, Bobby. It’s been what? Three years?

THE KING’S NECKTIE: Yes. Since Kuala Lumpur, and “the incident.” You in the clear now?

ITdB: Yes, the doctor gave me an ointment; thanks. And thank you for asking me to do the interview. Do you mind if I smoke?

TKN: I’d prefer if you didn’t.

(She lights up.)

ITdB: So what made you start writing this blog?

TKN: Concern for my own mental health, mostly. When Trump came to power….I hate to say “elected,” because I don’t dispute that he won the Electoral College, or that that’s the super fucked up way we choose our presidents, but I don’t want to suggest that a majority of Americans voted for him. Just enough to make it happen.

Anyway, when Trump came to power my head was at risk of exploding with every passing day and every new outrage, so after a few months I needed a way to let off that steam. Luckily, the Internet exists, or I’d be standing on street corners handing out mimeographs.

But when I started writing this thing in May of 2017, it felt self-indulgent to me—like, who gives a shit what I think? But I really didn’t care, because I was so angry. So I began writing the blog primarily just as catharsis, and I figured if anyone other than me got anything out of it, that was a bonus. I’m a big Peter Greenaway fan, and back in the ‘90s, at a Q&A at the San Francisco Film Festival, I heard an audience member ask him about the accusation that he makes films only for himself. And Greenaway looked surprised, and said. “I think it’s the height of arrogance to imagine that one makes films for anyone but oneself.“ That’s my ethos too, with this blog.

I do feel a little embarrassed still, but I can’t stop. Or more precisely, I should say that I am unwilling to stop. If I didn’t let off that steam, I’d go nuts.

Does that answer your question?

ITdB: Sorry—I nodded off. What were you saying?

TKN: Just that—

ITdB: Where did the name come from?

TKN: I’ve always been fond of the quote that appears on the masthead, ever since I first read it years ago, but I was under the impression that it was from Edward Abbey. Then I learned that wasn’t the case. Apparently when he was the editor of his college literary magazine at the University of New Mexico in the Twenties, he’d used that it on the cover of an issue and attributed it to Louisa May Alcott, for the sake of sheer absurdism, I presume. After I learned that, I was under the mis-impression that the quote was really from Diderot, the French Enlightenment philosopher. But then a  sharp-eyed reader informed me that it was really Jean Meslier—another Frenchman—who was an apostate priest turned atheist in the early 19th century. But I like the original Louisa May Alcott joke. For a long time, about once a month I’d get some wiseacre writing to tell me it wasn’t Alcott, so finally I put a disclaimer in the fine print saying, “Yes, I know it was really Meslier.”

ITdB: Yes, but isn’t it a little violent? The imagery? Especially in these fraught times?

TKN: I hear you. When I started the blog, as angry and upset as I was about Trump, the idea of political violence in the US wasn’t really a worry. Obviously, the quote is just a somewhat tongue-in-cheek quip about the insidious power of despotism and organized religion, which frequently go hand in hand, you may have noticed. But after January 6, talk about stringing up political leaders doesn’t feel so metaphorical, or distant anymore. So I’ll admit it makes me a little uneasy now. But at this point, the brand is what it is.

ITdB: Everyone has their reasons, right?

TKN: Right. So why shouldn’t I? Like the bit in Catch-22, where they ask Yossarian about his request not to fly any more missions: “Suppose everyone felt that way?” And he answers, “Then I’d be a damned fool to feel any other way, wouldn’t I?”

ITdB: One of the things about this blog is that it’s a bit….

(pause)

TKN: Long-winded?

ITdB: I was going to say exhausting. Have you ever thought about writing shorter pieces?

TKN: What do you mean?

(Long, uncomfortable pause)

I kid. Yes, of course. Lots of people have suggested that. I’ve tried it, on occasion and I understand the advantages. But the whole point of this blog was as a place for me to vent without any adult supervision, and without the editorial hand that’s on me in all my other work—for the good, usually. That includes both work-for-hire and my own stuff, where my agents and editors and publishers often press me to be briefer, for my own good. The blog, by contrast, is deliberately and unabashedly self-indulgent in that regard. But my feeling is that nobody’s under any obligation to read the whole piece, or any of it. So I’m happy with this paradigm.

ITdB: But don’t you think shorter pieces would be…..you know, better. And have more reach, and more impact?

TKN: Yes. How’s that for brevity?

Also, the speed at which I write doesn’t give me a lot of time to reflect on a piece and cut it down before posting. Like Mark Twain said, “Pardon the long letter; I didn’t have time to write a short one.”

ITdB: I think it was Louisa May Alcott who said that.

BLOGGER WALKS INTO A BAR

ITdB: Speaking of which, what about the humor in the blog? Personally, I don’t find you very funny, but I’m told some people do.

TKN: (annoyed) Awaiting your question, Isa.

ITdB: The question is, what do you say to the complaint that the jokes—“jokes”—detract from your credibility, and represent a lack of seriousness?

TKN: Well, first I would say that humor and seriousness are not antonyms. You can use humor in a deadly serious way. In fact, Ferne and I have spent a lot of time delving into that area. But semantics aside, I understand the critique.

ITdB: Awaiting your answer, Roberto.

TKN: The answer is that the humor is integral to the style. In my book, Resisting the Right, which is about to come out, I indulge in it less, for that very reason. The tone is similar, but I don’t veer off on absurdist asides, and I’m generally a little more sober.

ITdB: Not a quality you’re known for in your personal life.

TKN: Funny. And they say Italians are humorless.

ITdB: What about the criticism that you’re just preaching to the chorus—

TKN: Choir.

ITdB: …..or worse, doing harm by actively insulting and alienating people who aren’t as anti-Trump as you are?

TKN: I never set out to reach Trump supporters. That’s not what this blog is about. It’s about rallying our side. I wanted to commune with kindred spirits, and exchange information, and organize, and keep up morale. It’s purely a cheerleading task—as Jacques Servin of the Yes Men describes what they do. I didn’t intend to reach across the aisle and change the minds of any Trump supporters….and I think it’s safe to say that, as far as I know, I haven’t.

At this point I think very few Trump supporters are persuadable anyway, and I don’t wanna spend my time trying. I know there is a small sliver of folks in that squishy middle who might go one way or the other, and I know they might be pivotal in November, so I’m glad somebody with more generosity and patience than me is trying to woo them. But that’s just not what I do.

ITdB: But aren’t you doing harm by alienating them? By feeding their sense of snotty liberals who look down on them?

TKN: I suppose. But are they really reading this blog in the first place?

ITdB: Probably not. Even I don’t read it, and I hate Trump.

TKN: Compliment received. But man, I am really sick of being told to walk on eggshells so as not to offend Trump supporters. Fuck that and fuck them. They damn sure don’t worry about offending us. I don’t think it does democracy any good to infantilize these people and not call them out for their outrageous and destructive anti-American bullshit, or pretend that they’re good faith actors or that the things they’re saying and doing are “legitimate political discourse” and not an active attempt to put an end to the republic. That just plays into their game, which is the deceitful subversion of the democratic process.

When it comes to the contemporary Republican Party—which should rightly be renamed the Trump Party, by the by. I don’t think the “GOP” deserves that title, or the legacy of Lincoln, and I say that as someone who, in his youth, was a registered Republican. It’s the Trump Party now, and we should call it that.

ITdB: Focus, babe.

TKN: What I’m saying is that when it comes to the contemporary Republican-slash-Trump-Party, we are not dealing with rational actors or a legitimate political party any more. We’re dealing with a radical insurgency that intends to exploit the very means of democracy in order to destroy it, all the while shrugging and feigning innocence, or worse, acting like they’re the real defenders of the Constitution and the principles this nation was founded on, and not neo-fascist white nationalist theocrats. And we should not let them get away with that bullshit.

ITdB: (smiling) Now that’s what I came for: vintage King’s Necktie. A very on-brand diatribe.

TKN: One tries.

ITdB: Any concerns about self-righteousness?

TKN: A few. But you don’t have to be perfect or blameless yourself to notice that the next guy is a monster. Or idolizes one.

IT TAKES A VILLAGE, SANS IDIOTS

ITdB: Do you ever go back and read your old essays?

TKN: Rarely. Drunk dialing old girlfriends usually doesn’t end well. But I admit, I do occasionally have a reason to pull up an old post, and I’ll read a bit, or skim it.

ITdB: And?

TKN: And I usually find some nice stuff, but I’m also often embarrassed at what obviously should have been cut. To circle back to your earlier point about brevity.

ITdB: OK, so sticking with just people who are predisposed to share your politics: what has the reaction to the blog been over the years?

TKN: It’s been amazing, and I remain really humbled by that—

ITdB: I would take issue with the word “humble,” or that you can claim to “remain” that way….

TKN: —I’ve just been surprised at how many people read it, and the positive feedback I’ve gotten. I have some diehard supporters who I commune with every week online, people who I know only through the blog. And then sometimes I’ll run into an old friend, or even a casual acquaintance, and they’ll tell me they read it every week and love it, and I can tell from their comments that they really do. That always astounds me, because of course I have no idea how it’s landing with most people. A few people have told me, “Your blog got me through the Trump years,” which like I say, is a huge part of what I set out to do.

I’m actually shocked that so few people have unsubscribed—only a handful, literally less than ten, and I’m equally surprised which ones they were. I think there must be a substantial number of folks on the distro list who are too polite to hurt my feelings, and just dutifully move it to the trash every week.

But people have been so supportive. For example, I have a wonderful woman named Gina Patacca who is a professional copy editor who voluntarily edits it pro bono every week. Bill Moyers became a fan and a promoter of the blog, and even began publishing some of my essays on his own site, so that was a huge thing for me. I’m honored, and in his debt.

ITdB: How did that come about?

TKN: The blog was sent to him by a mutual friend, the great Oscar-nominated documentary filmmaker Bill Jersey, who’s now 96, and who’s been a friend and mentor to me since I first left film school. So as the saying goes, “It’s not what you know, or even who you know, but who knows you.”

Ferne has been the most supportive of all. You’ve heard of a golf widow? She’s a blog widow. Sometimes she’ll see me staring off into space while we’re in line at the supermarket or something, and she’ll say, “You’re writing your blog, aren’t you?” But she couldn’t be more supportive, which means a lot, because she’s a much better and smarter publicist for the blog than I am.

ITdB: You’re lucky to have her.

TKN: I know.

ITdB: Any haters?

TKN: Oh yeah. I’d be falling down on the job if there weren’t. Occasionally some Trumper stumbles across it. But less of that now than in the early days, which either belies the conventional wisdom that the algorithm seeks to create conflict, or confirms the other conventional wisdom that it silos people and trades in confirmation bias.

ITdB: What essay drew the most fire?

TKN: The most—and most hateful—pushback I got was for a couple of posts about gun violence in 2018, in the wake of Parkland. Even my essays about abortion have not been met with that kind of vitriol….though those two demos overlap a lot, which is worrying in its own right.

But it was a real glimpse into Bizarro World, with right wingers attacking me and saying crazy shit, like claiming I’d never been in the Army, for example. Which I assure you I was. But you don’t have to take my word for it, because Uncle Sam keeps records. Unless you want to believe they’re forged too, as part of some grand Illuminati-brand conspiracy.

ITdB: Let’s not rule that out.

TKN: Plenty of folks don’t. After all, lots of records were destroyed in a mysterious fire at ARPERCEN in the ‘70s.

RESISTING THE RIGHT

ITdB: So has writing the blog fulfilled your expectations, the ones you had when you started it?

TKN: Oh, yeah. Exceeded them. It’s let me develop a different set of muscles than I use as a screenwriter, which has been my main gig for more than twenty years. And it’s led to various opportunities, which I’m very grateful for.

ITdB: Perfect segue. Do you want to plug your book?

TKN: Does Rose Kennedy own a black dress? If I can’t plug it on my own blog, where can I plug it?

The book is called Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, and it’s being  published by OR Books here in New York. It’s available for pre-order now and will ship at the end of June. It’s a kind of “worst case scenario” guide for what to do if Trump retakes power, and we find ourselves living under a right wing Christian nationalist autocracy, which a second Trump term would be.

ITdB: Jesus Christ. I don’t even want to think about that.

TKN: But we have to.

ITdB: So it assumes a Trump win is a fait accompli?

TKN: Far from it. I am guardedly optimistic that we will prevail, if we stay focused. The book aims to help us do that, and then contemplates what we can do if we fail. I think it’s only prudent to plan for all contingencies. That’s something I was trained to do in the Army—both in the infantry and in military intelligence—and I’ve tried to apply that mentality to our current political crisis.

So the first part looks at the current state of play and how we got here, and what we can do before November 2024 to shore up our democracy and prevent a Republican return to power. In that regard it goes way beyond Trump, because even if he were to drop dead at the defendant’s table in a Manhattan courthouse tomorrow, the fascist movement will carry on.

The second half looks at how to respond if the worst does befall us, and is structured as a handbook for ways Americans can push back across a range of areas: civil disobedience, economics, journalism, public health, education, religious organizations, the arts, and even interpersonal relations, among others.

In writing it, it was my privilege to speak to loads of highly experienced and eloquent folks and to try to distill their expertise and recommendations, from Rev. Norvel Goff, Sr., who was a deacon at Mother Emanuel Church in Charleston, South Carolina, at the time of the 2017 mass murder there, to Zoharah Simmons of SNCC, who was a legendary leader in the Civil Rights Movement; to MacArthur winners Jon Else and Dave Isay; Rabbi Michael Berenbaum; Tim Heaphy, who was the lead investigator for the House J6 Committee; Jacques Servin of the Yes Men; Tom Hall of the Back Row Manifesto; Shantal Palacio of the New York State Department of Education; the political strategist Jim Bernfield; the journalist Eric Alterman; the incredible James Carroll, who graciously wrote the foreword; and many others. It also draws on the work of folks like Gene Sharp, Saul Alinsky, Maria Ressa, Masha Gessen, Hannah Arendt, Tim Snyder, and so many more.

ITdB: I don’t mind telling you, Bob, I hope we don’t need your book and it sits on a high shelf and gathers dust.

TKN: Me too. But as I say, American authoritarianism isn’t going away—it has been with us in one form or another since before even the founding of this county, and it’s a safe bet that it always will be. In that regard, I would describe the book more broadly as a manual for defending democracy. And that’s a never-ending struggle.

Two other things about it that I want to mention, if I may.

ITdB: As Barack Obama told Mitt Romney, please proceed.

TKN: In the book I discuss how “resistance” is really the wrong word, per Michelle Alexander, the author of The New Jim Crow, who wrote that the forces of human rights and democracy are not the ones “resisting.” We are the mighty river that authoritarians and their supporters are trying to dam.

Similarly, “Gathering Storm” is in the subtitle to allude to ‘40s fascism. But like “resistance,” the word “survive” is misleading. Because my prescription is not just for survival, and a return to the status quo ante, meaning pre-2016, pre-Trump politics, but how to get on the path to something better—something closer to a true democracy, which the US has always aspired to, very ostentatiously, but never truly achieved for all its citizens.

ITdB: You mean, to build back better?

TKN: To coin a phrase, yes.

ITdB: Then I hope you sell a whole library of books, and that no one ever needs them.

THE FUTURE IS UNWRITTEN (BUT I HAVE A ROUGH TREATMENT)

ITdB: So how long are you going to keep this up? The blog, I mean.

TKN: Well, after the 2020 election a lot of people asked me if I was going to keep writing it. I think that was a common feeling at the time—that we’d ejected this motherfucker from power, and now things would get back to normal. But I never thought that would be the case, or that it would be safe to relax.

