DAVID AXELROD - THE ATLANTIC: What Donald Trump Fears Most Is Closing In

 

A reckoning that he has spent a lifetime eluding could be coming.

David Axelrod / The Atlantic 

24 April 24

Donald Trump’s biographers all seem to agree that he didn’t get a lot of love from his father. But what Fred Trump did impart to his son was an indelible lesson: There are two kinds of people in the world—killers and losers—and like his father, Donald had to be a killer.

In Fred Trump’s dark vision, all of life was a jungle in which the strong survive and prosper and the weak fall away. The killers take what they want, however they need to take it. Rules? Norms? Laws? Institutions? They’re for suckers. The only unpardonable sin in Trumpworld is the failure to act in your own self-interest.

The son learned these lessons well. He has charmed and conned, schemed and marauded his way through life on a scale his old man could hardly have imagined. From New York real estate to the White House, Trump has flagrantly breached the guardrails that contain most of us, and has largely been rewarded for it.

Until now. You could see that realization etched in the former president’s drawn and gloomy face captured in photos that emerged last week from Manhattan’s fabled Criminal Courts Building. You could sense it in his frenetic comments to reporters in the hallway outside Judge Juan Merchan’s courtroom, where Trump robotically recited the now-familiar word salad—“scam,” “witch hunt,” “hoax”—but did so with a trace of desperation, even fear.

Trump has defied seemingly career-ending controversies before, pulling off miraculous escapes. But these are more perilous straits. While he and his supporters dismiss the hush-money trial under way as a politically motivated sham, the potential consequences for the embattled former president are very real. And he seems to know it.

A conviction could carry jail time or, at the very least, chip away at his support in a precariously tight race with President Joe Biden. And defeat in the election would likely mean that the two pending federal trials Trump has so far managed to delay would move forward—one on charges of plotting to overturn the 2020 election; the other for allegedly snatching a trove of highly classified documents from the White House and obstructing repeated attempts by the government to retrieve them.

Those charges pose even greater risks to the former president’s reputation and freedom than Trump’s New York indictment for allegedly paying off a porn star to hide an affair from voters before the 2016 election and then burying the payment on his company’s books as normal legal expenses.

All of this appears to weigh on Trump as he sits in a courtroom for the first time as a criminal defendant, away from the campaign trail and cameras, in a setting and scenario he cannot control. A man who was bred to believe that the rules don’t apply to him—and who presents himself as peerless—is left to sit silently, by edict of the court, as a jury of his peers decides his fate.

All it would take, of course, is a decision by one of those jurors to spare Trump, and he, in his own, inimitable fashion, would brand a hung jury as complete vindication, using it to paint all the indictments against him as unfounded and political.

Trump would spin a potential conviction as well. He has already begun to do so: To Trump, the district attorney who brought the charges, Alvin Bragg— who is Black—is a craven politician, trying the former president on contrived charges for his own glory while he allows violent criminals to go free. Merchan, the judge—who is Hispanic—is biased and conflicted because he appears to have donated $15 to Joe Biden’s campaign in 2020, and his daughter is a Democratic consultant. Manhattan—and, by extension, the jury—is filled with Democrats and Trump-hating liberals. President Biden orchestrated the whole production.

If the jury returns a guilty verdict, we will hear it all.

Yet, as Trump sits and watches the criminal trial he hoped to avoid unfold, he must know that a potential reckoning he has spent a lifetime eluding could be coming. He has been reduced to a criminal defendant in a courtroom where someone else has absolute power and the rules very definitely apply. The weariness and vulnerability captured in those courtroom images betray a growing recognition that he could wind up as the thing his old man most reviled.

A convicted criminal?

No, worse. A loser.

"A man who was bred to believe that the rules don’t apply to him—and who presents himself as peerless—is left to sit silently, by edict of the court, as a jury of his peers decides his fate."

ALDOUS J. PENNYFARTHING: 4 years ago today: Trump tried to make Clorox great again

No, you weren't anywhere near better off 4 years ago

By Aldous J. Pennyfarthing for Community Contributors Team

Community

Daily Kos

Tuesday, April 23, 2024 at 9:44:06a MDT 

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

Happy bleachiversary, non-dead Americans! If you’re reading this, you likely didn’t listen to Donald Trump four years ago while COVID-19 was ravaging the globe. And you certainly took his words with a grain of salt—if not the entire punchbowl of tequila—four years ago today when he suggested disinfectant injections might turn out to be the silver bullet for ending the pandemic.

Of course, it’s appropriate that we revisit this at least once every four years, because this is the Olympics of Derp. It’s also appropriate for an election year because, believe it or not, this guy wants to be president again. And millions of Americans who presumably didn’t inject Clorox want to help him achieve that impossible dream/waking nightmare.

