For the purpose of this criminal case,
former President Trump has become citizen Trump.
– US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit
This week’s featured post is “About Biden’s Age and Memory“. Short summary: Everybody calm down.
This week everybody was talking about Biden’s memory
That’s the subject of the featured post. One of the things I learned during my father’s final years was the difference between aphasia (inability to find the right words) and dementia (inability to grasp situations). Biden’s occasional flubs look completely verbal to me, so they don’t seem worrisome. He knows what’s happening and is thinking clearly about it, even if he sometimes calls something or someone by the wrong name.
Trump makes similar mistakes all the time (probably as often as Biden) but the media doesn’t cover them the same way. I guess I understand why: It seems silly to worry about Trump saying the wrong words when the words he intends to say are so reprehensible. What if, when he wanted to call Democrats “vermin“, or accuse immigrants of “poisoning the blood of our country“, he had accidentally said something else? Would that be worse?
Just this weekend, he taunted Nikki Haley by asking about her spouse.
What happened to her husband? Where is he? He’s gone. He knew. He knew.
I haven’t seen a clear explanation of what Trump imagines Michael Haley knows. But where Haley has gone is no mystery: He’s a major in the South Carolina National Guard, and has been deployed to Africa since June. The Republican Party used to respect military service, but apparently it no longer does. Wherever Major Haley is, though, he has access to the internet, because he tweeted back:
The difference between humans and animals? Animals would never allow the dumbest ones to lead the pack.
And then there was this:
Former President Donald Trump said Saturday he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if it attacked a NATO country that didn’t pay enough for defense.
When he says that kind of stuff on purpose, who has time to cover his misstatements?
and the Trump trials
The big news from early in the week was the DC Appeals Court ruling against Trump’s claim of “absolute presidential immunity”. The court rejected Trump’s arguments across the board, summing up its opinion like this:
For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.
For weeks, observers have been speculating about what was taking the court so long — nearly a month — to rule, and their opinion validated most of that speculation: The three judges were ironing out their differences so that they could write a single opinion in the name of the court. It seemed obvious from the beginning that none of the three agreed with Trump’s lawyers’ arguments, but if they had disagreed about why Trump was wrong, they would leave issues for the Supreme Court to resolve. As it is, the Court has the option to refuse Trump expected appeal and let the lower court decision stand.
Trump is expected to file his appeal to the Supreme Court today, because the appellate court’s stay on his DC trial runs out today, leaving Judge Tanya Chutken free to restart proceedings. Jay Kuo explains:
But here’s a fun fact: While it only takes four justices to agree to hear a case, it takes five justices to issue a stay. And a stay is what Trump really, really needs to keep running out the clock.
I feel like commentators are doing the public an injustice when they observe that Trump is trying to “run out the clock”, as if that were a natural thing to do. An innocent candidate for office would want to get his cases settled before the election, but Trump wants to delay past the election because he is guilty. His only hope to stay out of jail is to regain the presidency and use its powers to obstruct justice, so that no jury ever sees the evidence against him.
Thursday, the Supreme Court heard arguments in another Trump case, the one about whether the 14th Amendment bans him from office as an insurrectionist. The questions asked by almost all the justices were skeptical, and most observers have concluded that the Court really doesn’t want to be the reason Trump doesn’t become president again.
Slate’s Dahlia Lithwick discusses what she finds “The Most Galling Thing About the Supreme Court’s Trump Ballot Arguments“: taking seriously the idea that finding for Colorado would open a can of worms, as red states would then start throwing Democratic candidates off their ballots. The assumption behind this argument is that our justice system is incapable of distinguishing frivolous cases from well-founded cases.
Remember when Trump said he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose support? Well, imagine if he did and the State of New York charged him with murder. Trump could then argue that the prosecution shouldn’t be allowed, because otherwise red states would start charging Democrats with murder.
Does that make any sense? I don’t think so, and I don’t think a similar argument in this case makes sense either.