I’ll admit, though, that I didn’t think the nightmare was going to continue at this intensity, and even get worse, in terms of the danger we’re facing, I didn’t expect that a guy who summoned a mob to try to overthrow the government by force would stand a 50-50 chance of being returned to power. But what did Mencken say about underestimating the American public?

ITdB: And after November? What’s the future of the blog then?

TKN: Well, if Trump wins they may come kicking down my door, so I dunno. I don’t flatter myself to think that mine will be the first house they’re gonna visit, by the way; I think I’ll have a few weeks while they go after The Nation and The New York Times and The Bulwark and MSNBC first. But I do think free speech and criticism of the government is going to be a lot more fraught if that nightmare comes true. A lot.

But even if Joe wins, I think a violent white nationalist insurgency is here to stay, including its political arm, which is to say, what we used to call the Republican Party. So I don’t anticipate hanging up my blogging spurs any time soon.

ITdB: So you’re going to keep writing this thing until you die?

TKN: Or until fascism in the USA is put down for good like the rabid dog it is. Though that’s an insult both to rabies and to dogs.

So whichever comes first, yeah. I’d put my money on death.

********

Illustration: Photo by Ferne Pearlstein, taken at Grand Army Bar in downtown Brooklyn, April 5, 2024.

Behold Democracy’s Last Stand

Published on by thekingsnecktieLeave a comment

The Supreme Court will surely reject Donald Trump’s absurd claim of total immunity for any crimes he committed while president, right???

That’s what all the experts have been telling us for months. Even after the Court made the brow-raising decision to hear the case at all—rather than letting stand a definitive lower court ruling that slapped down this Hail Mary argument, which it could easily have done—and even after it took as long as possible to take up the case and schedule oral arguments, aiding Trump immeasurably with that delay, we were still told over and over that the justices—even the shamelessly partisan right wing ones—would ultimately do the right thing.

They had to, right? They’re not stupid people, unfamiliar with the Constitution. They have lifetime appointments and are not beholden to Donald Trump, even though he put three of them in their jobs. They might be believers in a revanchist right wing ideology, but they couldn’t possibly be that shamelessly partisan…..right???

The better question is why we continue to be so naive. The NFL may have changed the kickoff rule, but Lucy is still pulling the football away from Charlie Brown, and like Chuck, we seem to fall for it every time.

Here are Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern, both of them savvy, veteran Supreme Court observers, describing the self-soothing reasoning:

There were promising signs: (The justices) had, after all, refused to wade into the Trumpian efforts to set aside the election results in 2020. They had, after all, hewed to a kind of sanity in batting away Trumpist claims about presidential records (with the lone exception of Clarence Thomas, too long marinated in the Ginni-scented Kool-Aid to be capable of surprising us, but he was just one vote).

We promised ourselves that there would be cool heads and grand bargains and that even though the court might sometimes help Trump in small ways, it would privilege the country in the end. We kept thinking that at least for Justices Brett Kavanaugh and Neil Gorsuch and Chief Justice John Roberts, the voice of reasoned never-Trumpers might still penetrate the Fox News fog. We told ourselves that at least six justices, and maybe even seven, of the most MAGA-friendly court in history would still want to ensure that this November’s elections would not be the last in history. Political hacks they may be, but they were not lawless ones.

That was the collective delusion. The only question now is when we’re going to wise up and recognize what is right before our eyes:

That the archconservative majority that controls the US Supreme Court is a corrupt arm of a neo-fascist movement.

Hyperbole? I’ll gladly eat crow if that turns out to be the case, come June. But oral arguments yesterday do not bode well.

PARTISANO

Lithwick and Stern’s piece was one of the best on yesterday’s terrifying shitshow, so I’ll put this in cruise control and let them take it for a bit. (Wake me in a few.)

After so much speculation that these reasonable, rational jurists would surely dispose of this ridiculous case quickly and easily, Thursday delivered a morass of bad-faith hand-wringing on the right about the apparently unbearable possibility that a president might no longer be allowed to wield his powers of office in pursuit of illegal ends.

This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act…..They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.

Echoing a thought experiment about SEAL Team Six posed in the lower court hearing, Trump’s counsel, John Sauer, told Sonia Sotomayor that, under the right circumstances, the president could legally order the US military to assassinate a political rival. Similarly, he told Elena Kagan that a president could order the military to mount a coup, again, if the right circumstances arose. What those circumstances could possibly be he declined to explain.

Constitutional law professor Anthony Michael Kreis tweeted: “Unbelievable that Supreme Court justices who see forgiving student loans, mandating vaccines, and regulating climate change as a slippery slope toward tyranny were not clear-eyed on questions of whether a president could execute citizens or stage a coup without being prosecuted.”

Elections expert Marc Elias tweeted: ”I am in shock that a lawyer stood in the US Supreme Court and said that a president could assassinate his political opponent and it would be immune as ‘an official act.’ I am in despair that several Justices seemed to think this answer made perfect sense.”

And here’s Edward Luce of the Financial Times: “Still can’t quite digest that a former and possible future American president is telling the supreme court that he should have immunity to kill political rivals. Utterly surreal.”

But according to Trump’s argument, almost EVERYTHING a president falls within the scope of the his official duties. (Hell, even the Pope doesn’t get that kind of authority, but has to be deliberately speaking ex officio to be considered infallible.) But as Justice Sotomayor asked, if everything a president does can be classified as an “official act,” what was Nixon’s pardon all about? Tricky Dick certainly agreed. “When the president does it, that means it’s not illegal,” as he infamously told David Frost. But he still took he pardon, didn’t he?

Trump, of course, has long believed that he (and he alone) is above the law, both as a private citizen and as president. “I have an Article II, where I have to the right to do whatever I want as president,” he said in 2019, during the Mueller probe of his collusion with Russia over the 2016 election. No one disputes that this megalomaniacal malignant narcissist thinks that. But for the Supreme Court to agree? When you’re a star they let you do it, I guess.

That belief has not prevented Donald from embracing the opposite tack when it served his needs, of course. Lest we forget, in his second impeachment trial, in January 2021—the one stemming from his actions on January 6—Trump’s own lawyers argued explicitly that the proper avenue for adjudicating the charges against him was post-presidential criminal prosecution, by way of dodging the more pressing threat. “After he is out of office,” said one of those lawyers, Bruce Castor, “you go and arrest him.”

But that was then.

It’s impossible to imagine this Court responding positively if it were Joe Biden or Barack Obama or Bill Clinton arguing that they had absolute immunity to do whatever they wanted as president. (In fact, the same Republicans who are on Trump’s side in this case just recently tried to impeach Joe Biden). And in the wake of a SCOTUS decision in favor of Trump, you can be sure that no future Democratic president—if there are any, or any free elections at all in  America—will ever be allowed to make the same defense, without the Court finding (or inventing) some loophole why it doesn’t apply to them. The one thing you can count on is that the Court will frame its ultimate decision in such a way that Biden is not able to avail himself of that same imperial authority, only Donald Trump or some other Republican successor.

SEARCHING FOR THE REAL KILLERS

But “what the president does” did not seem to be on the docket yesterday, only the actions of his foes.

“Five justices sent the message, loud and clear,” wrote Lithwick and Stern, “that they are far more worried about Trump’s prosecution at the hands of the deep-state DOJ than about his alleged crimes, which were barely mentioned…..(T)he court has now signaled that nothing (Trump) did was all that serious and that the danger he may pose is not worth reining in. The real threats they see are the ones Trump himself shouts from the rooftops: witch hunts and partisan Biden prosecutors.”

Much-respected retired federal judge J. Michael Luttig remarked, “The Court and the parties discussed everything but the specific question presented.” Several times when the special counsel’s advocate, former Deputy Solicitor General Michael Dreeben, wanted to talk about the specifics of this case, and of Trump’s conduct, the right wing justices insisted he go back to hypotheticals carefully constructed to bolster their own pro-imperial position. (Gee, I wonder why.)

In fact, the right wing justices seemed singularly focused on avoiding any mention of the pertinent facts of this case, such as Trump’s own actions for which he is criminally charged, or—speaking of future presidents—the fact that he is again running for the highest office in the land.

“I’m talking about the future!” Kavanaugh declared at one point to Dreeben, pitching himself not as Trump’s human shield but as a principled defender of the treasured constitutional right of all presidents to do crime. (We’re sure whatever rule he cooks up will apply equally to Democratic presidents, right?)

Nixon, too, famously professed not to be acting not out of self-interest, but on behalf of future presidents. Trump has echoed that farcical claim. Justice Neil Gorsuch actually said: “I’m not concerned about this case, but I am concerned about future uses of the criminal law to target political opponents based on accusations about their motives.”

Which is more appalling: that he’s “not concerned about this case”—that is, the one before him—or that he thinks the DOJ is the real danger here?

Sam Alito even made the Orwellian argument that total immunity is necessary to prevent future presidents from committing illegal criminal acts:

“Now, if an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is going to be able to go off into a peaceful retirement but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy?”

The mind reels. (PS The defendant in question is not a president who headed off into a peaceful retirement, or even left office peacefully at all, but one who tried to mount an autogolpe and has since encouraged his followers to political violence even as he runs for the White House yet again.) So Alito is worried that the threat of a post-presidential prosecution would have a chilling effect on presidents who wanted to commit crimes while in office? I suppose that’s correct—and, like all deterrence, intentional.

Is there a genuine risk of overzealous prosecutors going after a genuinely innocent former president for partisan reasons? Sure. But it has never happened in 235 years of American democracy. Very much the contrary, in fact: there has been an extreme reluctance to charge former presidents with anything, even when they have in fact committed major crimes.

You know what has happened in our history, though, and very recently? A president trying to overturn an election by means of a violent self-coup. And that guy is still out there, and seeking a return to power. Which danger do you think is more real and pressing?

But none of that matters to the Court’s right wing cabal.

FALL OF A FIG LEAF

The night before oral arguments, Never Trump conservative Tim Miller of The Bulwark suggested on MSNBC that the right wing supermajority on the Supreme Court‑—including a justice whose own spouse helped foment this very insurrection—was playing a cowardly and deceitful game that would enable it to maintain a patina of legitimacy by ultimately rejecting Trump’s absurd claim to total immunity, but only after it helped re-elect him. Like many, Miller suggested that not even these Unitary Executive Theory-friendly justices are willing to endorse a completely imperial presidency. (Hell, Joe Biden might get ideas!) But they are moving as slowly as possible—not to mention the consideration of that claim in the first place—in order to aid Trump’s bid to regain power after that they can reject it with an Alfred E. Neuman-like “What, me worry?” shrug of faux innocence.

After oral arguments, however, I am forced to take a far darker view that the Court may not even bother with that fig leaf, but will simply agree with Trump’s outrageous neo-fascist assertion.

It’s true that it’s notoriously difficult to parse how a Supreme Court decision will go based solely on the justices’ questions. (Some, such as George Conway, have specifically counseled caution on that front, and even offered cause for optimism.) The justices may well have been engaging in some wild-ass thought experiments in order to shape the contours of this very grave matter, on the way to a rational and clear-eyed decision. Or not.

But it may not matter.

Even if the Court ultimately rules against Trump, the delay (and further delays it might cause by sending the case back down to Judge Amy Chutkan for further clarification) have already been a massive gift to Trump and his cause. For that matter, so was the mere matter of dignifying his claim in the first place.  

Prof. Ruth Ben-Ghiat of NYU, an expert on authoritarianism, tweeted: “Folks, whatever the Court does, having this case heard and the idea of having immunity for a military coup taken seriously by being debated is a big victory in the information war that MAGA and allies wage alongside legal battles. Authoritarians specialize in normalizing extreme ideas and involves giving them a respected platform.”

Were there any bright spots? Only a few. At one point, Trump’s own attorney admitted that some of his acts related to overturning the election were “private,” opening the door for Smith’s prosecution to proceed even if some charges will be thrown out. But the delay alone could still be deadly to the special counsel’s case, to say nothing of depriving the American people of a verdict before they go to the polls.

It is ironic that Trump benefited—again—from the justice system’s generosity the very same week that Harvey Weinstein had his conviction for sexual assault in New York state thrown out on what some would say is a technicality, though others believe it is a more substantial issue of jurisprudence. (The good news: he still faces 16 years in prison in California for a separate rape conviction.) The system sure is good at meticulously protecting the legal rights of rich and powerful white guys, the more horrible the better. In fact, Ronan Farrow has already written of the ways in which the New York court’s logic in overturning the Weinstein conviction might also help Trump get off. As it were.

MEANWHILE, BACK IN NEW YORK

Over the past years, we have been shocked time and time again by the unthinkable coming true, from Trump’s election in the first place to the court overturning Roe. But we should not have been shocked by any of it, because it has been telegraphed far in advance. The same thing is happening now with the immunity claim.  

It is fitting that SCOTUS is arguing this issue even as a perma-scowling Donald Trump sits petulantly at the defendant’s table in a New York State courthouse in Lower Manhattan, on trial for election interference in the form of hush money payments to a porn star, and his illegal efforts to hide those payments from the authorities. (Chutzpah Hall of Fame: Trump even tried to take the payments as a tax deduction. Very on brand.)

But Trump certainly does not want to be at that defendant’s table, as his Resting Asshole Face shows us every day. He does not think the law applies to him the way it does to ordinary mortals, which is how he has lived his whole miserable, entitled life, and more or less what his lawyer in the J6 case argued before the Supreme Court. Much as he would like to stay home eating cheeseburgers and watching Fox and Friends, however, he can’t just not show up in court, because for the moment, he is subject to the rule of law. If he didn’t turn up, some New York State Troopers would come knocking on Trump Tower and haul him down there in cuffs.

The image of Trump sitting at the defendant’s table and scowling (when he’s not nodding off or farting) is a reminder that, for the moment, the rule of law still pertains in the United States. But if he has his way, he will never be a defendant in a courtroom ever again, nor held accountable for anything at all. And a lot of people—including some in black robes (and some in white ones) are working very hard to help him achieve that goal.

If Donald Trump wins the election and regains the White House in November, you will never again see a picture like the one that illustrates this essay, because Donald Trump will squash all criminal proceedings against him and his allies, pardon the January 6 insurrectionists whom he summoned to try to overthrow the government, and operate as the head of state who is above the law and can do whatever he wants.  

COURTING DISASTER

Of the four criminal trials that Trump is facing, the NYC trial will likely be the only one that will take place before the election, or maybe at all, since it concerns crimes he (allegedly) committed before becoming president. In fact, it concerns crimes he (allegedly) committed in order to become president. If the Court rules in his favor, the DC, Georgia, and Florida cases may all be thrown out.

Therefore the Supreme Court decision on Trump’s immunity claim may prove a pivotal nail in the coffin of democracy. At the very least, it is a damning statement about the dysfunction of our political and legal system, largely owing to deliberate sabotage by the American right wing going back to the time of Newt Gingrich if not before. As Liz Cheney wrote in a New York Times op-ed when the Court first agreed to take this ridiculous case, “It cannot be that a president of the United States can attempt to steal an election and seize power but our justice system is incapable of bringing him to trial before the next election four years later.”

Oh, but it can be. If the archconservative members of the Supreme Court—three of who were put there by that individual—want it to be.

But even if Trump—incredibly—skates out of this jam the way he has so many near-death experiences before, the failure to lock him up will not be the final word. As we all know, even conviction and incarceration—though richly deserved—in and of themselves would not be enough to keep him out of the White House, by law. Only the voters can do that. Notwithstanding the title of this essay, the New York trial not really democracy’s last stand, nor is the J6 case, nor Florida nor Georgia; it is but one in a series of events that collectively comprise that die-in-place defense. The really pivotal one will be on Election Day.

Because in the end, the courts will not save us, any more than Mueller did, or the Senate did in two impeachments, or the House Committee on January 6 did, and we would be foolish to count on them to do so. The only people who can save American democracy are us—the American people—at the ballot box in November.