RELATED STORY: 4 years ago today: Trump claims 'ultimate' and 'total' authority

So without further ado, let’s play “remember when?” as we turn the clock back to 2000 and enjoy this golden oldie from the silver tongue of the bronze bozo:

Trump at press conference: So supposing we hit the body with a tremendous, whether it’s ultraviolet or just very powerful light. And I think you said that hasn’t been checked but you’re going to test it. And then I said supposing you brought the light inside the body, which you can do either through the skin or in some other way. And I think you said you’re going to test that, too. Sounds interesting. Right? And then I see the disinfectant, it knocks it out in a minute. One minute. And is there a way we can do something like that, by injection inside or almost a cleaning? Because you see it gets in the lungs and it does a tremendous number on the lungs, so it would be interesting to check that. So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, right? But it sounds interesting to me. So we’ll see, but the whole concept of the light, the way it kills it in one minute. That’s pretty powerful.

Look at the lady in the photo above.  It's the precise moment when White House Coronavirus Response Coordinator Dr. Deborah Birx’s soul leaves her body, picks up a baggie of space ketamine at a Klingon yard sale, and injects it into its ectoplasmic eyeballs.

Of course, while Birx stood cow-eyed and mute as Trump suggested injecting poisons into veins and inserting lamps where the UV light don’t ordinarily shine, she had a lot to say later when she was no longer Trump’s employee and—shocked face—was promoting a book.

In an April 2022 interview with ABC News, Birx recalled that moment, shall we say, not-so-fondly. According to Birx, Trump’s bizarre comments stemmed from a misunderstanding over his advisers’ earlier reassurance that natural sunlight would help disinfect playground equipment, making playgrounds safer for kids than they might have otherwise seemed. Naturally, Trump took that little grain of truth and turned it into sour mash. ABC News reported:

“I just wanted it to be ‘The Twilight Zone’ and all go away,” Birx said. “I mean, I just—I could just see everything unraveling in that moment.”

Birx also addressed that moment in a Monday interview with “Good Morning America.”

“This was a tragedy on many levels,” she told co-anchor George Stephanopoulos.

“I immediately went to his most senior staff, and to Olivia Troye, and said this has to be reversed immediately,” she said; Troye was an adviser to then-Vice President Mike Pence.

Yes, many of us wanted this to be “The Twilight Zone”—even though it would have been the worst episode ever and might have forever tarnished the memory of that classic. Though I would have preferred it be a dream where I’m back in high school, Trump is stuck in my locker, and I can’t remember the combination. As it was, it was one of those nightmares where today is the day of the big test and the president hasn’t studied.

Of course, this episode was just a microcosm of Trump’s larger COVID-19 response, which was like watching a squirrel trying to collect nuts with its head stuck in a Snapple bottle. If Trump had done nothing on COVID other than recite CDC press releases from his toilet and wear a mask when his babysitters told him to, we would have been far better off. As it was, he felt the need to regale us with his barmy Demon Sperm Doctor tales. 

In fact, this one incident may have sickened even more Americans than his weird comments about his daughter. Of course, you don’t ever want to imagine Trump playing doctor but—ironically—it’s even more disturbing when he does it this way.

Forbes:

But people certainly listened to [Trump’s] words as officials from the Maryland Emergency Management Agency sent out an alert one day after receiving more than 100 calls about ingesting disinfectants as a possible treatment for COVID-19, according to the Governor’s office, and reported by ABC News.

Meanwhile, calls to New York City’s Poison Control Center for exposure to specific household cleaners and disinfectants increased more than twofold after the President’s comments on Thursday, WNBC New York reported today. Data from the New York Poison Center center revealed that in the 18 hours after Trump’s comments, the Poison Center received 30 exposure calls about disinfectants. Ten involved bleach, 9 were about Lysol, and 11 others regarding other household cleaners. Compared to the same time window last year, there were a total of 13 exposure calls, with 2 involving bleach, but none involving Lysol-type products.

Of course, as Trump became increasingly desperate to hand-wave COVID away, he started beer-bonging snake oil like paint buckets of pureed cheesy fries. For instance, he continually promoted hydroxychloroquine in early 2020 as a COVID cure based on little more than wishful thinking. And according to at least one study, people died because of that, too. According to The Hill “an estimated 16,990 excess deaths across six countries—Turkey, Belgium, France, Spain, Italy and the U.S.—were likely attributed to hydroxychloroquine use.”

Gee, thanks, Dr. Trump!

Meanwhile, in case you’d forgotten—like roughly half of the country appears to have done—Trump’s general COVID incompetence and specific embrace of pseudoscientific conspiracy theories  and undermining scientists likely led to the unnecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of people. 

The Guardian, Feb. 11, 2021:

The US could have averted 40% of the deaths from Covid-19, had the country’s death rates corresponded with the rates in other high-income G7 countries, according to a Lancet commission tasked with assessing Donald Trump’s health policy record.

Almost 470,000 Americans have died from the coronavirus so far, with the number widely expected to go above half a million in the next few weeks. At the same time some 27 million people in the US have been infected. Both figures are by far the highest in the world.

