Month: August 2023

We all know that Trump’s ultimate defense is to win the election and use his control of the DOJ to put an end to the federal charges against him. But what if that doesn’t work? What if he actually goes to trial, and his freedom is on the line?

Trump’s first defense is that his activity was political speech that is entitled to the strongest possible protection under the First Amendment. The weakness in this argument is that several kinds of socially damaging speech are not entitled to any First Amendment protection at all, and the crimes he is alleged to have committed incorporate some of these exceptions. Fraud, for example, inevitably involves speech. So does conspiracy. By definition, you can’t have a conspiracy without communication.

My guess is that the judge will dispose of these defenses even before trial. Smith and his team will have to be careful to draw a clear line between legitimate political speech and criminal activity when they put on their case, however. Filing lawsuits–even patently frivolous ones–is not a crime; directing the creation of false sets of electors and demanding that election officials find additional votes is, provided that the intent set out in the relevant statutes can be proved. More on that in subsequent posts.

For once, Rich Lowry has it right; Donald Trump is, in fact, a right-wing version of Huey Long. The analogy is totally appropriate.

Many years ago, when Trump was running for president for the first time, I argued that his ceiling was Long, and that his floor was George Wallace. Maybe it should have been the other way around.

The principal difference between the two is that Long cared about the plight of poor citizens of Louisiana, and actually made efforts to help them. Trump couldn’t care less about anyone except himself.

The war clearly wasn’t going well, even though the opponent was much smaller, and appeared to be overmatched. Young men were fleeing the country in droves in order to avoid the draft. The world looked on scornfully.

The president needed to maintain domestic support for the war, so he beefed up the welfare state in addition to ramping up defense spending. The predictable result? A large deficit and inflation, of course.

Is it Putin or LBJ? You decide.

Brooks argues once again that it is the professional class, not the angry MAGA voters, who are really responsible for the threat to liberal democracy. As he sees it, the professional class–blue people–created the knowledge economy, which devalues the skills of red people. They profited immensely from this change, but refused to share the benefits of the economic change with the less educated red people. They further stacked the deck in the favor by marrying each other and refusing to take drugs and get divorced. The red people–the hapless victims in this scenario–have responded quite appropriately by voting for Trump and trying to burn it down. What else could they do?

Let’s deconstruct this argument:

1. Blue people did not set out to create today’s economy; it just evolved as the result of billions of individual decisions that were made by capitalists all over the world. The notion of some sort of a conspiracy in favor of the professional class makes about as much sense as the “Long March.”
2. In any event, the numbers show that the professional class has only benefited slightly from the evolution of the economy. The big winners were the one percent, not teachers, journalists, and bureaucrats. They are, of course, predominantly Republicans.
3. The undoubted failure of our political system to provide compensation for the victims of technological change and globalization is not due to any actions of the professional class, which generally sympathizes with their plight. It is the result of stonewalling by the Republican Party, which rejects both federal programs that would benefit reactionary workers and tax increases on its donor class, the principal winners of neoliberalism.
4. Brooks, as a member of the professional class, should do penance for the “sins” of his peers by moving out of the big city, wrecking his personal life, and becoming addicted to opiates. Does he really think we should be blamed for not destroying ourselves?
5. Voting for a man who supports tax cuts and deregulation for rich businessmen, and who has no interest in reactionary workers except as cannon fodder for his campaign, is not a rational strategy for the victims of globalization and technological change.

In short, Brooks has misidentified the villains here. The fault lies with the Republican Party, not ourselves.

Attacking a judge in your criminal case sounds like legal suicide. That hasn’t stopped Trump from doing it, presumably against the advice of his attorneys. That’s the bargain you make when you represent Trump; you will generate plenty of publicity, but if you are to win, it will be in spite of your client, not because of him.

And this is just the beginning. You can be sure that Trump’s attorneys will do everything possible to keep him off the stand, because they can imagine what will happen when a man who told tens of thousands of lies during his presidency faces cross-examination. He will ignore them and insist on making his stump speech to the jury. What happens afterwards will have great entertainment value for blue America.

The Band somehow managed to merge the best of both blue and red America. Would that we had someone like that now.

Jason Aldean need not apply.

A recent poll shows that the GOP electorate is far more concerned about crime, immigration, and inflation than wokeness. That’s terrible news for DeSantis, who has made fighting wokeness his brand. Without it, he’s just another guy–Tim Scott with a chronically grumpy personality. Why is wokeness failing for him?

Part of it, of course, is DeSantis’ obvious shortcomings as a salesman, but the problem runs deeper than that. The real issue with wokeness, as I’ve said before, is that the average GOP voter only encounters it on a daily basis on Fox News. In real life, he never sees it: his friends aren’t woke; he doesn’t spend any time reading left-leaning opinions in periodicals or on social media; he’s never met any sneering Harvard graduates; and he doesn’t even know any trans people. Why would he cast his vote for president to get rid of it?

David French denies that the current Supreme Court is a MAGA court, by which he means one that permits Trump arbitrarily to reward his friends and punish his enemies. He’s right. A majority of the Court has consistently resisted Trump’s most extreme claims, although Alito and Thomas are open to them.