**********

Photo: A disgruntled criminal defendant on trial in Lower Manhattan, April 2024. Credit: Getty Images.

In Praise of Argument’s End

Published on by thekingsnecktie3 Comments

It’s been a hectic few weeks.

Iran launched a drone and missile attack on Israel that was almost completely repelled by Israeli air defenses—with the help of intel from its Arab neighbors. (!) So maybe Jewish space lasers are a real thing after all.

Over in Washington, the chief advocate of the space lasers theory, Marjorie Taylor Greene, began trying to oust Mike Johnson as Speaker of the House for being insufficiently fanatic.

Numerous red states threatened librarians with prison time for disseminating books that Republicans dislike. (Hey, in science fiction, are the people banning books and throwing librarians in prison usually the good guys or the bad guys? Asking for a friend.)

What else? Oh, the Supreme Court parsed whether the January 6th insurrectionists really did anything wrong, with Sam Alito (and to a lesser extent, an unrecused Clarence Thomas, whose own wife was part of fomenting that insurrection) suggesting that the people who attacked the Capitol were just “protestors” and that punishing them would chill free speech. (#legitimatepoliticaldiscourse)

It would also put a dent in bear spray sales.

Out west, Arizona made abortion almost completely illegal with no exceptions, affirming a law from 1864, a time before it was even a state. In response, Donald Trump—evidently operating in that same Civil War mode—seemed to think bleating “states’ rights” was a winning strategy for addressing the ensuing outrage.

And speaking of The Former Guy, topping the news last week, for the very first time in our history, the United States has charged a former US President with criminal offenses and put him on trial. Two of the jurors initially chosen for the case departed within a day, one of them stating that they felt intimidated by the defendant’s well-established pattern of winking incitement of his followers to physical violence against his enemies. Meanwhile Trump fell asleep in court two days in a row, and a protestor set himself on fire outside the courthouse, Thich Quang Duc-style.

Some would have us believe that the New York case is trivial, a tawdry tale of paying hush money to a porn star, and a partisan mountain-making out of molehill material. But others have pointed out the blatant dishonesty of that spin, which is shamelessly partisan in its own right. When one gets beyond the lurid surface, what this case is really about is a presidential candidate who was already on the ropes from the Access Hollywood tape—whose own party was running away from him like he was radioactive—trying to avoid another sex scandal hot on its heels, one that would almost certainly have delivered the presidency to Hillary Clinton on a silver platter.

Luckily for Donald, Jim Comey was about to come to his rescue.

In the The New Yorker, Eric Lach writes:

Would Trump have lost the 2016 Presidential election if Stormy Daniels had gone public with her story? Prosecutors in Manhattan think maybe so.

Trump faces thirty-four felony counts of falsifying business records, which the Manhattan District Attorney, Alvin Bragg, claims was part of a scheme to “conceal damaging information and unlawful activity from American voters before and after the 2016 election.” The case has become known as the “Stormy Daniels hush-money case,” which has made it easier for the public to dismiss, because it seems like small potatoes. In fact, the argument that the prosecutors have made in court filings is focussed on something closer to election interference. The case is about Trump lying his way into office.

So this case isn’t some trifle; it’s about cheating in a presidential election, and lying to cover it up. Trump didn’t have Michael Cohen buy Stormy Daniels’s silence in order to keep Melania from learning about a one-night stand, as he and his defenders would have us believe.

He did it to bamboozle the American people in order to win the White House.

TRY TO SEE THINGS MY WAY

It remains to be seen how the New York trial plays out and what it portends for the other three criminal trials that await Trump, in Florida, Georgia, and DC. But what I’d like to write about this week is something far simpler: The pleasure of not having political arguments any more—at least not with anybody in a red baseball cap.   

I was late to Facebook; I got on in January 2017, right after Trump’s inauguration, because I needed to vent and commune with like minds—precisely the “echo chamber” aspect of social media for which it is so often criticized. (I also didn’t start drinking coffee till I was over 50. But I hear good things about this band “the Beatles.”)

In those early days of the Trump administration, we were still fruitlessly trying to operate under the rules of American politics ante…which is part of what Trump exploited to win the election and what got us into that mess in the first place. That meant being told to “give him a chance,” and having arguments with Trump supporters who kept insisting that he wasn’t so bad (“Hillary’s much worse!”) and that at any moment he was going to “pivot” and become “presidential.”

Good times.

These days American political discourse, legitimate or otherwise, is a lot more efficient. At this point, if someone cops to supporting Trump, that’s all you need to know and the conversation can cease immediately. That declaration is an automatic credibility destroyer; nothing that person can say on the subject of politics ought to be given a shred of credence following that admission (which, incredibly, is often in the form of a boast).

And that is quite a relief.

Nowadays, on those occasions when I read a puzzling op-ed, or a tweet, or any other sort of editorial comment that seems to support a questionable position—usually one with a whiff of revanchist right wingism about it—the first thing I do is look into the author’s politics. If a quick check of the Internet reveals that they are a Trump supporter—which it often does—I consider the case closed without a nanosecond spent considering any possible merit to the argument in question, even if it is not connected to Donny. A Trump button on your lapel is an announcement of unredeemable villainy, and a forfeit of any claim to seriousness.

Is that mulishly doctrinaire on my part? I believe it is not. This is not 2017 anymore. By now, nothing can justify support for Donald Trump: not the border, not judges, not tax cuts (all of which are odious anyway, in my book, but never mind).

And that saves me loads of time. Time that I can devote to my rock opera adaptation of “Welcome Back, Kotter,” done in Esperanto.

This is not to say that we can relax. Trump may yet go on to win the White House again, as mind-boggling as that may be, in which case we will be plunged into a nightmare in which arguments with fascists will be the least of our worries. In fact, they may become extinct for different reasons, because any criticism of the Dear Leader will be punishable by arrest. (Think I’m exaggerating? Look back on what you thought was impossible in May of 2015.) But for now, bickering with assholes like Jamie Dimon, Chris Sununu, and guys in black pickup trucks blaring “God Bless the USA” are not on the agenda.

Doing everything we can to beat Trump in November is.

JESUS, ETC.

Like most FB newbies, when  I first got on the platform I argued with randos incessantly, until I realized how bad that was for my mental health, and what a sheer waste of time it was. I almost never do it anymore, and on those rare occasions when I do find myself foolishly drawn into a donnybrook, I immediately feel sick and regret it.

The “block” function is my friend, I’ve learned, self-care wise.

But I recently got into a fight with someone over an AI image of Jesus hugging Trump. The original image was clearly created without irony, but in this re-post, it was accompanied by a sarcastic remark by an anti-Trumper. (“It was at this point that Jesus realized his wallet was missing.” Pretty funny, IMHO.)

My antagonist wrote: “No matter what side you’re on, this is in bad taste.” As his politics were unclear, I genuinely wondered if he meant the original AI image, or the sardonic comment about it. So I asked.

What ensued was a stream of vitriol, a refusal to engage in any substantive way, and a flurry of ad hominem attacks on me. (On the Internet? Shocking!) We went back and forth a few times as I tried my tactful best just to get him to explain what bothered him, but even my politest and most innocent requests were met with the angry insistence that somehow they were veiled insults meant to “control” him.

In short: the dude was angry. 

The irony was not lost on me that this incredibly irate fella also professed to be a follower of Jesus Christ, and so devout in his piety that he was offended even by a painting of the Messiah. Enraged “Christians” whose belligerence belies the teachings of their hero are nothing new, of course. But encountering one face to face—or at least over fiber optic cables—was bracing.

I was really taken aback by that, but only because I was out of practice. In the old days, when I stupidly engaged with trolls more regularly, that sort of hair-trigger hostility was par for the course in conversation with Trump supporters. And one has to wonder why that is.

USED TO BE A SWEET BOY

Another Facebook tale.

Like many of us, I have reconnected with lost lost friends and classmates via social media. One such person was a kid I knew when we were all of 14, whom I’ll call Troy. We were both Army brats living on a Stateside post that shall remain nameless. He was a sweet kid: goofy and funny, a comedy nerd like myself, and a Python fan. (It was 1977.) When I saw him on Facebook after more than 40 years out of touch, and reached out, he politely wrote back to say, hey, good to reconnect, but just so you know, I think we might have some pretty different politics.

Fair enough. I checked out his profile and was surprised to find that he had indeed become very conservative, including vocally pro-NRA. A lot of his posts were quasi-libertarian, with oblique swipes at Biden, and at “wokeism,” and the subject of DEI in particular. There was a lot of rah-rah pro-military stuff as well, but nothing overtly pro-Trump.

But I didn’t feel the need to get into any of it with him, and I didn’t. We stayed cordial and non-political as I fooled myself into thinking maybe he hadn’t totally gone over to the dark side.

Then, in September 2020, when it was reported that Trump had denigrated US war dead as “losers and suckers,” I wrote him privately to ask, Army brat to Army brat: “Come on, man. You can’t possibly defend this.”

His response? “I don’t believe it’s true.”

So there you have it. As Troy showed, Trumpists have a unique ability to deny facts about their boy that are inconvenient to their own professed principles and worldview, no matter how definitively proven or empirically godawful, or both. (See also: free trade, Russia, NATO…the list goes on.)

I knew in my bones that the “losers and suckers” comment was true—it just felt far too Trumpy and on point to have been made up. And the story was subsequently confirmed by no less than Trump’s own White House chief of staff John Kelly, a retired Marine four-star who lost a son in combat in Afghanistan. In the process (and by way of defending his comrade General Mark Milley, the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs whom Trump had recently called a traitor), Kelly also delivered a scathing assessment of Trump, whom he would later call “the most flawed person” he’d ever met:

What can I add that has not already been said? A person that thinks those who defend their country in uniform, or are shot down or seriously wounded in combat, or spend years being tortured as POWs are all “suckers” because “there is nothing in it for them.” A person that did not want to be seen in the presence of military amputees because “it doesn’t look good for me.” A person who demonstrated open contempt for a Gold Star family—for all Gold Star families—on TV during the 2016 campaign, and rants that our most precious heroes who gave their lives in America’s defense are “losers” and wouldn’t visit their graves in France.

A person that has no idea what America stands for and has no idea what America is all about. A person who cavalierly suggests that a selfless warrior who has served his country for 40 years in peacetime and war should lose his life for treason—in expectation that someone will take action. A person who admires autocrats and murderous dictators. A person that has nothing but contempt for our democratic institutions, our Constitution, and the rule of law.

There is nothing more that can be said. God help us.

SOUR TIMES

When Kelly said that, I thought about reaching out to Troy and rekindling the discussion. But seeing online that he was still solidly right wing, and knowing that the reply would not be, “I was wrong—Trump’s a piece of shit,” I didn’t have the heart.

But recently Troy and I got into it again. He’d posted one of his snickering, passive-aggressive comments, this one accusing the left of suppressing free expression. (I realized that he still had a sense of humor, of sorts, but that it had curdled into the bitter cynicism prevalent on the right.) I couldn’t resist gently pushing back.

His reply was disingenuous, suggesting that a lot of conservatives were not Trump fans, and implying that he was among that cohort, but in the next breath saying he understood why, because of the “abortion” (his term) that Biden had made of America. (Odd choice of words, no?) I called bullshit, noting that he was trying to distance himself from Trump while at the same time defending him, and asked him to just own it, if in fact he supported the man.

But it was actually Troy’s wife (whom I don’t know at all) who came after me, teeth bared, and we sparred a bit. With classic Trumpy evasiveness, she avoided my questions, jumping from subject to subject with a heavy dose of whataboutism, defending book bans in Florida and deploying the now-commonplace right wing perversion of Martin Luther King to argue for racist policies that King would have abhorred, and along the way lecturing me on how well-read she was. Never a sign of security and strength.

But above all, like the dude I mentioned earlier, she seemed openly pissed off when I tried to be nice, accusing me of being “fake” for writing things like, “Even though we don’t see eye to eye, I’m sure we both want only the best for our country, even if we disagree on what that is and how to achieve it.”

(Am I missing something here? Maybe my attempts at civility do feel transparently false or sarcastic, at least to these people, even though I assure you that I am completely genuine. I feel as sad for these folks as I am mad at them. Maybe that comes across as condescending. Maybe my contempt for their policy positions makes those professions of empathy and common cause seem absurd. Or maybe they themselves cannot imagine sincerely wishing well to someone on the other side of the aisle, and therefore find it impossible to imagine that anyone else can.)

The bottom line is that these people are so angry. That is not news: It’s the same grievance that we have seen animate virtually all of Trumpism from the jump, bordering on nihilism, and poured into the empty vessel that is Donald, an avatar for all their fury. As I say, in my more generous moments, I can feel their hurt. How much pain do you have to be in to be that livid all the time? But then there are other moments when I remember that these are grown-ass adults who have no excuse for foisting their pathology on the rest of us, and who are culpable for the damage that they do.

And Troy—a well-educated white male, middle class or better, the son of a career Army officer just like me—can hardly lay claim to membership in any kind of beaten-down demographic. He ain’t no Appalachian coal miner, or laid off Rust Belt auto worker. Despite his ostentatious valorization of the military, he didn’t even serve himself…..but I did. The real issue, as with many right wingers, seems to be an unjustified displeasure over the erosion of his privilege in the interest of historically marginalized folks.

But I hear you saying, “Hey, King’s Necktie, you’re not exactly a beacon of sunshine yourself.” True. But at the risk of sounding like I’m rationalizing, I would suggest that my anger is what Buddhists call wrath: a righteous outrage at injustice, not some misplaced personal grudge that the civil rights movement put an end to separate water fountains.

I do realize that right wingers will make the same claim to righteousness…..I just think they’re wrong. As I have often said, one person shouting that the Earth is flat and another that it’s round are not equally right just because they’re shouting at equal volume.

LET THEM EAT CAKE (AND HAVE IT TOO)

My old pal Troy is representative of a kind of “conservative” who wants to be treated like a respectable pre-Trump Republican even as they support a version of the erstwhile Grand Old Party that has openly embraced fascism. But there is another version of this right wing archetype that eschews hostility for the façade of “reasonableness.” Which is despicable in its own way.

There may be no better example of that demographic than New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, who, in his usual patronizing manner, and apropos of Alex Garland’s new movie Civil War, this past week assured us that fears of political violence in the US are ridiculous.

Given Ross’s crappy track record as a prognosticator, the fact that he’s pooh-poohing the odds of a second American civil war are very worrying. How this guy still has a job at the Times baffles me. (Maybe the payroll department thinks it’s the Washington Times he works for.)

Earlier I mentioned New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu, who, like Douthat, is the kind of allegedly “reasonable” Republican whose support for Trump is the sort of thing that might enable the sonofabitch to win. That support is in its own way more cowardly and despicable than that of the hardcore redhatted MAGA faithful, and certainly more cynical.

Last Sunday on ABC’s “This Week,” George Stephanopoulos pressed Sununu—a Nikki Haley supporter until she dropped out of the race—on his endorsement of Trump, given the governor’s recognition of all the vile things the presumptive GOP nominee has done, an attempted coup above all.

“You believe that a president who contributed to an insurrection should be president again?” Stephanopoulos asked. (Good job, George!)

“As does 51 percent of America, George,” Sununu sneered. “I mean, really. I understand you’re part of the media, I understand you’re in this New York City bubble or whatever it is, but you got to look around what’s happening across this country.” Sununu went on to make specious claims about inflation and the border before adding that it’s “that type of elitism that the average American is just sick and tired of, and it’s a culture change. That’s what I’m supporting.”

