The fact of the matter is that almost nobody who works for a living has the time they wish they did to look, feel or be their best, much less to cultivate a highly aesthetic relationship with a thing called ease.
– Monica Hesse
“Tradwives, stay-at-home girlfriends and the dream of feminine leisure”
This week’s featured posts are “A Different Take on Retro Conservative Fantasy“, “The Arizona Abortion Ruling“, and “Republicans Scramble to Contain their Abortion Disaster“.
This week everybody was talking about abortion
My thoughts about the week’s developments are parceled out between two featured posts. I specifically examine the Arizona Supreme Court’s reinstatement of a draconian 1864 law in “The Arizona Abortion Ruling“. (Surprise: I agree that the majority read the state’s horrible laws correctly.) And I look at the larger political situation in “Republicans Scramble to Contain their Abortion Disaster“.
and Iran’s retaliation against Israel
Ever since Hamas’ October 7 attacks, one of the main goals of the Biden administration has been to keep the situation from escalating into a larger war involving Iran directly, and possibly drawing in Saudi Arabia and other regional powers. That got more difficult two weeks ago when Israel bombed an Iranian consulate in Syria, killing two Iranian generals.
Iran vowed to respond, and Sunday it launched hundreds of drones and missiles at Israel. With American help, Israeli air defenses seem to have handled the attack, which resulted in little damage.
If this were a playground spat — something I think the Middle East often resembles — the proper Israeli response would be something like “Nyah, nyah, missed me.” But apparently not everyone thinks so. So Biden is now trying to talk Israel out of launching some kind of attack on Iran.
and Trump’s first criminal trial
So the day has actually arrived: Trump is in court as a criminal defendant. Jury selection is underway.
Nobody has come up with the right name for this case yet. Sometimes it’s called the “hush money” indictment, but that makes it sound as if Trump were accused of paying hush money to cover up his affair with porn star Stormy Daniels — which isn’t true. Cheating on your wife with a porn star and then paying her not to tell anybody may be sleazy, but it isn’t illegal.
The actual charge here is falsifying business records, which makes the case sound like some technical bookkeeping error. That also is misleading. The course of illegality here is more circuitous: Trump had his fixer, Michael Cohen, pay for Stormy’s silence out of his own funds just before the 2016 election. (I can imagine the conversation where Cohen explained to his wife that he had taken out a home equity loan so that he could give money to a porn star.) That money wasn’t recorded as either a campaign expense or an in-kind contribution. And then the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen, recording the expense as legal fees. Those legal-fee invoices are the false business records.
So at its root, the case is about defrauding the electorate in 2016.
Anyway, all Trump’s last-minute motions to try to get the trial delayed failed, so here we are. Estimates on the timing vary, but most legal commentators predict a verdict well before the summer conventions.
There’s a lot of debate over what political impact the trial will have. One school of thought says this is all good for Trump, because it plays into his persecution narrative. His voters are never going to believe he’s guilty anyway, so there’s nothing to gain by convicting him.
I disagree. Trump is strongest politically when his campaign can spin gauzy tales about how great everything was in 2019. (They’ve shoved the nightmare of 2020 down the memory hole.) He’s weakest when his personality is front and center, reminding people of how much most of us hated having him as our president.
Trump on trial is going to be Trump at his worst: glowering, muttering, unable to control himself, and doing his best to incite violence against the long list of people he thinks have wronged him. The main issue at the trial is going to be whether Trump knew how this whole scheme worked, and numerous witnesses are going to say that he did. The only person in a position to testify that he didn’t is Trump himself, and Trump (as we’ve seen in the E. Jean Carroll defamation case) is a terrible witness. If he testifies — which he says he’ll do, but I doubt — he’ll insult the judge, alienate the jury, and probably convict himself.
One thing I’ve picked up from online interactions with Trump defenders is that most of them have preserved their faith in his general innocence by refusing to see the evidence against him. They didn’t watch the January 6 Committee hearings, haven’t read the indictments, and so on. They don’t have some alternate interpretation of the evidence that clears him, but they just say “politically motivated persecution”, believe him when he says “I did nothing wrong”, and refuse to delve any deeper. That kind of intentional ignorance is going to be hard to maintain once this trial takes over the news cycle.