By the way, as any MAGA mouse will be quick to remind you, Trump never actually said people should inject bleach. He said we should consider injections of disinfectants. Big difference, snowflake! Because bleach injections are bonkers, but disinfectant injections are super stable-geniusy. And you seem to have overlooked this portion of his legendary “I Have a Beam ... in My Head” speech: “So you’re going to have to use medical doctors, right?”

See? He wanted to use medical doctors to test this out. Not English lit Ph.Ds or gold-toothed Muppets. So there. He was totally in control the whole time. Four more years!

This November, you have a choice between a guy who follows the science, a guy who thinks you should inject bleach, and a guy who thinks you shouldn’t inject anything. The fate of our nation and the world hangs in the balance. Choose wisely.

FINALLY: Enough Republicans defy Trump to get Ukraine aid package through House

DEFLATED AT LAST!

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup

Daily Kos  

It wasn’t just Putin who lost in the House vote on Ukraine aid.

Ukraine won. Trump lost.

The House vote to aid Ukraine renews hope that Ukraine can still win its war. It also showed how and why Donald Trump should lose the 2024 election.

For nine years, Trump has dominated the Republican Party. Senators might have loathed him, governors might have despised him, donors might have ridiculed him, college-educated Republican voters might have turned against him—but LOL, nothing mattered. Enough of the Republican base supported him. Everybody else either fell in line, retired from politics, or quit the party…

At the beginning of this year, Trump was able even to blow up the toughest immigration bill seen in decades—simply to deny President Joe Biden a bipartisan win. Individual Senate Republicans might grumble, but with Trump opposed, the border-security deal disintegrated.

Three months later, Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine.

22 april 24

 

House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., delivers remarks at the U.S. Capitol. (photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images)

 

Riley Rogerson and Reese Gorman / The Daily Beast

 

22 April 24

Mike Johnson’s speakership has been building to this make-or-break moment.

On Saturday, after months of dithering, the House finally approved aid to Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. The aid for each of those countries—provided in different forms—passed individually, with a complex Venn diagram of lawmakers coming together on each of the bills.

But there was one constant for all the bills: Republican opposition.

The Israel bill passed 366-58, with 193 Republicans and 173 Democrats for the bill, and 21 Republicans and 37 Democrats opposed.

The Taiwan bill passed 385-34, with just progressive Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-MI) voting present. All 34 votes against the bill came from Republicans.

But most troublingly for Johnson, the Ukraine aid measure passed 311-112, with all 210 Democrats in attendance voting for the bill, and all 112 of the no votes coming from the GOP. As the bill passed, Democrats on the House floor waved Ukrainian flags and cheered in solidarity with the U.S. ally. They tried to hand flags out to Republicans, but only a few accepted.

After the vote, conservative Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) told Democrats to “put those damn flags away.”

(All of the bills will be combined together, including with a bill to force the sale of TikTok and other national security priorities, before the package is sent to the Senate for one up-or-down vote.)

Ukraine aid has cast a shadow over Johnson’s entire six-month speakership. It also might mark the end.

Just days before Johnson took the speaker’s gavel, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky begged Congress for more munitions to defend itself from Russia’s brutal invasion. There seemed to be a real urgency in the situation, and Congress was positioned to act. Hamas had just attacked Israel earlier in the month, and there was a real desire to show support for the U.S. ally, which hadn’t yet begun its aggressive bombing campaign.

Naturally, congressional leaders saw an opportunity to combine Ukraine aid with Israel, packaging two important priorities together to win over lawmakers who might have been reluctant about one or the other.

But Johnson was just beginning his speakership. He didn’t want to upset some Republicans who were adamantly opposed to spending another dime on Ukraine, never mind the facts about the form of the aid or where it was really being spent.

Johnson—an untested and little-known conservative—was suddenly sitting atop a fractured GOP conference, delicately balancing the desires of a diffuse group of lawmakers. Inaction became a hallmark of his speakership.

But over the last six months, as Johnson has tried to find a functional GOP majority that can pass any Republican priority, he’s had to come to a brutal truth: There is no Republican majority.

On virtually any bill Republicans want to pass without Democratic support, there seems to be at least a few GOP lawmakers—because it goes too far, because it doesn’t go far enough, or just because they’re mad about other things—who refuse to go along with the team.

Johnson has had to confront the uncomfortable reality that, if he’s going to pass a bill as speaker, he has to do so with Democratic votes.

And now, as Republicans line up against him to remove him from his job, he’s facing an even starker reality: To remain speaker, he will need Democratic votes.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) introduced a motion to remove Johnson about a month ago, and has since then, she’s been joined by far-right Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Paul Gosar (R-AZ). The trio has suggested that more Johnson detractors would come out from hiding once Johnson passed Ukraine aid. (The reality is, they don’t even need more Republicans to vote against him, if Democrats also vote against Johnson, as they did in every round of voting when Kevin McCarthy was speaker.)