We’re still waiting for a verdict in Trump’s New York civil fraud trial.
and the Gaza War
Since the ground attacks on Gaza started, Israel has been pushing the civilian population south, towards Rafah. CNN estimates that 1.3 million of Gaza’s two million people are now taking refuge there. The only place further south is Egypt, which is not accepting refugees.
Over the weekend, airstrikes on Rafah began. The Palestinian Red Crescent Society claims that over 100 people have been killed, but says the exact death toll is hard to know because people may still be trapped under rubble.
Last night, an Israeli raid into Rafah rescued two Israeli hostages.
There is beginning to be some daylight between the Biden administration and the Netanyahu government. In the press conference where President Biden responded to the Hur report, he characterized the Israeli response to the October 7 attacks as “over the top” and said
There are a lot of innocent people who are starving, a lot of innocent people who are in trouble and dying, and it’s got to stop.
Secretary Blinken has been trying to negotiate a ceasefire. The most recent Hamas proposal was for
a ceasefire of 4-1/2 months, during which all hostages would go free, Israel would withdraw its troops from Gaza and an agreement would be reached on an end to the war.
Prime Minister Netanyahu described this proposal as “delusional” and instead pledged to push on for “total victory” over “all of Hamas”.
and the failed Mayorkas impeachment
Something about the conservative mindset that’s been true for a long time: They’d rather focus on good and bad people than good or bad policy. So a scapegoat or a savior is more important than a plan to make things better. (You can see this happening in the presidential campaign: The point is to glorify Trump and promise that everything will be better after he’s back in power. But what will he do differently than Biden? Don’t worry about that.)
Case in point: The border. The Senate negotiated a tough bipartisan compromise to try to improve things at the border, but then Trump and his minions rejected it without any alternative proposal beyond “Elect Trump”. Simultaneously, House Republicans tried to impeach the secretary of Homeland Security, Aleyandro Mayorkas, for not solving the problems at the border. So: We don’t need new policies or new funding, we just need to punish somebody we don’t like. That’ll fix everything.
There are really no grounds for impeaching Mayorkas: no criminal activity, no personal scandals, etc. He’s just overseeing a badly broken immigration system that Congress has been refusing to fix for decades. All the problems would still be there if he were gone.
Not to worry, though, because in the end Speaker Johnson counted his votes wrong, and the impeachment failed 214-216. This kind of thing never happened to Nancy Pelosi: If she brought something to the floor, she had the votes to pass it.
Republicans are going to try again, though, because Rep. Steve Scalise may return soon from cancer treatment, and because they have nothing else to do.
Meanwhile, the Senate is trying to repair the damage done when Trump turned against the border/Israel/Ukraine compromise that was set to pass. Originally, the parts of the bill dealing with the border were put in because Republicans demanded them as a price for Ukraine aid. (Otherwise, they seem content to let Putin take over Ukraine. One fascist hand washes the other, I suppose.) But then Trump decided that solving a problem (which his party keeps saying is an existential crisis for our country) would give Biden a victory and help him claim that he is actually governing. Can’t have that, so the bill had to die.
So a bill with just Israel and Ukraine aid is moving through the Senate, having jumped a couple of procedural hurdles this week. (Bizarrely, Lindsey Graham wants to add amendments with border funding, creating a Groundhog Day causal loop.) It might move faster, but Rand Paul is blocking the unanimous consent necessary to vote sooner.
and you also might be interested in …
Yesterday, two pro-Christian Super Bowl ads promoted the slogan “He gets us” — “he” being Jesus. This campaign has been around for a while, but it seems that many people noticed it for the first time yesterday. The leftist magazine Jacobin traced the money. It comes from the billion-dollar Servant Foundation, which also has contributed $50 million to the Alliance Defending Freedom. The “freedoms” ADF defends are the states’ right to take over women’s healthcare decisions, and businesses’ right to discriminate against LGBTQ people.
So maybe the “us” in “He gets us” isn’t as all-encompassing as the ads make it sound.
Meanwhile, my social media feed was blowing up with the observation that If Jesus had that many millions on hand, he would probably use it to feed the poor rather than to buy Super Bowl ads. It does seem like a rather mysterious way for the Lord to work.