But French is wrong to say that the Court is “conservative.” A truly conservative Court would respect precedent, keep its decisions as narrow as possible, and refuse to hear cases in which the plaintiffs have only speculative injuries. This Court frequently rejects precedent, hears cases it shouldn’t hear, and invents constitutional rules that have no basis in text, history, or sound public policy, all to the benefit of the right. It is reactionary, not conservative.

I finished reading Jon Meacham’s biography of Jackson, “American Lion,” a few weeks ago. It was written in 2008–before Trump–and it shows; the author appears to approve of some of Jackson’s ideas about the presidency that would also apply to Trump. You have to believe the book would have been different if it had been written in 2021.

For all of the similarities between the two presidents, it is still the differences that really matter. These are:

1. Jackson tried to keep the country united; Trump divides it further every day in his own interest.
2. Jackson was not an amoral narcissist.
3. The memorable event involving a mob in Jackson’s time was at the White House during his inauguration. With Trump, it was a bit different.
4. Jackson, of course, was a war hero; Trump is Cadet Bone Spurs.
5. Jackson genuinely came from nothing; Trump was born with a silver spoon in his mouth, but is angry that it wasn’t platinum.
6. Jackson, for better or worse, was an actual economic populist; Trump just plays one on TV while he’s cutting taxes for the wealthy.

Whatever else you might think about Mike Pence, he comes by his anti-abortion extremism honestly. He is, by far, the most uncompromising opponent of abortion among the GOP presidential candidates. Given that both the right and left wings of the GOP hate him for his behavior as VP, it is the only reason to vote for him.

The NYT poll indicates that he has 3 percent of the vote. I have argued consistently that genuinely pro-life voters represent a tiny minority of the GOP electorate. This proves me right.

The same poll that I referenced in my last post indicates that 37 percent of the GOP electorate is unconditionally MAGA, another 37 percent can be persuaded to support someone other than Trump, and 25 percent is resolutely opposed to Trump. Those figures are consistent with the assumptions I have used for years. What do they mean for Trump’s opponents?

They mean Trump is beatable if you can lock up a significant majority of the “persuadable” votes; the anti-Trump vote will then fall into place. How do you do that? By swaggering (a prerequisite for the GOP nomination) and choosing positions that have the support of a majority of GOP voters. Being moderate on abortion, for example, is a good idea. Supporting Ukraine is another. Having an innovative tax plan is a third.

DeSantis hasn’t done any of these three things, and it’s probably too late for him to do so. Can any of the other candidates? Don’t hold your breath.

An NYT poll shows Trump and Biden tied at 43 percent. The question you should be asking is, “Who the hell are the other 14 percent?”

My best guess is that it consists of three groups:

1. Left-leaning young people who insist that there is no real difference between the two candidates;
2. Transactional voters who want to see the state of the economy before they choose; and
3. Anti-Trump conservative voters who want an alternative to Biden.

The good news here is that history suggests that all three of these groups will vote predominantly for Biden when the rubber hits the road. The perceived state of the economy will be the wild card.

Life in the time of Trump.

The third indictment’s here.

Will it suffice to change some minds?

The odds are poor, I fear.

By all accounts, the man is mad.

He’s seeking retribution.

And that should please the ones who want

A counterrevolution.

As I’ve noted before, Trump is an identity politician–not an ideological one. That means he is under no obligation to be consistent from an ideological perspective; all he needs to do is say things that please his elderly white base. He is very good at that. It is what makes him difficult to beat, at least in a GOP primary.

DeSantis doesn’t have that advantage. His task at the beginning of the campaign was to choose a series of ideologically consistent positions different from Trump’s that would appeal to the majority of GOP voters. Logically, he could have done this in two different ways:

1. He could have run as a national conservative, combining worker-friendly populist economics with a strong dose of social conservatism; or
2. Based on his record during the pandemic, he could have postured himself as a Reaganesque freedom fighter, which would have pleased and united the donor class without offending the base.

He didn’t do either of those things. Instead, he put all of his money on fighting wokeness, which essentially made him an even less likable version of Ted Cruz trying to win votes from the immovable MAGA base instead of the persuadable GOP majority. To no one’s surprise, it is clear from the polls that this tactic has already failed. Now, you are seeing evidence that he is moving slowly to the center on issues such as January 6 and abortion, probably at the behest of his donors. At this stage, that will only make his message dissolve into complete incoherence and make his downfall even more inglorious.

Donald Trump has no limits; he proved that on January 6. He wants a presidency with no guardrails so he can seek vengeance against all of his enemies. That is, in fact, the entire rationale behind his candidacy; it’s not as if he has any ideas to make anyone’s life better, or even any interest in doing so.

We know from extensive and bitter experience that nobody in the GOP is going to stand in his way. So how can we be sure he won’t declare martial law, send all of his opponents to Guantanamo Bay, and shut down the internet and all of the MSM except a few right-wing TV networks if he wins? We don’t. We just don’t.

In light of this, does it make sense to put up a third candidate who promises to work together with both parties–one whose nominee is trying to save liberal democracy, and one whose nominee wants to destroy it– to bring consensus to America? That sounds like suicide to me.