All Johnson did was give Ukraine aid a vote, with the bill passing overwhelmingly. But the modern GOP has come to expect the speaker to block certain bipartisan priorities from getting an up-or-down. It’s one thing to give legislation that will fail a vote on the House floor, but it’s heresy to give something a vote that will actually pass—that is, if a small conservative minority deems it insufficiently conservative.

The one thing Johnson did violate with the Ukraine vote—ever so slightly—was the so-called Hastert Rule, named after disgraced former GOP Speaker Dennis Hastert (R-IL), who was later convicted for sexually assaulting boys decades before his time in the Speaker’s office.

Hastert started a “majority of the majority” rule for putting bills on the floor—a standard which Hastert himself broke a dozen times when he was in charge.

Regardless, GOP Speakers have generally tried to live by that standard (even though every Republican Speaker since has broken the rule). But if there’s one argument the conservatives pissed off with Johnson and the Ukraine aid vote can make, it’s that one.

But Johnson’s patience for those rules had finally run out. He put his foot down, spoke publicly about his belief that this was the right thing to do, and said he was prepared to let the chips fall as they may.

He brought up four separate foreign aid bills—which also included unprecedented restrictions on TikTok—in the name of famed World War II-era British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, calling out the fecklessness of Churchill’s predecessor, Neville Chamberlain, notorious for appeasing Adolf Hitler.

Johnson knew he would face a Republican backlash for that decision, and he appears fully prepared to live with the consequences of his actions.

But just as the Ukraine decision may break Johnson, it also may make him.

Former Democratic Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), deferred to Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) when asked about if Democrats should save Johnson. But if there was any indication of what she thought Democrats should do, she said Johnson took the House to a “place that is historic” despite objections from his own members.

She added that the motion to remove Johnson “disregards any respect for the institution, because you should be able to resolve your differences.”

“The institution really needs to be respected,” Pelosi told The Daily Beast. “And if people are doing something wrong, then the chair should be vacated, but if it’s a difference of opinion, that’s democracy.”

At least two Democrats—Reps. Tom Suozzi (D-NY) and Jared Moskowitz (D-FL)—have already said they wouldn’t vote to remove Johnson if Republicans intend to throw him overboard because of the Ukraine vote.

“You need to demonstrate that this chaos caucus doesn’t have the power that they think they have,” Suozzi told The Daily Beast. “We can’t allow them to punish him for doing the right thing.”

The top Democrat on the Armed Services Committee—Rep. Adam Smith (D-WA)—also indicated Democrats would have Johnson’s back.

Former Majority Leader Steny Hoyer (D-MD) said after the vote that “nobody should penalize the speaker for doing the right thing.”

“The right thing is what 350 people voted for—give or take,” he said. “But what was, I think, a very positive day for our country, positive day for the House, and certainly a wonderful day for Ukraine.”

As Democrats line up to defend the speaker, Johnson is, in effect, ceding power to Jeffries. That has always been part of the calculus of other embattled GOP speakers; if you rely on Democratic votes to save your speakership, you’re no longer, really, the Republican speaker.

That may make Johnson’s position untenable—particularly in the long-term—but for now, there are Republicans rallying around him.

Former speaker candidate Rep. Austin Scott (R-GA) told The Daily Beast that if Johnson leans on Democrats to stay in power, so be it.

“There’s nobody in the Republican conference today that can get 100% of the vote from the Republican conference,” Scott said. “And if they take him out, by definition, they have given the Democrats control over who is the next Speaker of the House.”

Other GOP members are holding out hope that Johnson’s right flank hates him less than the eight Republican rebels who removed McCarthy.

“I think they don’t distrust him as much as they did McCarthy,” Rep. Kelly Armstrong (R-ND) told The Daily Beast. “But he has been prone to fits and starts.”

For now, the motion to vacate the chair hangs over Johnson’s head, and it’s unclear how many Republicans would support an effort to remove him—or how many Democrats would save him.

It’s entirely possible the actual numbers come to mean a great deal. Johnson may be able to preserve some important optics if some Democrats—or perhaps all Democrats—simply sit out the vote to remove him. That way, no Democrat would have to actually vote for Johnson, and it would be unclear how close his detractors are to actually removing him.

But either way in that scenario, the message would be the same: Johnson is speaker because of Democrats. And it’s unlikely Democrats—or Republicans—will forget that.

Ukraine won. Trump and Putin lost.

Fox News take the wheel: Trump repeatedly falls asleep during criminal court trial!

Trump arrives early and prepared for his next day in court!  

Cartoon by Lalo Alcaraz for Comics

Dozo the Clown takes center stage as hush money trial begins Monday

By sepiasiren

Community

Daily Kos

Monday, April 15, 2024 at 6:21:26p MDT 

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

 

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim  Country Gazette Blog

Where’s Dr. Feel Good when yah need him?