It was widely reported before the game that Tucker Carlson threatened to kill himself if Taylor Swift’s boyfriend’s team won the Super Bowl. (The claim appears to be false.) Yesterday, Travis Kelce’s Chiefs did win, starting a Tucker death watch.
Speaking of Tucker, he interviewed Russian dictator Vladimir Putin for two hours and posted the video to the web.
Unfortunately for Tucker’s career, which has gone into eclipse since Fox News sacked him, Putin did what dictators often do: gave a long boring speech that few Americans will be interested in. Putin has this theory of history, going back to the Middle Ages, saying that Ukraine is not really a country and has no right to exist separate from Russia.
It’s not hard to imagine King George making a similar speech about his 13 American colonies, so Americans are unlikely to be persuaded. To Americans, nationhood is a covenant between people, and is not based on some essentialist theory about race, language, and culture. If a bunch of people get together and declare themselves a nation, who are you to tell them they’re not?
Anyway, it appears that the point was to impress Russians with how seriously Putin’s ideas are taken by Americans, and not to actually convince American viewers of anything. It was an internal propaganda victory similar to the victory Kim Jong Un got by meeting with Trump.
Prior to the interview, Tucker put out a video defending his decision to do it. I have no real argument with the points he was making, but I think he was making them in bad faith: Yes, Americans should hear from voices that the American mainstream paints as villainous, but those people should be asked hard questions, challenged when they lie, and fact-checked afterward. Tucker did none of that.
Also, I suspect he won’t apply his reasoning evenly. For example, the same logic would lead him to interview the leaders of Iran and the Taliban, something I suspect he won’t do. He interviewed Putin not for any noble journalistic reason, but because he supports Putin.
Climate scientist Michael Mann won his defamation lawsuit against two conservative critics. He was awarded only $1 from each in compensation, but one of the two was hit with $1 million in punitive damages.
and let’s close with something in bad taste
Everybody who tries to cook has had the experience: You look at a recipe, have high hopes, and then something else happens entirely. In the end, you see that the outcome was completely predictable, but somehow that wasn’t obvious beforehand.
Well, you can always laugh. The Tasty Area website has collected extreme kitchen fails that will make you feel brilliant by comparison. My favorite is the guy who cooked his pasta from both ends at once.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
“When you say working, are they [airstrikes on Yemen] stopping the Houthis, no. Are they going to continue, yes,”
-President Goodbrain, explaining why he will continue to be checkmated by a bunch of Yemeni hillbillies as he attempts to protect Israel from economic damage while it carries out a genocide.
Seriously, this war with Yemen is as delusional as anything Trump has said or done. The difference is that violence in the name of the American empire is accepted by liberals, so they don’t register how insane Biden has become.
How should countries that depend on shipping in that part of the world deal with the hillbillies sinking freighters? Would our response be different if Iran was sinking ships in the region?
Ansarallah’s demand is for Israel to end its assault on Gaza, and they’ll end the blockade in return when that happens. Morality aside, Biden should have recognized that Israel’s war was a lost cause that was threatening both regional stability and international shipping. He could have muzzled his dog by cutting Israel off from the American military and diplomatic support they depend on if they didn’t end their slaughter. Then Ansarallah would have declared victory and ended the blockade.
Instead he went to war with Yemen, despite the fact his diplomatic position was so weak that he couldn’t recruit a single Red Sea country into joining his war. This completed Ansarallah’s blockade for them by turning the Red Sea into an active war zone. Insurers look at two militaries trading missile strikes across the sea route and raise their prices accordingly, so it has become cheaper for shipping companies to simply avoid the Red Sea and go around South Africa. The longer this goes on, the more US Navy’s raison d’etre of protecting international shipping is coming into question as it fails to actually secure those trade routes against attacks from the poorest country in the region. It also materially weakens the US navy as it burns through its stockpile $2 million interceptor missiles shooting down $5,000 Yemeni drones. It’s going so badly that the Biden administration’s only plan seems to be for China to bail them out.