Let’s recap. First off, Sununu suggested that he was fine with fascism as long as lots of other people are. (His 51% figure is wildly wrong and deceitful, however. The number is more like 30%, even though, in our antidemocratic system, that may still be enough for Trump to win. But even a genuine majority that thrilled to authoritarianism would not make its triumph any more morally defensible.) Then he trotted out the tired reverse snobbery about the media and city dwellers and people of privilege—said the son of a former White House chief of staff and governor who followed his dad into that office.

In The Bulwark, Jonathan V. Last neatly summarized the implications of Sununu’s odious stance:

Trumpist authoritarianism can only succeed when elites like Sununu give him cover.

Sununu isn’t a Trumpist. He doesn’t believe in MAGA populism. And he has no political future in the Republican party—he’s as anathema to MAGA as he would be if he were a Democrat. And yet, Sununu has been willing to campaign for Trump. To lie for Trump. To humiliate himself for Trump.

Why? Is he a dishonest scoundrel? A coward? Or a fool?

Sununu is part of a large class of Republican elites who have been not just willing, but eager, to play dice with liberal democracy.

To be fair and precise: Douthat does not identify as a Trump supporter, but his constant apologia for the man is tantamount to it. In fact, in the same way that Sununu is more craven than the unapologetic mass of MAGA, Douthat is even more craven than Chris. If you’re gonna be a fascist, do us a favor and be honest about it.

But I don’t need to argue with Douthat and Sununu any more than I do with erstwhile childhood friends, or their wives, or the Facebook rando who hates the sacrilege of AI Jesus and his BFF Donald. Their allegiance to Trumpism is self-damning.

YOU BET YOUR LIFE

To conclude, let me return to my online contretemps with Troy.

When he weighed in again, he was more succinct in reply to my blunt question about whether he supported Trump. “If it’s a choice between Biden and Trump,” he wrote, “I’ll vote for Trump every day and twice on Sunday. You know, like Democrats do.”

Per my policy, that was all I needed to know, and everything else we might talk about was ephemeral, including the original debate about free expression. “Nothing more to discuss after that,” I wrote. “Let’s let history decide which one of us chose more wisely.”

“Happy to take that deal,” he answered, with the unearned confidence of a Ron Burgundy.

And then I blocked him, and his wife, and his little dog too.

Personally, I like my odds.

*******

Photo: Palin & Cleese. “An argument is a collective series of statements intended to establish a proposition. It isn’t just saying, ‘No it isn’t’.”

“Yes it is.”

“No it isn’t!”

If You Ain’t Cheatin’

Published on by thekingsnecktieLeave a comment

“If you ain’t cheating, you ain’t trying,” one of my old sergeants used to say, and he was only half-joking. Maybe a quarter.

That also appears to be the motto of Republican attorneys. From special counsels to Supreme Court justices, right wing jurists are making a mockery of the law, and worse than that, doing it under a dishonest cloak of alleged impartiality.

We need not even discuss the legal maneuvering of Trump’s revolving door of lawyers and the spurious motions they regularly deploy to try to delay his various trials in hopes he will soon be a dictator who can squash them permanently. That’s what he hired them to do, and we should expect nothing less from a shyster who would take that job.

No: I’m talking about officials in the justice system who are supposed to be honest brokers and patently are not. (It also works in medicine—see retired Rear Admiral—sorry, demoted to O-6—Dr. Ronny Jackson, the former Trump White House physician, now a Big Lie Republican Congressman representing Texas.)

I am not calling for an unreasonable standard of purity, or naively suggesting that bias can be eliminated from politics. Inevitably, ideological interest creeps into legal and judicial decisions all the time, even with otherwise reputable jurists. But what we’ve seen of late goes beyond gamesmanship and into wanton perversion of the law in the pursuit of raw power.

WITH A CAPITAL “T” AND THAT STANDS FOR “TRUMP”

This past week we saw once again how Donald J. Trump is the wildly undeserving beneficiary of the very system he openly wants to destroy when it was reported that, as the official candidate of one of the two major parties, he will begin receiving national security briefings from the US Intelligence Community.

Let’s pause to take that in. A man under felony indictment for stealing and hiding the most sensitive US government secrets is going to be given top secret/SCI national security briefings? At a time when he owes half a billion dollars that he doesn’t have? What could possibly go wrong?

As Rachel Maddow pointed out, an ordinary American seeking a security clearance who had those kind of financial liabilities—let alone that history of mishandling intel—wouldn’t stand a chance of getting one, let alone at that level. But evidently Donald Trump is not an ordinary American.

Such intel briefings have been customary since the Truman administration (as Harry didn’t want any other potential president to get caught flat-footed in case he learned he was supposed to, say, drop an atomic bomb). But we’ve never been faced with a candidate who was suspected by the FBI of being a Russian agent, under indictment for stealing classified information, and openly seeking cash to settle massive debts. Whether he sells intelligence to foreign despots (or private tycoons of any nationality) or is simply beholden to them in a second administration, it’s madness to facilitate it.

And do we know that he is susceptible to that kind of bribery? We sure do.

Trump recently did a 180 on his heretofore virulent attacks on Anheuser Busch—over the right wing’s freakout over Bud Light ad featuring trans spokesperson Dylan Mulvaney—on the very day the company announced it would host a $10,000 a plate fundraiser for him. He’s done a similar flip-flop on TikTok, even as a rare bipartisan consensus in Congress is moving toward banning it, because he is courting Jeff Yass, a billionaire whose fund has a $33 billion stake in its parent company, ByteDance. (That’s billion with a b, and that rhymes with c, and that stands for corruption. Or bribery—take your pick.)

And those are only the cases we know of, thus far. Even Steve Bannon is saying Trump has been bought.

As a different Dylan once said, money doesn’t talk—it swears.

So why is Trump going to get these briefings? The decision came down from the White House itself, and we can only speculate that Biden is trying to avoid lending credibility to his opponent’s spurious claim that he is being persecuted by the so-called deep state, if only by a break with precedent. But for eight years now, any such effort to sway MAGA Nation with acts of good faith or principle have consistently proven to be a fool’s errand.

The former military intelligence officer in me believes that the security risks of reading Trump onto any additional classified intel far outweigh any bad PR that would come with shutting him out. Apparently lots of high-ranking officials in the IC agree. Page one of the Secret Squirrel handbook: Don’t show your secrets to somebody who’s likely to sell them for bail money.

Let the Red Hatters bitch and moan, say I; they’re gonna do it regardless.

Which, in my roundabout way, brings me to the crux of this essay. The idea that we can impress Trump supporters with our good faith and backward-bending attempts to be fair and impartial is not only a doomed to fail, but actively self-destructive. It’s like watching an endless loop of Miller’s Crossing, as John Turturro as Bernie Bernbaum screws over Gabriel Byrne’s Tom Reagan after he spared his life. At every turn right wingers have gladly accepted such efforts by Democrats, then weaponized them for their own ends, with nary a scintilla of concern about “principle,” or the optics of how that looks.

Exhibit A, also from just this past week: special counsel Robert Hur, who had been appointed to investigate the Biden documents case.

HUR PEOPLE HURT PEOPLE

As soon as he delivered his written report last month, it was clear that Hur, a lifelong Republican who had been appointed as a US Attorney by Trump, went beyond his remit with an unsolicited, inappropriate, and unprofessional characterization of President Biden’s mental fitness that he— a lawyer, not a physician—was unqualified to make. (Maybe he consulted Ronny Jackson.)

Of course, that didn’t stop the MSM from running that story night and day, hammering the preferred Republican narrative into the public mind exactly as the GOP intended, and as Hur surely knew it would.

It’s impossible to believe that that was an accident and not a deliberate partisan strategy.

California Congressman (and soon-to-be Senator) Adam Schiff excoriated Hur on that point on live TV, as the WaPo reported:

“You were not born yesterday, you understood exactly what you were doing,” Schiff said. “You cannot tell me you’re so naive to think your words would not have created a political firestorm.”

Incensed, Hur fired back, “What I understood is the regulations,” referring to the part of Justice Department policy that says special counsel reports should be confidential to the attorney general. But the last two such reports were released publicly, and Attorney General Merrick Garland had made clear beforehand that he would do his best to release as much of Hur’s report as possible.

Schiff met that answer with disbelief and scorn.

“You must have understood the impact of your words,” the congressman said, accusing the prosecutor of injecting “your own personal, prejudicial, subjective opinion of the president, one you knew would be amplified by his political opponent. You had to understand that, and you did it anyway.”

“Congressman, what you are suggesting is that I shape, sanitize, omit portions of my reasoning …”

Schiff was having none of it.

“You made a choice. That was a political choice; it was the wrong choice,” he said.

What was most annoying was Hur’s smug, performative claim that he was merely a nonpartisan public servant following the rules. He is anything but. As Adam Serwer wrote with characteristic elegance in The Atlantic:

During his testimony before the House, Hur insisted that “partisan politics had no place whatsoever in my work.” He tried to have it both ways, insisting that his report was accurate while refuting the most uncharitable right-wing characterizations of Biden’s memory. But as legal experts pointed out after the report was released, Hur’s description of Biden’s memory was not a necessary element of his duties, and it is unlikely that someone with as much experience in Washington as Hur would be so naive as to not understand how those phrases would be used politically.

Tellingly, Hur resigned from the DOJ just before his testimony so he would not be bound by its code of ethics. Reportedly he was also prepped by Trump advisors, who surely told him to emphasize the notion that he did not “exonerate” Biden, by the strict legal definition, only recommended against prosecution.

But Hur’s behavior gets even worse. Now that we have the transcript of his interview with the President, we know that even that “Biden is senile” assessment was not only gratuitous, but wildly inconsistent with the very facts in his own report, which show Joe to be quite sharp. (Even some of Hur’s specific examples—the timing of Beau’s death, for example—are flat-out wrong.)

In the Washington Post veteran legal analyst Ruth Marcus writes that Hur “mischaracterized and overstated Biden’s alleged memory lapses” and “consistently adopted an interpretation that is as uncharitable and damaging to Biden as possible.”

Gratuitous is bad enough. This was gratuitous and misleading.

Hur is entitled to his own interpretation, and it’s relevant, as he explained on Tuesday, to his assessment of how a jury would assess Biden’s conduct. Hur said he needed to “show his work” in explaining his decision not to pursue charges. But the special counsel well understood that his report to Attorney General Merrick Garland would be made public—and he understood, or should have, the political fallout that would result from his scorching assessment of Biden.

So, he had a dual responsibility here, and he failed twice. First, he went beyond, far beyond, what was necessary to outline his concerns about Biden’s memory, and how that would impact any case against him. Second, as we just learned, his recitation of the facts was one-sided.

“Necessary and accurate and fair,” Hur said. I’d say he was zero for three.

The MSM is going to report that just as eagerly and breathlessly as it spread Hur’s lies in the first place, right?

Don’t hold your breath.

A subsequent correction lacks the same power—and is usually buried deep inside the metaphorical paper, near the classified ads and local Little League results. Serwer:

First impressions stick. After a big story hits, the initial conclusions can turn out to be wrong, or partly wrong, but the revisions are not what people remember. They remember the headlines in imposing font, the solemn tone from a presenter, the avalanche of ironic summaries on social media. Political operatives know this, and it’s that indelible impression they want, one that sticks like a greasy fingerprint and that no number of follow-ups or awkward corrections could possibly wipe away.

APPEASEMENT FAILS AGAIN

But in addition to detailing Hur’s dishonesty, Serwer also explained the Democrats’ own goal of trying to appear non-partisan, which Republicans are happy to exploit over and over again: “Hur’s report is itself something of a self-inflicted wound for Democrats, a predictable result of their efforts to rebut bad-faith criticism from partisan actors by going out of their way to seem nonpartisan.”

Serwer explains the appeal of the “Biden is senile” story for the press on these exact grounds, as it seemed like “the sort of superficially nonideological criticism that some reporters feel comfortable repeating in their own words, believing that it illustrates their lack of partisanship to conservative sources and audiences. Coverage of the Hillary Clinton email investigation reached saturation levels in 2016 for similar reasons.”

We all know how that turned out.

Indeed, Hur’s abuse of his report to deliver a partisan attack was a reprise of Jim Comey’s unsolicited dig at Hillary when, as FBI director, he declined to seek charges against her in July 2016. It was also an escalation, as Hur is a far more partisan actor than Comey. But the comparison is instructive. Comey has since stated that his subsequent decision to announce the re-opening of that investigation in late October of that year, on the very eve of the election—breaking with standard FBI procedure not to comment on such matters—was driven in part by fears of what the right would say if he did not announce it, and Clinton won, and news later got out.

One can hardly think of a more disastrous miscalculation in modern American politics, and that includes Mike Dukakis’s decision to drive a tank.

Serwer again:

For reasons that remain unclear to me, Democrats seem to have internalized the Republican insistence that only Republicans are capable of the fairness and objectivity necessary to investigate or enforce the law. Any lifelong Republican who fails to put partisanship above their duties is instantly and retroactively turned into a left-wing operative by the conservative media. Acting to prevent complaints of bias (as opposed to actually being fair) is ultimately futile: Comey’s last-minute gift to the Trump campaign didn’t prevent Trump from smearing him as a liberal stooge.

The right wing knows it can goad Democrats—and journalists—into giving them what they want by means of this relentless cry of left-wing bias.

I’ve written before about Eric Alterman’s critique of the GOP “working the refs.” (He speaks about that at length in an interview for my forthcoming book Resisting the Right.) Serwer cites that concept explicitly:

These efforts to work the refs pay off. Right-wing criticism of Obama probably influenced him to pick a grandstanding Republican to head the FBI, an agency that has never been run by a Democrat, just as it likely influenced Garland to pick a grandstanding Republican to investigate Biden.

Conservative criticism of the mainstream press leads too many journalists to attempt to prove they aren’t liberals, which results in wholesale amplification of right-wing propaganda to deflect criticisms that the media aren’t objective; the facts become a secondary concern.

ALAS, POOR MERRICK

But even with Hur’s unprofessional behavior, and the media’s willingness to abet it, it didn’t have to play out this way, except that—as Serwer alludes—Merrick Garland is the poster boy for the Democrats’ appeasement impulse.

The Attorney General was under no obligation to appoint a special counsel to look into the Biden documents case at all, as the differences with the Trump case were so great that he could reasonably have demurred. But he did, in order to look “objective” and defer criticism. Even then, he did not have to choose a right wing hack like Hur for the gig—again presumably in the interest of looking scrupulously fair.

After seeing Hur’s final report, Garland could have redacted portions of it. He had promised to release as much as he could, which offered enough subjectivity to put the blatantly partisan portions out of that category. Would that have looked bad, especially if the redacted portions later leaked out? Yes, but—contra Comey—it might have been the lesser of two evils.….and, as we have discussed, by then the narrative would be set and the revelation would be drained of much of its power.

That is absolutely the GOP playbook in these cases.

Do you imagine for a moment that a Republican AG like Bill Barr wouldn’t have done so? No need to imagine, because Barr not only did that, but he did something much more extreme in holding the Mueller report for three weeks while issuing his own blatantly partisan and misleading four-page “summary,” in order to set the story in advance. Which worked brilliantly, with Trump claiming “total exoneration,” and the press blaring that assertionas gospel. Serwer: “Only later did the public learn that Mueller’s report had found ‘no criminal conspiracy but considerable links between Donald Trump’s campaign and Russia, and strongly suggested that Trump had obstructed justice’.”

Garland could have similarly held Hur’s report and first issued his own summary…..and unlike Barr/Mueller, he would have been justified in so doing, since Hur was engaging in wildly inappropriate editorializing while Mueller was scrupulously adhering to the rules. To a fault, some would say—the purity impulse in action again.

Maybe Merrick doesn’t think it’s his job to control the narrative. But it is his job not to let the people he appoints abuse and distort the process for partisan purposes. Very much his fucking job.