Actually, they called him the Candy Man, and of course, I am referencing the crooked Quack who tried to convince us that Trump was a swimsuit model, Rep. Ronny Jackson, of Texas. As was told, Jackson was the White House physician to Presidents Barack Obama and Donald Trump before he left in 2018 and he was a bit too foot loose and fancy free when it came to doling out meds.

Uppers, downers, in-betweeners—you name it, bruh was handing them out like PEZ from a dispenser (if you under the age of 20, Google “Pez”). Interestingly enough, Trump thinks Biden should take a drug test prior to any debates—can we say “projection?”

Roofie Ronnie has of course, gone on the record to deny all allegations, but I am not gonna trust a man who tried to convince us that someone like Donald Trump and Pierce Brosnan are one in the same.

Not having easy access to stimulants—and maybe too many rage boner binges on Truth Social, have taken their toll—left Trumpy without a way to stay alert during his first criminal trial, which began today in Manhattan.

Long and short—dude fell asleep. Let me repeat that: He. Fell. Asleep.

And they call Biden Sleepy Joe?

The overuse of the term unprecedented when it comes to Donald Trump is, well, unprecedented.

But seriously, have we ever had to contend with an elected official who as unapologetically crooked and debauched at Donald J. Trump? Obviously not at the highest level of office in the land, excluding even Nixon of all people, comparatively.

Which is why most of us wised up and Donald Trump is currently un-presidented…see what I did there? HA!

Judge Juan Merchan

Now Trump done went and shown an even greater disdain for American Jurisprudence and the rule of law for falling asleep in court. Come on, Trump campaign, someone has to be the adult in the room and take Trumpy’s iPad away from him before bed.

I do it to my teenage son all the time.

Will MAGA come to the rescue?

As pointed out in the above Midas Touch video, soon after the news of Trumpy courtroom naptime hit the airwaves, the hashtag #SleepyDon began trending on X. Of course, MAGA freaks are going to holler that this is fake news, but I think some media outlets may spin this as how strong he is in the face of peril—like they did when he looked up at a solar eclipse.

Instead of touting that as a foolhardy example of what not to do, Conservative news outlets declared Trump’s act of looking up at the eclipse “brave.” One wonders how many others “blindly” followed his lead during the recent solar event?

Somebody call the hospitals in every Red State, stat!

Anyhoo, Mr. Vigor reportedly fell asleep during his criminal election interference trial (it’s not a hush money trial.) The act of falling asleep shows an even deeper disdain for the law than I would have thought even Donnie capable of, especially after a string of losses—but then, why am I surprised?

Yahoo News quote below:

Donald Trump appeared to fall asleep in court on the first day of his hush money case as he became the first US president to stand criminal trial.

Mr Trump seemingly dozed off on Monday morning in the New York courtroom as his lawyers clashed with prosecutors over what evidence would be admissible.

The former president has been charged with falsifying business records ahead of the 2016 election to cover up a $130,000 (£104,000) payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult film star.

See how Yahoo correctly references the criminal act as falsifying business records ahead of trial in the article but all of MSM calls it the hush money trial?

It’s willful. Fricking MSM.

To that end, I can already see headlines the New York Times Pitchbot could write: Donald Trump thumbed his nose as the Judge in his Manhattan trial by falling asleep! Bravo Trump—what a guy!”

Hell, there are some MAGA folks likely already saying a variation of this or claiming this didn’t even happen—which is why cameras in the court room would be helpful, but I digress.

Reportedly, Trump fell asleep during jury instructions, because of course he did. I wonder if he snored?

This is a developing story that I am sure will only get weirder as time treks along, in the interim, stay true and stay blue.

Cartoon by Nick Anderson

Trump Trial Is Already Influencing Public Opinion

  Donald Trump. (photo: Intercept)

20 April 24

Pundits are reading these shifts completely wrong—this is exactly the kind of movement that could determine the election.

Dahlia Lithwick and Anat Shenker-Osorio / Slate

Four days in, and with the jury just selected, those in the commentariat class are already ready to offer their closing arguments in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial. Most of the naysayers are lawyers. 

Some of them doubt that Trump will be found guilty of even a misdemeanor, much less a felony, for his alleged crime of illegally offering hush money payments to hide an affair he had before the 2016 presidential election. They question the soundness of what they deem a rather novel legal theory—elevating the minor crime of falsifying records into the more serious charge of doing so in furtherance of another crime. 

Others are just exhausted. Our Slate colleague Richard Hasen, in the L.A. Times, declared, “I have a hard time even mustering a ‘meh.’ ” It’s understandable to feel jaded by what has been a yearslong process, with Trump seeming to evade accountability every time—but dismissing this case is precisely the category error that holds that what lawyers believe about legal verdicts is somehow predictive of political and electoral outcomes.

And it’s not just the lawyers. The pundits are also certain they know how the public will think about a trial that’s barely begun. They’re sure they understand how it will affect a vote that remains 200 days away, and they are bringing in survey data to back up their claims.  