This is why I say that this war is a delusional act by an insane president with no understanding of the reality he’s supposed to be governing in. It’s a moral, economic, diplomatic, and strategic disaster no matter how you look at it. If America was a serious country Biden would be impeached for it, but America is a joke so he’s not going anywhere.
We await your essay in the next issue of Foreign Affairs explaining why a POTUS who doesn’t simply acquiesce to the demands of terrorists is, ipso facto, insane and should be impeached.
In the meantime, this country, and the world, is extraordinarily blessed to have an administration of exceptionally accomplished career foreign service officials running policy for probably the most experienced-in-foreign-policy POTUS we’ve had since probably John Quincy Adams. It’s an extremely challenging situation and region strategically, and not one for simplistic neophytes demanding either rainbows and unicorns or crippling isolationism.
See what I mean when I say liberals just accept violence in the name of the American empire? You can walk them through every single reason why America choosing to escalate violence is a disaster that only weakens its position, but they just brush it off because they want to see their great leaders (as long as they have a D next to their name) hurt the enemies of America.
I’ll leave it to you though: When you consider everything that has happened since October 7th, how has Biden’s unconditional support for Israel (up to and including going to war with Yemen and losing) been anything other than a moral, political, economic, diplomatic, and strategic disaster? How is his continued support for the multiple wars in the Middle East that have grown out of it not insanity?
This. Americans have been trained to be opinionated, to think their ideas are as valid as someone like Biden’s because they’ve read some articles or done some study. We need more epistemic humility! We can assume that none of us has the capacity to understand the situation as well as Biden, who has had access for decades to intelligence reports, conversations with other leaders, advice from experts and insiders of all sorts, etc, that we never will, plus his positions have given him ample time and motivation to soak it all up. We can discuss things and try to understand, but we’re far too ignorant to know of all the likely ramifications of any given action he might be able to take.
Doug notes << former President Donald Trump said Saturday he would encourage Russia to “do whatever the hell they want” if it attacked a NATO country that didn’t pay enough for defense. >>
Right now, the foxnews.com home page has dozens of stories, with the top headline “Dem attacks fans not standing for NFL’s controversial Black national anthem”. It has no story about Trump abandoning NATO allies. People in the right wing bubble won’t even know how despicable Trump is.
Biden tried to make a joke about forgetting things but it fell flat. Where he said Steve Ducey (Fox) that he must be forgetful because he was talking to him. Maybe John Stewart will have it tonight since the rest of the media didn’t point it out.
He delivered it badly because he was angry. It was the right idea, and would have worked if he could have communicated real amusement.
So, should we nickname Tucker Carlson “Tokyo Rose”? Or, “Kremlin Puke”?
“If a bunch of people get together and declare themselves a nation, who are you to tell them they’re not?” Wouldn’t this make secession by, say, Texas or Cascadia, legitimate?
So clearly it’s more complicated than I implied. But I wouldn’t dismiss those “nations” out of hand. My personal opinion about Texas’ first secession is that the Civil War was inevitable, no matter what Lincoln wanted, because the economics of slavery only worked if the slave empire kept expanding. The North could fight immediately over secession, or it could fight later over the western territories or the South’s eventual invasion of Mexico or Cuba.
If there is a supernatural being along the lines of what’s presented in the Gospels, he certainly does “get” them, and if he ever has the opportunity to encounter these uber-grifters, having their money-changing tables turned over in their temples of fraud and avarice are going to be the least of their problems.
According to a lot of people, England and France should have accepted a ceasefire with Germany in the summer of 1944.
“Meanwhile, my social media feed was blowing up with the observation that If Jesus had that many millions on hand, he would probably use it to feed the poor rather than to buy Super Bowl ads. It does seem like a rather mysterious way for the Lord to work.”
Actually, one of the most important mandates for Christians is to evangelize. So it is important to spend millions for that purpose, as long as it is spent wisely. In this case it has. And, as Jesus once pointed out: Matthew 4:4 “Man does not live by bread alone.”