NEVILLE NEVILLE, YOU’VE TORN YOUR DRESS

But at least some Democrats have finally figured out how to jiu-jitsu the GOP’s tactics.

Obviously, House Republicans called Hur to testify because they wanted to highlight his uncalled-for assessment of Biden’s mental acuity. But it was clear to me from the start—and not because I’m Nostradamus—that the hearing might backfire on the GOP, thanks to the kind of admirable combativeness and muscularity that Adam Schiff and others demonstrated and that we need, in contrast to the Marquess of Queensbury thinking that this essay bemoans.

For example, in pressing on why the DOJ is charging Trump and not Biden over the retention of classified documents, Hur wound up explaining on national TV why what Trump did was so much worse. Another California Democrat, Ted Lieu, made that case very well by reciting a litany of Trump’s illegal behavior re the classified documents in his possession—hiding them, defying subpoenas to return them, ordering staff to move them when federal investigators were coming, and to lie about it—and forcing Hur to admit that Biden did none of those things.

Yet another California Democrat (what’s in the water out there?), Eric Swalwell, attempted to get Hur to pledge not to accept a federal judgeship from Trump should he win again. Yeah, that was some grandstanding, but who could resist? It certainly highlighted the self-serving motives behind Hur’s actions, both political and potentially personal. And Hur’s refusal to answer and lame attempt to pivot back to “what I came here to discuss” didn’t look great.

Democratic grandstanding or no, in a (gulp) second Trump administration, don’t be surprised to see Hur in black robes.

As Heather Cox Richardson wrote, the Democrats on the Judiciary Committee also showed “videos of Trump slurring his words, forgetting names, and speaking in word salad, getting their own sound bites to voters.”

And it was effective. On Twitter (don’t call it “Eks”) George Conway predicted that the one-two punch of Biden’s State of the Union address and Hur’s “immolation” a few days later would go down in political history like Reagan’s disarming “I am not going to exploit my opponent’s youth and inexperience’ moment,” from a 1984 presidential debate at a time when he was the one being attacked for his age. As HCR writes, “Mondale later said he knew Reagan’s answer was the moment he had lost not only the debate but probably the election.”

Maybe the left is finally figuring out the Neville Chamberlain is not a great role model.

So let’s stop trying to appease the right, and engaging in torturous contortions to try to show MAGA Nation how fair and decent we are, when all they ever do is exploit our goodwill and use it against us, and against democracy. Yes, we should play by the rules. But there’s playing by the rules, and then there’s doing self-harm when facing an opponent who gleefully twists and distorts and undermines those rules….all the while pretending that they too and fair and impartial and good faith players.

But guess what Republicans? You can’t piss on our heads and tell us it’s rain.

Another old NCO maxim? No—Hester Street. Better in the original Yiddish.

********

Photo:  Republican special counsel Robert Hur, with his message for America.

Credit: Associated Press

h/t to Beth Westrate for “what could possibly go wrong?”

Profiles in Courage (Not)

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This is the third in an accidental series on autocracy’s handmaidens. I didn’t set out to do that; it’s just that the news is making it unavoidably so.

First, we looked at the despicable role of the Supreme Court in abetting Trump’s neo-authoritarian project while trying to maintain its pose of holier-than-thou high-mindedness. Then, at the role of us ordinary Americans, on whose docile cooperation that project depends. This week, we survey a few key leaders within the Republican Party who recently have had a real opportunity to stand up and defy this far right movement, but for various self-serving reasons decided……Nahhhhhhh.

Would I prefer to finish the essay on the re-release of Stop Making Sense that I’ve had on deck for like six months? Yes. So, friends, please fix our fucking democracy so I can chill out.

THE PARTY’S OVER

Remember when Donald Trump was a parvenu in the Republican Party, widely criticized by its mandarins as unfit for office, not a “real conservative,” and an electoral disaster waiting to happen?

He now owns the Republican National Committee lock, stock, and barrel. (Look for it on the Trump Organization website, next to the steaks, bottled water, Chinese-made neckties, and worthless university degrees.)  

Last week the RNC shitcanned its chairwoman, Ronna Romney McDaniel—a Trump toady who had already turned on her own uncle in favor of Donald—and replaced her with Trump’s own daughter-in-law, Lara, Eric’s wife, who is co-chair along with chairman Michael Whatley, a Big Lie proponent and longtime Trump booster.

The new regime wasted no time cleaning house. The WaPo reports: “The (RNC’s) senior leadership has been almost entirely replaced or reassigned, while dozens of lower-ranking officials including state directors were either fired or told to reapply for their jobs. A nationwide network of community outreach centers, once a fixture of the party’s efforts to attract minority voters, will be shuttered or refocused on get-out-the-vote efforts.” One inside source called it “an absolute bloodbath.”

This is true cult-of-personality, fascist state stuff, and the final obliteration of the Grand Old Party’s claim that it is the Party of Lincoln with a proud tradition of blah blah blah.

Perhaps the scariest thing for Republicans is the effect of all this on downballot GOP candidates, who can’t possibly miss the unmistakable signal that this new Trumpified RNC—like Trump himself—cares not a shit about them or their races.

Ideologically speaking, it marks the end of old school Republicanism that some of my conservative friends continue to insist is the heart of the GOP, and its final codification as the outright party of White Christian nationalism. As Heather Cox Richradson writes: “Rather than calling for a small federal government that stays out of the way of market forces, as Republicans have advocated since 1980, the new Trump Party calls for a strong government that enforces religious rules and bans abortion; books; diversity, equity, and inclusion programs; and so on.”

Bonus irony, for those old enough to remember: The purge and subsequent revamp is being led by Trump advisor Chris LaCivita, the same guy who led the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” smear campaign against John Kerry in 2004. Quick explainer, for those too young to remember: that was one of the most deceptive, dishonest, and despicably effective political ad campaigns in US history, one that convinced much of America that the son of a former US President who used his family connections to avoid going to war (and possibly didn’t even complete his Stateside Air National Guard service), was an uber-patriot, and the guy who actually went to Vietnam, and got wounded  there, and who had a chestful of medals, was somehow an un-American traitor. 

That ought to be an indicator of the kind of criminal, bare knuckles campaign Team Trump intends to run, and how gallingly successful it can be.

Are you shocked?

COUNTRY FIRST (BUT THE COUNTRY IS RUSSIA)

The GOP’s humiliating surrender to Trump is now complete. There are dudes in federal prison who get sodomized on a regular basis who have more dignity and agency than the leadership of the Republican Party. (If there’s any justice, Trump himself will be in that orange-suited population soon.)

Of course, in another sense, it is woefully off-base even to think of this dynamic in terms of the GOP “surrendering” to Trump. That formulation assumes that a hostile takeover is in play. It is not. The Republican Party is thrilled to have Trump; if it were not, it would have dumped him long ago. Even those old school “Rockefeller Republicans” who profess to have misgivings wind up bending the knee, if they want to remain in the Party’s good graces. Ask Oklahoma Sen. Jim Lankford, as right wing a politician as he can be, who nevertheless got censured by his own state party last week for the sin of brokering a bipartisan border deal that Trump subsequently disliked.

Even the most left-leaning outlets are susceptible to this fake narrative that there is still a “normie” wing of the GOP. Reporting on Nikki Haley dropping out of the presidential race, MSNBC (of all nets) recently ran a chyron that read, “Republicans Fail to Stop MAGA Movement.”

Et tu, MSNBC? When is the media gonna figure it out? The Republicans are not even TRYING to stop Trump. They don’t WANT to stop Trump. Trump IS the Republican Party. This chyron is like one that reads, “Arsonists Fail to Put Out Fire.”

(It was especially galling that this chyron should appear over an interview with former Republican-turned hardcore Never Trumper Charlie Sykes, who has been loudly sounding this very alarm for years.)

But that fealty to the Dear Leader need not be so blunt and brazen in order to do harm.

The Bulwark’s Jonathan V. Last has coined a law: “Any person or institution which is not explicitly anti-Trump will become a tool for authoritarianism eventually.”

We saw it with Moscow Mitch McConnell, who just endorsed Trump, despite years of acrimony between them, despite his speech during Trump’s second impeachment holding him “morally responsible” for January 6th, despite Trump insulting and humiliating him and launching a racist attack on his wife, Elaine Chao, formerly Trump’s own Labor Secretary. The rationale, we’re told, is that Mitch thinks a Trump win in November will give the GOP the best bet to hold onto the Senate, which is all he cares about. (Which is another way of saying that all he cares about is himself.)

Is it fun to watch Mitch get emasculated like this? Kinda. If only it weren’t at the feet of an even worse swine. A powerful, long-serving US senator on the cusp of retirement, with a history of hostility toward his party’s presidential candidate, could give that candidate the middle finger on the way out. But if Mitch had that kind of integrity, he wouldn’t be a craven POS in the first place.

We saw it again with the vastly overpraised Nikki Haley, who angered critics by not being more vocal in her condemnation of Trump when she ended her presidential run, after taking it to him fairly hard in the pyrrhic, what-have-I-got-to-lose endstage of her always hopeless campaign.

But again: should we really be surprised? A supposedly moderate conservative, Nikki ran on standard godawful GOP rhetoric, stood by Alabama’s fetal personhood decision, and promised to pardon Trump if she were elected president. Tell me again how she’s better than Donald?

When Nikki left the race, she did a pretty good Pontius PIlate impression in washing her hands of what happens from here. She certainly didn’t tell her supporters not to go over to Trump. Last writes, “If there’s been a more cowardly statement over the last year, I can’t think of it…..(Nikki Haley) has resigned herself to being a useful tool for Trump’s ongoing authoritarian attempt.” Don’t be surprised if she shows up on his ticket come summer.

And speaking of Nikki, we saw Last’s law in action with Haley supporter Governor Chris Sununu of New Hampshire. Another alleged moderate, Sununu has also been highly critical of Trump, including calling him a “loser” and saying he should face the legal music in his various criminal proceedings. That’s the kind of behavior that earned him the same sort of undeserved credit from desperate and dewy-eyed liberals that Nikki got. (The bar for principle in the GOP is pretty low.)

But now that Nikki is out, Sununu has said that he will vote for Trump. “I’m going to support the ticket. I’m going to support Donald Trump.”

Guess he didn’t get the memo about “country over party.”

Acknowledging his previous criticism of Trump, Sununununu remarked, “Look, I don’t take any of that back, to be sure. But again, understand this is an alternative. I mean, the alternative is Biden.”

So Trump is really bad but Biden is somehow worse? That mindset is not going to age well. “Yeah, Mussolini’s a monster, but I’m loyal party guy.”

OO-OOH THAT SMELL

These Republicans, who have not the courage of those who left the party in disgust—like David Jolly or Michael Steele or Bill Kristol or Charlie Sykes or Tim Miller or George Conway—are looking down the barrel of history’s harshest judgment.

Sununu is on record arguing that our institutions are so strong that a single individual can’t undermine them, telling the New York Times (sic): “As much of a stink as (Trump) made that the election fraud in Jan. 6 and all this stuff, he still walked out the door.”

As Chris Cillizza writes, you could call January 6th—and more importantly, the concerted campaign of electoral subversion that led up to it—just a stink. Or, “You could also call it an armed insurrection on the US Capitol with the express purpose of delaying the certification of a free and fair election.” Cillizza reminds us how close Trump came to succeeding in that effort, stopped only by the actions of a few. Contrary to the conclusion that “our institutions and democracy are essentially impregnable,” Cillizza writes that he took the exact opposite lesson from that day:

To me, what January 6 proved is that we were one Mike Pence action away from the basic tenets of democracy being totally undermined. (And Pence had plenty of doubts before he did the right thing!). The aftermath of the 2020 election showed me how paper-thin the difference between order and chaos, between democracy and, um, not-democracy really is.

For Sununu to believe that Trump can’t do anything all that bad if he is elected again requires him to ignore ALL of the things the former president has already SAID he will do if he is elected again. Among those proposals:

+ A political weaponization of the Justice Department

+ A purge in the civil service—aimed at installing more Trump loyalists

+ A new Muslim ban

+ Retribution against news channels he views as unfriendly to him

The idea of reinstalling someone like that into office solely because he, like you, has an “R” after his name is, to borrow a phrase from Sununu, fucking crazy.

SLIPPERY PEOPLE

There were a couple other little things that came out recently that bear noting.

After getting savagely—and justifiably—mocked for her State of the Union rebuttal, it emerged that tone was the least of Sen. Katie Britt (R-Ala.)’s issues. The flat-out lie that Republicans will protect IVF didn’t get by me, but now her sensational story of a sex trafficked migrant has turned out to be untrue in several crucial details, including the president it happened under—George W. Bush.

Well, I’ll be.

As some wag put it, it takes a helluva lot of gall to talk about the horrors of sex trafficking and then tell viewers to vote for a convicted sexual predator. It takes even more gall to lie about it. (The Washington Post’s factchecker gave Britt’s version four Pinocchios.)

The truth was exposed by independent journalist Jonathan Katz, demonstrating yet again why a truly free and tenacious press—one not beholden to profits or political pressure—is so crucial, particularly to a democracy under siege.

The other story I want to touch on is Trump’s speech in Rome, Georgia, the heart of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s congressional district, soon after the SOTU.

Look at some tape of Don just four years ago. He was always cuddly as a cactus and charming as an eel, but back then he could at least put a coherent sentence together. His mental decline is howlingly evident. But his awfulness carries on.

Employing his usual talent for projection, Trump railed at Biden for “shouting angrily at America” in “the worst State of the Union speech in history,” describing it as an “angry, dark, hate-filled rant” and the “most divisive, partisan, radical and extreme speech ever delivered by a president in that chamber.” He called Biden “grossly incompetent,” “the worst president in history,” “the most corrupt,” as well as “crooked,” clueless, and “a threat to democracy” who would “weaponize government, weaponize the FBI, weaponize the DOJ,” alleging that “everything (he) touches turns to shit” and that he is “destroying our country,”

That is in fact a highly accurate description of a recent president, but that president is not Joe Biden.

And then he mocked Joe’s stutter.

Here’s John Hendrickson in The Atlantic:

More than Trump’s ugly taunt, one thing stands out to me about these moments: the sound of Trump’s supporters laughing right along with him. This is a building block of Trumpism. The man at the top gives his followers permission to be the worst version of themselves.

I spent some time in that part of north Georgia, and lived for quite a few years south of there, in Columbus. (Athens it ain’t.) But the people there are like the people everywhere: good, bad, and everything in between. The self-selecting batch that showed up for a Trump rally aren’t a representative sample, and undoubtedly skew toward the middle of that spaghetti western triptych. But like Nikki and Chris and even Mitch (at least at the beginning of his loathsome career), there are plenty of people who might otherwise be constrained by longstanding norms, including common decency, who have gone over to the dark side after Trump opened the door and beckoned them in.

Let’s give Hendrickson—a stutterer himself—the last word, or at least next to last:

Trump may be among the most famous and powerful people in modern history, but he remains a small-minded bully. He mocks Biden’s disability because he believes the voters will reward him for it—that there is more to be gained than lost by dehumanizing his rival and the millions of other Americans who stutter, or who go through life managing other disorders and disabilities. I would like to believe that more people are repulsed than entertained, and that Trump has made a grave miscalculation. We have eight more months of this until we find out.

And the Republican Party has welcomed this cretin into the house and given him the keys.

***********

Photos, clockwise from top left: Aspiring Trump running mate Nikki Haley; future Fox contributor Chris Sununu; an American yardbird aspiring not to wind up on the menu at Popeye’s; and a fella on his way to join Joe McCarthy and Strom Thurmond in the ninth circle of Hell.