ABC News thus declared, “The polls suggest that a guilty verdict would be unlikely to have a big influence come November,” citing as evidence the fact that “just 35 percent of independents and 14 percent of Republicans” believe that Trump is guilty in the New York criminal case. As further proof that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s efforts are going to be electorally inconsequential, they go on to reference a Quinnipiac poll showing that only 29 percent of voters would be less likely to support Trump upon a conviction in this criminal trial.

And, sure, all of these are in fact numbers, and they are indeed less than 50 percent, and, yes, we’ve been told many, many times that it takes that plus one to win an election. But this is where so many political analysts have either memory-holed how presidential elections actually work in the U.S. or are demonstrating that motivated cognition is one hell of a drug. Because for Trump to lose this election, it does not require over 50 percent of people to say that this trial would flip their vote. 

Many people are already absolutely determined not to vote for the criminal defendant. As in 2016 and 2020, the 2024 election will come down to margins of 1 or 2 percentage points in just six states. In this game of winner takes all, even by a hair, dropping “only” 9 percent of your base upon a Bragg conviction—as the most Trump-favorable poll testing the stakes of this case reports—means you would lose the election.

Thus, while it is absolutely the case that 36 percent of independents saying that a guilty verdict would move them away from Trump is less than the 44 percent saying it wouldn’t, when your vote total is presently neck and neck and electoral precedent says it will come down to the wire, you cannot afford to lose anyone, let alone over a third of the gettable voters. That 36 percent matters greatly.

And so, those who are dismissing the electoral consequences of this criminal trial by declaring that events in Manhattan over the next few weeks will merely animate Trump’s base—a base that will see this trial as yet more proof of the Deep State’s (™) persecution of their Lord—are also demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of electoral math. 

You cannot mobilize the voters who are already absolutely voting for Trump to any greater heights. No matter how rabid their fury, and how bottomless their sense of shared grievance, they still get only one vote each—at least until they figure out how to commit the voter fraud they love to decry on a broader scale. The rank and file in the tank for MAGA cannot become more impactful.

It’s important to remember that this is really an election interference trial, with a crucial trifecta of sex, money, and voter deception. So, yes, the public opinion data is one way to understand the influence—and in fact, it points toward this case being quite consequential. But the larger, as yet unquantifiable element of this criminal lawsuit currently playing out in the midst of a presidential election is the story it transmits. 

The trial is a long-awaited step toward accountability for a presidential candidate publicly performing the role of criminal defendant, sitting reluctantly before a jury of other Americans. This telegraphs a very loud tale about him and, more importantly, the stakes of this election. We don’t yet understand the effect that part will have on voters—it hasn’t happened yet.

Where the civil trials against Trump got newspaper write-ups, this criminal trial is receiving the full television and social media meme daily bonanza. Americans are a uniquely Law & Order–obsessed people: They love jury selection and objections and closing arguments and are captive to this uniquely American notion that there is something about landmark “trial of the century” events worth watching. 

This means that voters who only barely register the drumbeat of political news will still see a man they are supposed to consider the potential leader of the free world falling asleep, muttering threats at jurors, and generally looking sad and trapped and small. And if he is declared guilty, this process will render him, in many voters’ understanding, a criminal.

What the political pundits and legal scholars who are now parsing the electoral consequences of this case seem to have forgotten is that elections center on grand, sweeping tales, not the arcana of case law and criminal liability theory. 

Big moral narratives sound like “Morning in America” and “Yes We Can” in the affirmative, or “Swift Boat” and “47 percent” and “her emails” in the most damning. And this trial is part of that arc, about a man absolutely determined to seize and hold power, no matter how, with explicit details about hidden bank accounts and pulling one over on voters to game an election.

Finally, while there’s understandable interest in examining how traditional swing voters will respond to the Bragg case, it’s critical to remember that these electoral unicorns are on the 2024 endangered species list. This election isn’t just the usual “take to your partisan corners” contest; it’s a rematch between the same two contenders we know all too well. 

Virtually no one is still deciding between Trump and Biden. And what “gettable” voters are contemplating is, in broad strokes, whether to participate at all in this election. These “double haters,” folks who are turned off by both top contenders, are tuned out of this election. 

The question then becomes what would get them off the sidelines and into viewing the very real stakes, stakes that make turning out to repudiate Trump imperative. What Trump on trial—and the constant barrage of chatter about it—ultimately does is clue these weary citizens into the actual consequences of this election. 

It changes the narrative from a tale of two old men, neither of whom they find appealing, into the possibility that a convicted criminal will be deciding which laws, if any, apply to him and also to everyone else. This, for everyday voters residing outside the commentariat, is what can become core to politics: a story of morality and possibly even some game-changing theater.

What Trump on trial—and the constant barrage of chatter about it—ultimately does is clue those weary citizens who are currently tuned out into the actual consequences of this election.