Credits: McConnell: Elizabeth Frantz/Reuters; Haley: Reuters; Sununu: Chris Cillizza/Substack; Chicken: selfie

History Will Shake Its Damn Head

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The American punditocracy was recently rattled by news that the US Supreme Court will hear Donald Trump’s absurd claim that, while president, he was a king who could have legally ordered SEAL Team Six to cap Joe Biden.

I know that’s not the specific scenario in United States vs. Donald Trump, but it’s a thought experiment that was posed in the DC Circuit Court of Appeals when it heard the case, and is very much the gist of what SCOTUS has agreed to decide.

And by so doing, the Supreme Court itself may have had the effect of capping Joe Biden.

It boggles the mind that the highest court in the land is even bothering with this ridiculous appeal, one that has been thoroughly debunked by lower courts, and the consideration of which poses vast dangers to the republic. But bothering it is, which is all the more ominous as a harbinger of what is coming next, either by accident or design.

So let me jump ahead to the conclusion, for those without the time to slog through this whole essay:

American democracy is at grave risk from a homegrown neo-fascist movement, one that is abusing the very mechanisms of that democracy in order to undermine and destroy it. And the people and institutions that comprise that democracy are not only allowing it to happen, but assisting it.

TLDNR

Few legal experts thought the Court would take up this case. Trump’s claim of total immunity is ridiculous on its very face, defying the whole premise of American democracy. The DC Circuit Court obliterated it in its airtight, well-reasoned and articulated decision of last month, and SCOTUS had no obligation to hear the appeal, or even explain why it declined to do so. It could easily have denied certiorari without comment, as it does all the time, let the solid lower court decision stand, and allowed the trial of Trump to proceed. That is what it would have done if it really wanted to protect its already badly damaged reputation, and affirm its allegedly high-minded desire to stay out of partisan politics (or so we are repeatedly told).

But it did not. So one thing we can presume is that, for some of the Court’s right wing members, any semblance of integrity (or at least the appearance thereof) is secondary to advancing its Christian nationalist agenda, optics be damned. Is that shocking? Not when recent scandals involving certain justices suggest that they don’t really give a shit about optics at all.

(Trump himself openly cheered the Court’s decision to take the case—a sure sign that it is evil. But I guess he got what he paid for.)

Let’s not forget: Trump put a full third of the justices on that Supreme Court, joining two others who are— believe it or not—even more conservative than Trump’s picks, and another—the Chief Justice—who is a garden variety Reagan-era Republican who sides with them often as not.

Them ain’t great odds. Given the GOP’s campaign of election subversion, and Trump’s own personal criminality, this was always the fear: that Trump would place justices on the Supreme Court who might someday hold his fate—either electoral or carceral, or both—in their hands. And that turns out to be exactly what is happening.

Of course, the notion that the right-leaning Court is doing this explicitly to aid Trump may be a bit unfair. There could be legitimate reasons SCOTUS took up the case.

Maybe the Court feels it’s incumbent upon it to weigh in on what election expert Richard Hasen has called “the most important case in this Nation’s history.” A decision from the highest court in the land would put a definitive end to this fundamental question once and for all, and settle the matter nationwide for all of Trump’s many trials, rather than have the same issue come up over and over, to be handled piecemeal.

Yeah, maybe that’s the Court’s thinking. But that does not mean a majority of the Court agrees that the immunity claim is so much horseshit.

The best case scenario, as noted by Tim Heaphy, formerly lead attorney for the House J6 Committee, is a quick decision that has the political side effect of convincing a majority of the American people that Trump’s claim is bullshit, thus aiding his speedy prosecution. But the highly respected retired federal judge and conservative anti-Trump icon Michael Luttig argues that the only plausible reason the Court took the case is because at least one or two justices (read: Clarence and Sam) believe Trump is in fact immune. For that same reason, Luttig doubts a fast decision is in the works.

On that point, all this gymnastic speculation about why the Court is doing what it’s doing—“It just wants to go by the book, to make MAGA Nation accept its verdict!”—is beginning to feel like wishful thinking, akin to the tedious speculation about why the Republican Party at large hasn’t yet dumped Trump. I am not at all sure that this Court, like the GOP at large, wants Trump to go down to defeat, and I am even less sure that it will deliver a verdict here that hastens that outcome.

SLOWWALKING TOWARD OBLIVION

Trump has gamed and exploited the legal system his entire adult life, and continues to do so now. But that system does not have to roll over and let him do so, especially when it is very clear what he is up to. Unless, of course, the conservative elements within that system want to let him to do that, and are doing everything they can to help.

Trump’s privileged treatment by the legal system is akin to his privileged treatment by the health care system when he had COVID. In both cases, the least deserving recipient on Earth—one who had actively attacked and undermined that very system—was given the very best advantages available from it, advantages the average American would never get. Infuriating does not begin to describe it.

Oral arguments are set for April 22. A decision is not likely before the end of the Court’s current term, which would be early July. That means the soonest a trial would start—assuming the decision is not a pro-Trump travesty that shuts the case down altogether—would be late summer, and even that is unlikely. A verdict before Election Day is all but impossible.

Why is this delay so important? Because the American people have a right to hear a court of law and a jury of Donald Trump’s peers adjudicate his guilt or innocence regarding an attempted coup d’état before they go to the polls and consider him for restoration to the position of President the United States.

We all know that, shockingly, nothing thus far has dented Trump’s support among conservative voters: not paying hush money to a porn star, not “grab ‘em by the pussy,” not kissing Putin’s ass, not kidnapping migrant children, not killing hundreds of thousand by mismanaging a pandemic, not even trying to have Mike Pence murdered as part of a failed coup. Weirdly, the one thing that polls tell us would cause some of those Republican voters to turn on him would be a criminal conviction. And the Supreme Court seems eager to step in and make sure that doesn’t happen before those voters go to the polls.

In a piece titled “The Supreme Court Just Handed Trump an Astonishing Victory,” Vox’s Ian Milhiser wrote:

It’s hard to imagine the Supreme Court signing onto this argument, which has already been rejected by two other courts. Yet Trump has now, with Wednesday’s ruling, leveraged this ridiculous legal argument to delay his DC trial for at least four and a half months, and the delay will likely extend much longer because the Court will need time to produce an opinion.

Milhiser called it “a colossal victory for Trump,” one that “could potentially allow him to evade criminal responsibility for his attempts to overthrow the 2020 election altogether.”

Simply put, Wednesday’s order is a disaster for anyone hoping that Trump may face trial before the November election. And, because the nominal reason for this order is to give the justices more time to decide if the president is completely above the law, this decision raises serious doubts about whether this Court can be trusted to oversee Trump-related cases in a nonpartisan manner.

We have all heard that most legal experts believe the Court will ultimately reject the immunity claim. Then again, most experts believed it wouldn’t take it up in the first place. Even if the Court does reject ultimately his immunity claim, the sheer time it is taking to do so will have aided Trump beyond comprehension, which may be all he wants or needs. Therefore, if the political benefit of this delay allows Trump to win re-election, none of the attendant details will matter, not even a final ruling against him…..because he will be president again and can shut down this case, as part of a broader effort to institute a right wing dictatorship that he is openly advertising and campaigning on.

As my friend Scott Matthews points, out, there is also the chance SCOTUS rules that Trump’s actions were sufficiently close to “official,” where presidential immunity is already settled law. (That is certainly what—hold onto your red baseball hat—the Wall Street Journal thinks.) Of course, it’s risible that trying to overturn an election would fall under a president’s official duties, but not inconceivable that a Supreme Court with a right wing supermajority would rule that way.

Would they give Biden the same immunity? Of course not.

Obviously, if we had a functional Court whose right wing members showed a shred of principle, Clarence “Big Man” Thomas would recuse himself. But you may have noticed, we don’t. At least Ginni, who was an active collaborator in the attempted coup at the center of the case the Court will hear, will be happy. I’m sure they’ll have a laugh about it on their next trip on Harlan Crow’s private jet.

SHAKE IT LIKE A POLAROID PICTURE

As I have written here and elsewhere, future generations may well look back on the actions of the people and institutions of the United States in this period with absolute head-shaking astonishment.

Not because the Republican Party squandered its chance to be rid of Trump after January 6th. That way of thinking presumes the GOP is a reasonable political party that wants to be rid of him, and not a neo-fascist Christian dominionist insurgency happy to have him at his head. Nor will our descendants shake their collective noggin at the fact that roughly 30% of Americans are fully on board with that autocratic endeavor. We know our country has always had a robust subset of slavering pro-authoritarian troglodytes.

But they will headshake a-plenty at the foolish willingness of the vast, non-cretinous but insufficiently bothered majority to let its own democracy be destroyed, even after narrowly dodging that fate only a few years before at the hands of that very same asshole and his army of eager gargoyles.

Now, you may say: “Hey, King’s Necktie, you’re being irrational and emotional. Much as you may hate Trump, and as serious a threat as he is to American democracy, we have to play by the rules, otherwise we become what he is.”

(You can call me Bob by the way. Or Bobby. Or RJ. Or you can call me Al; it was Al all the time.)

I hear you, dear readers. We absolutely ought to give Trump due process and the full benefit of the law that any accused individual deserves. We ought to dot our i’s and cross our t’s and do everything by the book, both for the principle of it, and to deny MAGA Nation any reason to claim victimization or martyrdom or injustice. (For all the good that will do. They will cry foul anyway.)

But the Constitution is not a suicide pact. We can stay within the letter—and spirit—of the law without bending over backwards to accommodate a brazen fascist who has openly declared that, if elected, he intends to trash the very system that protected and abetted him. And the behavior of so many right wing politicians and government officials on that front, including, apparently, at least a few justices on the Supreme Court, suggests that they are not acting out of naïveté at all but active, palm-rubbing malevolence.

Right after Biden beat Trump in 2020 (it’s true, Republicans—look it up!), I wrote a piece called “The Ghost of Grover Cleveland,” ruminating on the odds that Trump could come back and win a second term. I didn’t rule it out, though at the time he seemed grievously wounded. His prospects looked even worse after the failed coup of a few weeks later, when it seemed that even the craven GOP was going to break with him at last. Apparently we all badly underestimated the depths of the Republicans’ cowardice and avarice.

I guess I figured when you were already in Death Valley, you couldn’t go any lower……but I forgot about the Marianas Trench, where the GOP seems to be building a gated community.

Devil’s advocate: Does Hasen’s aforementioned assessment of the importance of this case not argue for moving slowly and carefully? Sure, to an extent—but not when one of the factors making it so important is the time-sensitive nature of the threat a second Trump presidency poses to American democracy.

The Court certainly does not have to move this slowly. In 1974, it heard arguments in United States v. Nixon and issued its decision within weeks. It moved even faster in Bush v. Gore, issuing an opinion within a matter of days. Fred Wertheimer, founder and president of the nonprofit watchdog group Democracy 21, told the Post:

This case is just as important, probably more important, than the Pentagon Papers case, or the (Watergate) tapes case. If they wait and issue the opinion at the end of the term in June, they likely will have knowingly prevented voters from knowing if Trump is a convicted felon before they vote. They will have rewarded Trump’s delaying strategy at the enormous expense of the country and the Supreme Court.

In an op-ed for MSNBC, Wertheimer, Norman Eisen, former impeachment counsel to the House Judiciary Committee, Joshua Kolb, former law clerk on the Senate Judiciary Committee, wrote:

There is no excuse for the court to drag its feet. The issues have already been fully briefed multiple times, and the justices are well aware of both the legal arguments and the stakes. Unnecessary delays risk depriving voters of knowing whether Trump attempted to criminally subvert our democracy when they cast their ballots for president. 

But it wouldn’t be the first time those folks in black robes reached in and decided a presidential election.

ONLY FANS

In a recent piece for The Bulwark titled “Delay is a Choice,“ Bill Kristol wrote that in taking up Trump’s laughable immunity claim, and thereby abetting his attempt to run out the clock before November 5, the Supreme Court “broke no laws or even rules,” which speaks to the insidiousness of the act. Michael Waldman, president of the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University Law School, made a similar point, telling the Washington Post, “This appears to be the approach that helps Trump the most while appearing not to.” The former federal prosecutor and Mueller team member Andrew Weissmann calls the Court’s decision to hear this case de facto immunity, a point also made by Waldman, who tweeted, “The Court effectively granted Trump immunity for his alleged crimes, regardless of whatever ruling they make later.”

This latest delay of at least two months comes on top of a previous delay of two and a half months that the Court created last December when it declined Jack Smith’s request for an expedited ruling on this very issue, in order to avoid the exact problem we now find ourselves facing. (One small but hopeful sign is that the Court has fast-tracked written arguments in this case, but even then it is giving the two sides seven weeks to do so.) And there could be more delays to come. The high court could send the case back down to Judge Tanya Chutkan for further distinguishing between immune and non-immune presidential conduct, or engage in any number of other arcane and time-consuming legal maneuvers…..all while the fuse is burning down on a giant Boris Badenov-meets-Wile E. Coyote-sized pile of antidemocratic dynamite.

Yet another former federal prosecutor, Lisa Rubin, has predicted that Judge Aileen Cannon, the Trump toady who is presiding over the stolen documents case down in Florida, will surely use the Supreme Court’s action as an excuse to delay that trial as well. Frankly, she would be justified in so doing, unlike many of her other rulings—just another reason why SCOTUS’s decision to grant cert is so destructive. Meanwhile, the election interference case in Georgia has already been delayed thanks to the brouhaha over Fani Willis’s conduct of that prosecution, even though her actions in no way affect the material allegations against the defendant.

All this delay means that the first criminal trial Trump will face is the New York City case against him for paying hush money to Stormy Daniels. In fact, that trial, currently set to begin to on March 25, may be the only one that takes place before November. Former Watergate prosecutor Nick Akerman believes that Trump faces “certain conviction” in that matter. But many have lamented this sequencing, as that case seems so minor, and, well…..sordid. (An opinion often delivered with a heavy dose of sanctimonious misogyny.)

Will a conviction in the Daniels case makes the same difference to Republican voters as a conviction for trying to overthrow the government? Akerman believes it should, if we are successful in reminding them that this was not just about a cheating husband trying to hide a zipless fuck from his wife, as Trump claims. Coming just days after the release of the Access Hollywood tape, when his candidacy seemed to be on life support, it was about the presidential nominee of one of our two major parties trying to keep word of a scandal from reaching the ears of the voters.

In other words, it too is a case about election interference, just like the Florida and Georgia and DC trials.

THE ONCE AND FORMER GUY

The crux of Kristol’s Bulwark piece was this, and a cutting one it is:

So those who hoped the legal system would stop Donald Trump are almost certain to be disappointed. As were those of us who hoped the United States Senate would stop Trump in February 2021. As were those who hoped the Department of Justice would move quickly to hold him accountable in 2021 and 2022. As were those who placed their faith in Republican elites in 2023 or Republican primary voters in 2024.

Where does that leave us, the American people? Relying on ourselves. Perhaps that’s as it should be.

After all, here the people rule.

For now.

Maybe Kristol is right. Maybe even if all the trials are delayed, Biden will beat Trump anyway. That would be great—perhaps even better than if he is beaten because he is damaged goods after a criminal conviction. But the “system” is sure giving Donald every possible advantage to avoid that fate.

We shall see what SCOTUS’s ultimate decision is, and how fast it renders it. I am not super optimistic on either count. If the Court makes an honest assessment of Trump’s immunity argument, I’m betting on a 7-2 ruling against him, delivered at the very end of its term, in early July. But if the majority takes the coupmaking-is-an-official-act position, it could go 6-3 the other way.

The stakes could not possibly be higher.

In case you thought Republicans were kidding about being the party of neo-fascist White Christian nationalism, at CPAC last week, outside Washington, D.C., the right wing gadfly Jack Posobiec gave opening remarks in which he said: “Welcome to the end of democracy. We are here to overthrow it completely. We didn’t get all the way there on January 6, but we will endeavor to get rid of it and replace it with this right here.” He then held up a cross necklace and continued: “After we burn that swamp to the ground, we will establish the new American republic on its ashes, and our first order of business will be righteous retribution for those who betrayed America.”

What does Maya Angelou say? Something about believing people, I think.

“Democracy is evil, democracy is mob rule,” said another CPAC attendee, called Tommy Tatum, who recorded himself harassing Capitol police officers at the trials of January 6 insurrectionists, whom he has defended in their attempts to overturn the election. NBC reported that neo-Nazis and other white nationalists openly mingled and proselytized at the conference as well, and received a warm reception.

Remember when CPAC felt like a kinda kooky but generally benign Mummers Parade for Republicans? Good times.

At that same conference, Don the Con showed up and engaged in his continuing gimmick of hugging the Stars & Stripes, a trope that, to me, summarizes his whole grift in a nutshell. The idea that a person loves America so much that they can’t see the flag without hugging it is infantile. Even so, the idea that this particular individual loves America that much—despite a lifetime of evidence that he doesn’t love anyone other than his own fat ass, not even his own family, whom he would throw under the bus in a New York minute—is something that only an absolute sucker would buy. Yet he continues to do it, and his fans continue to eat it up.

If it were a Russian flag, I’d believe it.

If they regain power, Donald Trump and the GOP have openly boasted that they will shred the Constitution, extract revenge on their enemies, and institute a regime that would make Margaret Atwood blanch. Daily we learn more and more of their plans. I say “learn,” but little homework is required, because they are bluntly announcing it. It’s Mein Kampf all over again, and I won’t back off from that analogy, no matter how much the people rubbing elbows with neo-Nazis complain that it’s unfair to compare them to Nazis.

The question is, are we going to pay attention to the flashing red lights and howling warning sirens, or not?

MANSPLAINING FOR BOOMERS

Online discourse is replete with initialisms, and one that puzzled me for a long time—I’m over 21—was SMDH. Eventually I learned (for others who remember vinyl records, answering machines, and paper checks) that it stands for “shaking my damn head.” It’s what you write when something is gobsmacking, dumbfounding, or otherwise mind-blowing, in a way that beggars comprehension.

It perfectly describes how future generations may well look back on America’s inexplicable, nonchalant, self-destructive slide into a second Trump administration and the likely end of participatory democracy in these 50 states.

That is to say, something very close to TEOTWAWKI, or at least TEOAmericaAWKI. And it will not leave me ROTFLMAO.

*********

Illustration: Trump doing his idiotic, trademark “flag hug” at CPAC last week, apparently after sucking on a lemon.

Resisting the Right: A Handbook

Published on by thekingsnecktie2 Comments

Writing this blog for the past seven years (but who’s counting?) has been a profound experience for me, and kept me from losing my mind during the madness of the Trump era and beyond. Nota bene: That madness is far from over. In fact, we’re heading into one of the most fraught phases of this ongoing existential crisis for American democracy.

Case in point, this week Trump called for Russia to attack our NATO allies, which prompted  headlines reading: “Biden is old.”

To that end, the blog also led me to write a book contemplating the worst case scenario of a return to power by The Former Guy and/or the Republican Party, which are now one in the same—a kind of handbook for resistance as we face down the very real threat of American fascism. That book, RESISTING THE RIGHT, to be published by OR Books, is now available for pre-order (click link here), and will ship early next month.

RESISTING THE RIGHT does not resign itself to defeatism or the alleged inevitability of a right wing triumph. Far from it. Rather, it lays out the state of the current crisis, how we came to this pretty pass, and what we can do to prevent the arrival of the autocracy that Trump promises. As a matter of simple prudence, it then looks ahead, not only to how to survive and resist a second Trump regime, but how to overcome it and reclaim participatory democracy in the USA. In the process, it contemplates not just restoring the status quo ante Trump, but ways we can actually make this country better, and build a true democracy that thus far has been largely aspirational for many.

November 5, 2024 is just nine short months away. It’s not hyperbole to say that if things go badly, it may be the last free and fair election we ever see. It’s up to us to prevent that, and to gird ourselves for what comes after. Like the man says, work for the best, but be prepared for the worst.

Here’s an excerpt from RESISTING THE RIGHT’S first chapter.

HOW TO TELL WHEN YOUR HOUSE IS ON F–KING FIRE

Historians have it easy compared to fortune tellers. With the luxury of time and hindsight, it’s relatively simple to connect the dots of what is past; why do we even hand out academic degrees for the people who do that? It’s harder to grasp the contours of events while they are unfolding—the task of journalists—and even harder to predict what will happen next—the task of prophets. But sometimes one finds oneself in such a state of eyepopping emergency that only the somnolent or willfully blind, or the gleeful perpetrators of that very emergency, can deny it.

We Americans are in such a moment right now.

The two-party system under which the United States has operated since roughly 1854 has its shortcomings, but for almost 170 years it has at least provided political stability, if not the best possible public service to the full spectrum of our citizenry. Its most glaring flaw—and inherent danger—becomes apparent, however, when one of those two parties openly rejects representative democracy. Over the past 55 years, and rapidly accelerating in the last seven, the Republican Party has abandoned any pretense of belief in democracy, representative or otherwise, engaging instead in an overt assault on the fundamental principles of the American experiment.

This assault is unprecedented in this country by a major political party, and one aimed at permanent control of these United States. Not two years ago, the undisputed leader of the erstwhile Grand Old Party fomented a violent self-coup in an attempt to overturn the results of a free and fair election. Far from repudiating that attack, the party has since embraced it, defending it as “legitimate political discourse,” lionizing its perpetrators, and alternately downplaying its violence or insisting it was a false flag operation—sometimes both at once.  More importantly, the party has also shielded the senior leaders of that autogolpe and used every available lever to thwart efforts at accountability, including aggressive manipulation of the courts and of Congress. When that has failed, it has turned to brazen defiance.

Even before Trump, the GOP was already engaged in a methodical, decades-long, and highly successful campaign to game the mechanisms of the electoral system to its advantage, through gerrymandering, voter suppression, obstructionist abuse of parliamentary procedure, and a flood of money, among other methods. But now that campaign has reached a chilling new level, as the party has successfully convinced a majority of its members, about 70%—about 30% of the electorate—that the last presidential election was stolen from its candidate. In the process, it has deliberately undermined public faith in the integrity of the election system, with terrifying implications for future votes.

To justify all this, the Republican Party has mounted a propaganda campaign that has swept up tens of millions of Americans who believe that all these measures are necessary, even heroic, in order to “take our country back.” Many of them have stated that they are unwilling to stop there, and would support violence to achieve their ends, if necessary.

As I write these words, the GOP is bluntly announcing that it will not accept the results of future elections unless it wins. Having failed at overturning an election in 2020, it has set about taking control of the electoral process upstream so that no such drama will be necessary in the future, a kind of pre-emptive putsch of an even more insidious order, enabling it to deliver victories to its candidates regardless of the will of the people. Under the Orwellian pretext of preserving “electoral integrity,” it is instituting restrictive new rules for voting, and intimidating election officials in order to replace them with Republican loyalists empowered to reject ballots, turn away voters, and otherwise skew the results. It is full of officials at all levels who refuse to acknowledge that Joe Biden is the rightful president and who refuse to commit in advance to respecting the results of their own elections. To that end, the party is very deliberately focusing on offices that control the vote itself—governors and secretaries of state in particular—as well as members of Congress who might have the final say in any disputes, and the judges who would adjudicate those disputes, including a Supreme Court where it already holds a 6-3 supermajority.

The Republican willingness to go to such extremes is driven by its own existential dilemma, which is a kind of terminal diagnosis. Even as the number of our fellow Americans who are comfortable with right wing radicalism remains alarming, demographics are trending heavily against them. The researcher David Atkins, who runs the qualitative research firm The Pollux Group, reports that “the country is becoming more diverse and more urban every day. Americans under 40 are overwhelmingly progressive. This is the present and future of America.” Unable to win the popular vote in a presidential election (Republicans have done so only once in the last eight elections), and with these trends moving inexorably against them, the GOP has only two options:

1) Change its platform to attract more voters, or

2) Cheat.

No one who has observed the GOP’s wanton lack of principle over the past decades ought to be surprised that it has chosen Door Number 2.

In a free society, reasonable people can disagree and advocate for their positions in the marketplace of ideas using legitimate political discourse that does not involve bear spray. But once free elections have been compromised, and the citizenry no longer has recourse to the vote in a credible way, that society is in a state of dire emergency. “A democracy can survive intense policy disagreements over taxes, government benefits, abortion, affirmative action and more, “ as The New York Times’s David Leonhardt writes. “But if the true winner of a major election is prevented from taking office, a country is not really a democracy anymore.”

BULLET-DODGING AS A WAY OF LIFE

Is it really that bad, you ask? After all, the 2022 midterms were widely seen as a repudiation of Trump and Trumpism, an announcement that Americans were tired of the circus, tired of the politics of grievance and divisiveness and incivility, tired of waking up every morning asking “What fresh hell?”

It is true that the electorate turned back Big Lie candidates up and down the ballot in almost every major race. Even Doug Heye, a veteran Republican strategist, told Fox News that “The MyPillow-ization of the GOP has been a disaster.” One might think such a result might even spur self-reflection within the Republican Party itself. But it did not.

Did anyone really believe that the epic thumping that the GOP took would cause it to come to its senses? As Tom Hall of the political blog The Back Row Manifesto asked, would Republicans really be “chastened into good governance and policies and tack to the center”? On the contrary: even as it was made abundantly clear that the American public by and large does not want Trumpist candidates, the seditionist faction of the GOP will exert even more power going forward, because the so-called “normie” branch of the party made a Faustian bargain with them from which it cannot extricate itself.

In a nation that clearly yearns for small “d’ democratic rule, a party that has thrown its lot in with the global autocratic movement represents a clear and present danger. Electoral defeats render such a party more dangerous, not less, because it knows it will continue to be defeated at the polls and must pursue an alternative strategy.

The much-welcome victory of democracy in the midterms, therefore, is far from the end of this threat. All those election deniers, White nationalists, and would-be theocrats are all still out there, along with a great many kindred spirits. Next time, they may not leave their fate to the will of the American people. The Republicans are like a gang of bank robbers who have brazenly boasted of their plans to knock over the local savings and loan. It does us no good to relax because they have not done it yet.

Even if they are somehow prevented from cheating or from gaming the system, the Republicans will almost certainly regain power sooner or later by simple law of averages.

David Atkins has written of what he calls “thermostatic behavior,” meaning the reliable urge among the American electorate to “throw the bums out.” In an elegant December 2021 piece for Washington Monthly, Atkins laid out in clinical prose how, in “layman’s terms, the electorate grows cranky and dissatisfied for reasons often out of government’s direct control (gas prices, a pandemic, economic fluctuations, and so on), and the party out of power gains an advantage accordingly. Voters of the dominant party become complacent even as the opposition grows angrier and more determined.”

In short, even in a fair system, history suggests that one way or another the Party of the Big Lie will eventually win sufficient power to take control of American governance—if not in 2024, then in 2028, or 2032. That they are willing to rig the system in order to do so, or even openly defy it, only increases their odds of success. What makes that eventuality so terrifying is that the Republican Party has made it clear that, if it does succeed in regaining power, it does not intend to surrender it ever again.

As Atkins writes: “Democrats would need to win every single election from here to prevent the destruction of democracy, while Republicans only need to win one. And the American system is set up so that Republicans will win sooner or later, whether fairly or by cheating . . . Blue America needs to start thinking about and planning for what ‘Break glass in case of emergency’ measures look like—because it’s more likely a matter of when, not if. It not only can happen here; it probably will happen here.”

In 2024, we may well see the GOP regain control of the White House and both houses of Congress. It already has control of the House, and appreciable command of the judiciary at all levels, including the US Supreme Court, with its supermajority of archconservative justices and their lifetime appointments—three of whom are only in their fifties. It also already controls a majority of governorships and state legislatures (including 23 “trifectas,” or full control of both chambers and the governorship), and in many cases, the crucial position of secretary of state as well.  Even as it is losing the demographic battle, its structural advantages in the electoral system allow it to maintain this edge and give it a real possibility of extending it. Perhaps that will occur legitimately, through the thermostatic effect and general American dumbfuckery, or perhaps through electoral suppression, chicanery, or sheer brute force. But when it does, barring internal reforms for which not even the most starry-eyed optimist could hold out hope, the GOP will do its damnedest to install permanent, unvarnished, White nationalist, Christian supremacist authoritarianism in America.

THE DEVIL—YOU KNOW

Should he win in 2024, Trump has made no secret of his plans to institute what can, without exaggeration, be called a dictatorship, and to rule in an unconstrained, vindictive manner that will make his first term look like a garden party. In fact he is campaigning on it, playing to the deep-seated right wing attraction to the so-called strongman, for whom such plans are a feature not a bug. Should he lose, he is sure to insist the election was fraudulent, further inflame his followers, and do still more damage to our democratic system.

The New Yorker’s Jelani Cobb reminds us that Trump was no more the creator of the rancid stew of racism, xenophobia, misogyny, kleptomania, and general sadism that animates the contemporary GOP than he was the developer of the real estate properties, frozen steaks, Chinese-made neckties, and vodka on which he slapped his name as a private businessman. All were rife within American conservatism long before his arrival, and as Cobb writes, “there is no reason to believe that his absence would cause them to evaporate.”

When Trump launched his political career, he latched onto that toxic strain in American culture and it embraced him in return: not just a pre-existing menagerie of right wing radicals who have long been at war with the US government—Second Amendment nuts, sovereign citizen adherents, and neo-Nazis among them—but also garden variety suburban reactionaries who moved comfortably in polite society. Trump “promised to return his constituents to an imaginary past in which their jobs and daughters were safe from brown-skinned immigrants,” Masha Gessen has written, one “in which the threat of what Trump called ‘radical Islamic extremism’ was vanquished or had never existed, in which white people did not have to treat African Americans as equals, women didn’t meddle in politics, gay people didn’t advertise their sexual orientation, and transgender people didn’t exist.“

That promise was a fantasy and a lie, of course. As Cobb observes, “it has always been apparent that everything Trump offered the public came slathered in snake oil,” but “fixating on the salesman misses the point. The problem is, and always has been, the size of the audience rushing to buy what he’s been selling.”

Trump, as has been noted ad nauseam, was never the cause of the Republican descent into madness, only a symptom and accelerant. Did Donald Trump make us worse as a nation? Undoubtedly. But then again, he was never sui generis: we are the soil from which he sprang, and the ones who hoisted him to the heights which he attained. His racism, misogyny, apathy, sloth, and hubris reflected the worst of a country that liked to see only its best. A nation that put this man in power was not a nation that could remotely claim to be in good health. One that is considering putting him in that position again is even more unwell.

Trumpism has undeniably conquered the GOP and that sickness will carry on with or without him. Ten percent of Americans in favor of right wing autocracy is not heartwarming, but it is manageable. Thirty percent, which is roughly where we currently stand, is considerably more worrying.

The threat to the very heart of representative democracy in America could hardly be more dire. We are in the political equivalent of a housefire, and there can be no ignoring the flames licking up the walls and beams and rafters all around us. Perhaps we will get lucky and the fire will die out, but the laws of physics tell us that that is not likely…. particularly when there are enthusiastic arsonists pouring gasoline on the blaze.

SLEEPER CELL

Over our nearly 250 years as a sovereign state, Americans have come to take long-term political stability in this country for granted. We are lucky in that regard, and spoiled.