Jury selection forces Trump to face people who don't worship and adore him

Former President Donald Trump awaits the start of proceedings during jury selection at New York State Supreme Court, Thursday, April 18, 2024.

By Walter Einenkel for Daily Kos

Daily Kos Staff

Friday, April 19, 2024 at 9:00:09a MDT

 

REPUBLISHED BY:

Blue Country Gazette Blog

Rim Country Gazette Blog

The jury selection phase of Donald Trump’s historic criminal trial is moving toward a conclusion, after many ups and downs. Because criminal defendants are required to be present in the courtroom, the famously thin-skinned Trump has been subjected to a wide variety of people’s opinions of him—forcing him outside the bubble of bootlickers that normally insulates him from reality.

Daily Beast reporter Jose Pagliery noted on social media site X that during juror questioning Thursday, Trump was “forced to sit down & hear several say they don't like his character. Slumped back in his chair, arms folded, big frown, furrowed brow. Angry as people trash him.”

It’s impossible to know how much this is bothering Trump, but the fragility of his ego is legendary.

This is the same petulant former president of the United States who angrily attacked late-night talk show host Jimmy Kimmel Wednesday morning for making fun of his various legal and financial issues.

This is the same Donald Trump who attacked 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg in 2019 when she was named Time magazine’s “Person of The Year,” saying she was “angry.” It seems he was one part ornery that a young woman (who had been critical of his environmental policies) received any public adulation, and a second part furious that he had not received the magazine’s annual award.

That same year, Trump’s White House tried to get Twitter (since renamed “X” under new owner Elon Musk) to remove a tweet by celebrity Chrissy Teigen because she had insulted him on the social media site, calling him “a pussy ass bitch.”

If there is any doubt that Trump’s paper-thin self-esteem needs a planet-sized amount of insulation, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman reports that former OAN host Natalie Harp, whose fawning coverage of Trump earned her a job with his campaign, now provides Trump with moment-to-moment sycophancy: 

Among the Trump aides in the courtroom is Natalie Harp, his ever-present favorite who uses a wireless printer to provide him with an ongoing stream of good news from the internet. She was initially sitting two rows behind the defense table, as she usually does. A security official in court just made her head to the back to sit in the same row as Trump’s other aides.

All 12 jurors and 6 alternates have now been selected and the trial is schedule to get underway on Monday.

Trump attacked 16-year-old environmental activist Greta Thunberg in 2019 when she was named Time magazine’s “Person of The Year,” saying she was “angry.”

Women’s Rights Are Being Rolled Back to 1864 Before Women Could Vote

  Photo illustration by Slate. (photo: Library of Congress)

 18 April 24

If you thought overturning Roe was bad …

Jill Filipovic / Slate

When the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022, just months shy of the landmark abortion case’s 50^th birthday, millions of Americans were stunned that the highest court in the land had just set our rights back half a century.

What we didn’t realize: Half a century is nothing. Less than two years after Roe fell, the conservative movement is taking women back not just 50 years. It’s rewinding the clock more than 150 years.

Case in point: Arizona’s abortion law, which is now in place statewide and which was passed 160 years ago, in 1864—when the Civil War was raging, before nearly a third of what are now the 50 U.S. states formally existed, and when women didn’t have the right to vote. Arizona itself wouldn’t be admitted to the Union for almost another half-century, having been recognized as an American territory only the year before.

That archaic 1864 law makes nearly all abortions a felony and threatens to lock up any abortion provider for a term of two to five years. The day after the Arizona Supreme Court ruled that this archaic law could go into effect, Arizona Democrats tried to repeal it. Arizona Republicans in both legislative chambers blocked those repeal efforts, while Arizona anti-abortion advocates have fought to keep abortion rights off the ballot.

When the 1864 abortion law was passed, the territory’s Legislature was led by a pedophile who married, then divorced and sometimes impregnated (in and out of marriage), a series of children, girls who today would be in middle and early high school and largely too young to get their driver’s licenses, according to reporting from the Washington Post’s Monica Hesse. This was legal because, across the U.S., parents were allowed to marry off their young daughters, and the age of sexual consent was largely prepubescent, typically at 10 or 12. In Delaware, it was 7. The same document outlawing abortion in Arizona also outlawed interracial marriage and allowed for the indentured servitude of Native American children. There’s a whole section on electric telegraphs.

All of these laws were written by men. When Arizona passed its abortion law, not a single woman had yet been elected to any state legislature anywhere in the nation, and women would not hold any such role for several more decades. This was an era in which women were largely under the control of their husbands, and they generally had little right to possess property, control their own wages, and even lay claim to their own children. Black women were often still literal property. Courts in several U.S. states spent the better part of the 19^th century ruling that husbands were legally entitled to beat their wives.