But autocratic elements have been in play in the US since the very founding of this country, varying from region to region and in prevalence and measure, largely aimed at vulnerable minority populations and women (not a minority), usually defined by race, religion, gender, sexual orientation, economic status, political belief, and place of origin.

In an October 2022 piece for The New York Times, Jamelle Bouie writes that “for most of this country’s history, America’s democratic institutions and procedures and ideals existed alongside forms of exclusion, domination and authoritarianism.” Dating back to the 1890s, “close to three generations of American elites lived with and largely accepted the existence of a political system that made a mockery of American ideals of self-government and the rule of law.” Black Americans who suffered under slavery and under Jim Crow, and then under various other forms of bigotry, discrimination, and oppression—including horrifically violent terrorism perpetrated both by state and non-state actors—have been waging a resistance movement in this nation for more than four centuries. Women, who got the right to vote barely a hundred years ago, were long barred from full participation in the work force, in the military, in athletics, and in numerous other aspects of American life. To this day, they earn only se venty cents on average for every dollar that men do. Gay people, trans people, Jews, Muslims, adherents of other faiths, atheists, immigrants . . . the list of marginalized and openly oppressed communities goes on.

In short, the American promise of “liberty and justice for all” has long been only aspirational….or less charitably, a hoax perpetrated by the privileged classes who had access to those things and did not much care that others did not. What is new in our current moment is the expansion of that autocracy to the broader culture, and to populations that heretofore have escaped its impact.

But the corollary to the long history of autocracy within the American experiment is that resistance to it is not a wheel in need of reinvention. We can draw on the experience and efforts of generations of brave and determined Americans who have fought oppression and injustice throughout our country’s history, and similar movements across the globe.

This is not to say that we should give up on trying to prevent an autocratic takeover; not by any means. But while we are working to stop that outcome, it would be foolhardy not to prepare contingency plans for the worst case scenario. Even if the United States manages to avoid the ascent of autocracy in the near term, we will almost certainly have to confront it sooner or later, so long as the Republican Party remains committed to its autocratic experiment, and a fanatical minority of tens of millions of Americans support it.

But let us be clear and precise in our terms.

In the Trump years, “the resistance” became a commonplace rubric for everyone opposed to that administration, from inveterate left-wingers to anti-Trump Republicans who, for decades prior, had been part of the GOP mainstream. But in September 2018, during the dark heart of the Trump era, Michelle Alexander, author of The New Jim Crow, published a landmark New York Times opinion piece called “We Are Not the Resistance” in which she argued that resistance is a “reactive state of mind,” one that can cause us to “set our sights too low and to restrict our field of vision to the next election cycle,” rather than keeping focused on the broader goal. “(T)he mind-set of ‘the resistance’ is slippery and dangerous,” she wrote. “There’s a reason marchers in the black freedom struggle sang ‘We Shall Overcome’ rather than chanting ‘We Shall Resist’.”

More broadly, then, Alexander argues that the entire view of the pro-democracy movement as “resistance” is backward. Her argument is for a much more far-reaching and sweeping kind of change, rather than the mere eviction of Trump and the reversion to a status quo ante that, while preferable, remains deeply flawed and similarly susceptible to the rise of similar threats in the future.

“A new nation is struggling to be born,” Alexander writes of the United States in the present moment, “a multiracial, multiethnic, multifaith, egalitarian democracy in which every life and every voice truly matters.” The fight against autocracy, therefore, is not a defensive one, but a pro-active one, to create a better world for all, and in it we have the numbers and human nature on our side, no matter how much our foes would like to convince us otherwise. As Rebecca Solnit wrote in December 2021, quoting Alexander (who was herself using the civil rights hero Vincent Harding’s metaphor), we are not the resistance at all, but rather, “the mighty river they are trying to dam.”

This handbook will examine the state of the current crisis, the events that brought us to this precarious point, the likely scenarios we can expect, and what can be done to forestall such a grim turn of events. It will contemplate possible permutations of Republican autocracy, and offer a range of contingencies in response across a broad spectrum of arenas: protest and civil disobedience, economics, the media, education, organized religion, medicine and public health, governmental institutions, the arts, and interpersonal relations. It will also consider the systemic long-term measures that can be taken to reclaim the republic and inoculate it against autocratic assault in the future.

We are a nation that, perhaps to a fault, prides itself on its fortitude. Now is the time to prove it. Most American—White ones, anyway—”have long had the luxury of relying on the mechanisms of official power to protect us from the sinister forces that would do us harm and undermine our free and open society. That is not the norm in most of the world, nor for large chunks of our less fortunate countrymen. As a nation, we now find ourselves in that harsher, more bare-knuckles realm.

We better begin acting like it.

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Resisting the Right: How to Survive the Gathering Storm, published by OR Books, is available now for pre-order, shipping in early March.

When You’re a Star, They Let You Do It

Published on by thekingsnecktie1 Comment

This blog is almost seven years old. Begun in the early months of the Trump administration, it was both a modest effort to commune with like-minded souls during a national nightmare, and a solipsistic act of catharsis to try to keep myself sane as I watched that nightmare unfold.

In those days, I churned out 10,000 word rants weekly—sometimes more than weekly. Trump’s outrages and provocations came so fast, I could hardly keep up.

But these days, like many of us, I barely have the energy to set my hair on fire anymore. That fatigue is worrying, of course, because the most dangerous phase of the fascist threat is likely still ahead of us, and making us numb and resigned is a conscious part of what its perpetrators are up to.

MURDER, HE WROTE

Meanwhile the outrages continue, and in fact, have only gotten worse.  

Witness this past week, when Trump’s latest set of lawyers appeared in a federal appeals court and argued, in essence, that as US president Trump was actually a king who could do whatever he wanted—even murder his rivals—and cannot be held accountable in a court of law.

I’m not a professor of constitutional law, but I’m pretty sure that is exactly the opposite of what the foundational documents of American democracy prescribe. In fact, any kid who squeaked through seventh grade civics could tell you that. (I’m kidding! They don’t teach civics any more.)

Trump and his defenders surely don’t even believe this fairy tale themselves, because they would definitely clear their throats by way of complaint if the current US president claimed those same powers. They don’t think the president is above the law: what they think is that a Republican president is. (Or at least Donald—more on that in a bit.) But the fact that the lawyers representing the first former US president to be charged in a criminal trial would go before a panel of federal judges and make that claim with a straight face ought to scare the shit out of every living American. Particularly because there is a fanatical minority of tens of millions of living Americans who are just fine with it.

Republicans, reactionaries that they are, are fond of a Frommian surrender of freedom in exchange for (the illusion of) security, and have long admired the “strongman” model of authoritarian leadership, from Nixon’s imperial presidency to the Bush-era unitary executive theory. But never before has that impulse reached the depths of Trump’s “brazen dictator-on-Day-One” boast.

Trump claims that the criminal charges against him for conspiring to overturn a free and fair election should be dismissed on the grounds that his actions constituted official presidential duties. 

I’ll just let that sit there a moment.

By now we should be used to headsnapping Orwellian “logic” from MAGA Central (feel free to think of it as Kafkaesque, if you prefer), but this one may take the proverbial cake.

In fact, what Trump and his supporters believe should fall under the rubric of “official presidential duties” is Mississippi wide. (Again: does not apply to Joe Biden.) Last week, Judge Florence Pan, one of the US Circuit Court judges before whom this argument was made, asked one of Trump’s lawyers, D. John Sauer, if a president could be prosecuted for ordering SEAL Team Six to assassinate a political rival. Sauer tap danced like Savion Glover, but essentially said no, unless that president was first convicted in an impeachment.

(On one level the question is nonsensical. Who needs DEVGRU when Erik Prince and Blackwater would be happy to do that sort of thing for Trump for free? In fact, I am quite sure they are already working on it.)

This “impeachment as prerequisite” argument was new, and it’s a doozy, both in its logical absurdity, and the sheer chutzpah of Team Trump in trotting it out.

During his second impeachment—the one for trying to overthrow the government—Trump’s lawyers argued that the Senate was the wrong venue to address those charges, but don’t worry, he could always be held accountable in a criminal proceeding after he left office. (Republican Senators who voted to acquit him, like Mitch McConnell and Marco Rubio, among others, made that same argument.) Now that precisely that legal effort is underway, Trump’s lawyers argue that he can’t be held accountable in a criminal proceeding precisely because he wasn’t convicted during his impeachment.

How stupid do they think we are?

Very stupid. And they are largely right.

As many have noted, this wholly invented concept of constitutional law on Sauer’s part would mean that a president could do anything he or she pleases, as long as they can retain the support of 34 compliant US senators. And of course, that would be easy to do, since that president could also legally order the murder of any senators who balked.

KAYE BALLARD, EVE ARDEN, AND DON

By now we should not be surprised that the highly litigious Mr. Trump is going to game and exploit and abuse the legal system in the most extreme ways possible, sanctimoniously demanding his own rights while demonstrating utter contempt for that same system when it tries to hold him to account. Still, the “I’m a god-king” argument was a new low.

This was also a week in which Trump and his myrmidons like Elise Stefanik trotted out the idea that the insurrectionists convicted and jailed for their actions on January 6th are somehow “hostages.” It was a week Trump went on an Insane Clown Posse-like jag about how magnets work. It was a week when his lawyers in a completely different trial demanded that he be allowed to make an incendiary campaign speech as part of their closing argument, and when the judge refused, he did so anyway.

Like a schoolboy claiming his dog ate his homework, those lawyers also asked the judge, Arthur Engoron, for an extension because Melania’s elderly mother had just died. When the judge denied that request, they responded with a peevish email stating: “Despite the fact that his Mother-in Law, who he was very close to, passed away late last night, President Trump will be speaking tomorrow.”

(Yes, I am sure that the famously warm and personable Donald Trump was super close with her. His eulogy: “Amalija was a beautiful woman. A New York 4, but a Ljubljana 8.”)

That trial in question was the civil one in New York City in which Trump and the Trump Organization are charged with fraud for illegally manipulating the valuations of their various properties. Trump attended that trial in person, because it appears to be the one he cares most about—because he stands to lose a third of a billion dollars. Judge Engoron has already determined that Don & Co are guilty; all that remains is for him to decide the extent of the financial penalty. Therefore, with his self-pitying diatribe, Trump clearly was not trying to sway the judge, whom he—yet again—insulted during those remarks. He was grandstanding for his voters and trying to shape the public narrative of himself as the victim of political persecution—but also a fighter!—and a martyr.

But in terms of that financial punishment, a bitter and worrying irony looms. One of the most infuriating and dangerous things about Trump has always been the extent to which he has lined his pockets—and compromised national security and the public welfare—by taking money from foreign entities. Bribes, in other words. Now, because he is about to be borderline bankrupted by that civil case in New York, as well as the crushing legal fees for his many other criminal and civil indictments, he will be even more susceptible to that kind of leverage going forward. Consider how that will play out if he becomes president again.

THE RULES OF THE GAME

In The Atlantic, David Graham wrote of that civil hearing that “at its core, the whole case is about Trump believing that he needn’t follow the same laws as other citizens.” Those rules, Graham wrote, “are for little guys, Trump seemed to believe,” and “Given how much Trump has gotten away with, it’s no wonder he thinks the rules don’t apply to him.”

No doubt. But it’s one thing for Donny to think that. It’s another for others—even his critics—to go along with it.

Also in The Atlantic, the great Adam Serwer proves once again why he is among the most incisive observers of our current political moment. Writing about attempts to disqualify Trump from the ballot under the Fourteenth Amendment’s insurrection clause, Serwer notes the absurdity that so many pundits—on the left as well as the right—are willing to give Trump a pass on that matter, and their weak-kneed logic for so doing.

There is little factual dispute over whether Trump attempted to seize power by fraud—pressuring state and federal officials to alter the election results—and then force, in the form of sending a mob to coerce Congress into reversing the election results. The real question is whether the Fourteenth Amendment’s ban on candidates who have broken an oath to defend the Constitution by engaging in “insurrection or rebellion” should be enforced.

Serwer argues that those “who now want us to ignore the Fourteenth Amendment” are arguing for bowing to the will—or threats—of a minority that has inexplicably been given special privileges and power, which is to say, Trump voters. “This is not a standard applied to any other aspect of the American Constitution in any other circumstance. It is an entirely novel standard invented for the benefit of Donald Trump.”

Meanwhile, the same Republicans who claim it’s “anti-democratic” to throw a popular insurrectionist off the ballot because of what they consider a ridiculous constitutional technicality are perfectly happy to have that same person ascend to the White House because of another ridiculous constitutional technicality, the Electoral College. (Or that we are subjected to the rule of the wildly anti-democratic US Senate. Or have popular legislation blocked by the filibuster. Or have our legislative bodies radically distorted by gerrymandering.)

Given that no one is suggesting that the Electoral College or the Supreme Court or the Senate can simply be ignored simply because they are antidemocratic or because many Americans don’t like them, the question is why the Fourteenth Amendment should be ignored. And here, the answer seems to be that Trump and Trump supporters retain a special power of constitutional nullification that no other American constituency possesses.

Serwer writes that those arguing against the Colorado and Maine decisions “are not simply arguing against Trump’s disqualification. They are arguing that neither the Constitution nor the law should apply to a figure popular enough to disregard them. This logic echoes Trump at his most base and grotesque.” And again, this argument is never applied to benefit any other politicians, Democrats especially. “Barack Obama is barred from running again, and no one of any consequence suggested, at the end of his second term, that he be allowed to ignore that prohibition simply because he might have been popular enough to win.”

Serwer goes on to quote the legal journalist Garrett Epps, who writes: “To create special rules for Donald Trump would be to perfect the assault he has mounted on American law.”

It is very much the same argument as the one that says we should not hold Trump to account in criminal court—or before that, impeach him—because it will make his supporters mad, or alternatively, only make them love him even more. Which are essentially the same thing. Trump and his squadrons of flying monkeys have long threatened violence if he is held to account. Yet incredibly, even some on the center and left cite MAGA World’s displeasure, and its perception of “unfairness,” as a reason not to apply the law to him:

For example, the liberal writer Jonathan Chait argues that disqualifying Trump “would be seen forever by tens of millions of Americans as a negation of democracy.” Similarly, the Yale Law professor Samuel Moyn has written that “rejecting Mr. Trump’s candidacy could well invite a repeat of the kind of violence that led to the prohibition on insurrectionists in public life in the first place.”

What Moyn describes is not democracy but a hostage situation.

If the fear of violence from one political faction is sufficient justification for disregarding the rule of law, then the rule of law cannot be said to exist.

Serwer acknowledges the backlash that will surely result if Trump is disqualified from the ballot in even one state, let alone several, and agrees that the best outcome for our democracy is his electoral defeat on an unquestioningly level playing field where there are no grounds for legitimate complaint. (Of course, Republicans will complain anyway, if not far worse—witness 2020.)

But those making the argument against disqualification should understand the breadth of the political argument they are making, which is that a political faction capable of credibly leveraging the threat of violence will be allowed to randomly and arbitrarily decide what the law is….

As the New York Times columnist David French writes, ‘Republics are not maintained by cowardice.’”

The disqualification issue may eventually prove to be much ado about nothing, in terms of practical impact on the election. Serwer writes that he does “not expect this Supreme Court, among the most partisan in memory, to follow the majority’s originalist pretensions and disqualify Trump….More disturbing is the reasoning from the commentariat in favor of keeping him on the ballot that amounts to a backhanded endorsement of Trump’s belief that he is above the law.”

“Insurrection?” he writes. “When you are a star, they let you do it.”

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Photo: Trump gets his star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame, 2007. It has since been repeatedly defaced, and the West Hollywood town council has called for its removal.

Credit: M. Tran/FilmMagic via Getty Images

Copy editing by the great Gina Patacca