The Arizona abortion ban followed centuries in which abortion was treated mainly as a woman’s concern, and was permitted until “quickening,” or the moment a pregnant woman could feel the fetus start to move. (This was also the Catholic Church’s position for hundreds of years, by the way.) But by the mid-19^th century, women were gaining unprecedented rights and freedoms. This did not sit well with the patriarchal and the powerful, including the all-white-male American Medical Association, which had just formed in 1847. Reproductive health care was largely the purview of midwives and other female practitioners, posing a problem for the male doctors who wanted a monopoly on the profession. The leader of the anti-abortion crusade, physician Horatio Robinson Storer, wrote, “Medical men are the physical guardians of women and their offspring” and, as such, have a duty to criminalize abortion. He lamented that birthrates were decreasing, with foreigners (Catholics especially) outbreeding white Protestants; asserted that women, who didn’t even seem to feel guilty about abortions, must pay a serious criminal price; and believed that women who were getting pregnant too frequently had only themselves to blame and were often those who chose to “forego the duty and privilege of nursing, a law entailed upon them by nature, and seldom neglected without disastrous results.”

According to Storer, who wrote to legislatures across the nation urging them to outlaw abortion, a woman’s “holiest duty” was “to bring forth living children,” a responsibility that was routinely interrupted by “female physicians and midwives” (emphasis his), who claimed expertise “in rivalry of the male physician” and whose work Storer opposed, alongside anything else outside a woman’s “proper and God-given sphere.” As for claims that women sought terminations because nonstop pregnancies were difficult and dangerous, or because they could not afford or did not want additional children, he objected to such arguments “which would justify abortion as necessary for the mother’s own good” as “a selfish plea.”

Storer lauded the Catholic Church’s position that a fetus was of greater import than a pregnant woman, and he admired the insistence on saving a fetus’s life even if it meant that the woman died. He eventually converted to Catholicism, in large part because of the church’s position on abortion.

Almost a decade after Arizona’s abortion ban, and as physicians including Storer were making sure similar bans were put into place across the U.S., Congress passed the Comstock Act—that was in 1873, exactly 100 years before the Supreme Court decided Roe v. Wade and legalized abortion nationwide. The Comstock laws prohibited the mailing of “obscene” materials, including contraceptives, abortion-inducing drugs or devices, sex toys, and anything the most extreme prudes of the era might deem pornographic. (The architects and supporters of this legislation did indeed try to forbid, in their words, “every filthy book, pamphlet, picture, paper, letter, writing, print, or other publication of an indecent character,” which at one point included even anatomy textbooks.) Anthony Comstock, the chief prude for whom the act is named, was an enthusiastic book-banner and suffragist-opposer.

The Comstock Act is back now too: It’s one of the laws the anti-abortion movement is hoping to use to ban the abortion-inducing drug mifepristone. Leaders of the anti-abortion movement have been exceedingly clear that they plan to try to revive the Comstock Act in order to ban abortion nationwide, and possibly contraception as well.

It’s not a coincidence that the early anti-abortion movement in the U.S. was one headed by men, in reaction to expanding rights, freedom, and power for women—just as it is not a coincidence that today’s anti-abortion movement, formed in opposition to rapid gains in women’s rights during the 1960s and ’70s, has seen its most significant victory thanks to the most overtly misogynistic president in modern American history, a serial philanderer, a many-times-accused sexual harasser and assailant, a man recently found liable for sexual abuse.

The history of these laws tells us quite a bit about our present, especially what motivates the most aggressive abortion opponents. Attempts to criminalize abortion have always gone hand in hand with conservative and religious views on gender roles, with abortion bans functioning as blunt instruments that force women back into our God-given place as dutiful mothers and obedient wives. And it’s equally impossible to separate out efforts to legalize abortion from broader moves toward gender equality, both in the liberalization of abortion laws—efforts led by feminists around the world—and in the feminist outcome of those liberalized laws. That would be record progress for women and girls, from more egalitarian interpersonal relationships to greater financial power to skyrocketing educational and professional achievements to much longer and healthier lives for women and the children we bear.

Those in the anti-abortion movement are relying on the letter of the law from 150 years ago not simply because it’s convenient. They’re leaning on century-old laws because they want to make America a certain way again, and those century-old laws both sprang from and enabled a particular kind of society. Those laws existed only because women were legally, socially, and economically second-class citizens, their rights and liberties determined by white men who enjoyed exclusive control over every lever of political power. And those laws had the effect of maintaining that same complete male domination—that is, until generations of feminists dismantled them and put a great many cracks in the system that created them.

And this, still, is the fundamental divide. Should women’s rights in America go back to what they were in 1873? Feminists have spent the past 150 years painstakingly chipping away at the laws that forced our subservience. But today’s anti-abortion movement, and its representatives in the Republican Party, has a different answer, one it makes clear every time it argues that women’s bodies should be regulated by laws that existed before any woman had a legal say in them.

RBG made her mark and women made theirs - but then a few male Arizona judges said, "Not so fast, sweeties."