In particular, it’s going to be hard for members of the jury. So even if a juror or two comes in as a Trump sympathizer, they might end up voting to convict. Especially after he glowers at them for several weeks.
Trump’s cognitive decline is getting harder to explain away. Here, he doesn’t just get the wrong word (as Biden sometimes does), his verbal center seems to glitch completely.
and you also might be interested in …
Kansas’ Democratic governor, Laura Kelly, vetoed a bill banning gender-affirming care, saying that it “tramples on parental rights”. Republicans have a supermajority in the legislature and are going to try to override the veto.
This is typical of Republicans: They support the rights of parents until the parents do something they don’t like. Similarly, they support local control until local governments do something they don’t like. All their apparent “principles” are just rhetoric.
The NYT is reaching the point where parodies just can’t keep up. Wednesday, it did a both-sides treatment of abortion: “Two Imperfect Messengers Take On Abortion“. I mean, Trump brags about torpedoing Roe v Wade and Biden supports legislation to restore it, but they’re basically the same.
The WaPo talked to Trump Media investors who are trying to keep the faith in the face of a plunging stock price. No matter how much they lose, they’ll never admit that they’ve been had by a lifelong conman.
Meanwhile, the conman and his insider cronies took steps this morning to offer more shares for sale, driving the stock price down to a new low: $27.55 a little before noon today. That’s down 15% since this morning, and down from its March 27 peak around $70.
So O. J. Simpson died of cancer this week. I’m somewhat amazed by how much coverage this has gotten. Yes, his murder trial dominated the news in 1994 and was an important moment in the transition to news-as-entertainment. But if you’re under 40, you may not know who he was.
I thought I’d add something to the discussion nobody else seems to remember: what a cultural presence OJ was before the murder and the trial. Here’s a 1978 clip from the Robin Williams comedy Mork and Mindy, where Mork was an alien sent to explore Earth. (This was the role that first made Williams famous.)
Every episode would end with Mork reporting to Orson, his contact back on Ork. This episode’s report included a terrible pun. Mork told Orson that some Earth people worship O. J. Simpson. “The Juice?” Orson asked, displaying a mysterious familiarity with OJ’s nickname. Mork replied: “Yes. And the gentiles also.”
and let’s close with something dark
Last Monday’s eclipse dominated public attention for a few hours. Maybe you watched a partial eclipse, or traveled to see totality, or missed it completely. But never mind. Lots of people took pictures. Here’s Wired magazine’s selections of the best ones.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
“That kind of intentional ignorance is going to be hard to maintain once this trial takes over the news cycle.”
Keep in mind that Trump supporters don’t pay attention to the same news sources as non-Trump supporters. The trial isn’t going to take over their news cycle.
I love your thoughts on “ease”! If we think of ease as leisure, then we can go back to Aristotle to find out how best to use it. I recommend Aristotle’s Way, by Edith Hall – from her chapter on Leisure: “His radical ideas about leisure have implications for our own times, especially his insistence that leisure is more important than work and that people misuse it if they are not educated in constructive pastimes. He notes that Sparta never flourishes in times of peace because its constitution, while training the Spartans well for combat, “has not educated them to be able to live in idleness.” Boredom is the enemy not only of peace but of happiness.”
Hall, Edith. Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (p. 183). Penguin Publishing Group. Kindle Edition.
I propose calling what has been referred to as the hush money trial as “The John Edwards Reboot.” It conveys that the government isn’t going after Trump for being Trump but is applying the law like it did with a Democrat in similar circumstances.
Trump’s lawyers may be able to make the argument that the government can’t have things both ways and have called Edwards’s similar spending a personal expense, while they call Trump’s spending a campaign expense. Ultimately, though, both are criminal trials about lying about money.
“Trump faces 34 felony counts alleging that he falsified New York business records in order to conceal damaging information to influence the 2016 presidential election.”
From here:
https://www.npr.org/2024/04/15/1238536885/trump-hush-money-trial
Something to note about the TradWives movement is that a real TradWife doesn’t engage in using her lifestyle as content for her social media career. It’s a mistake to conflate the two pursuits, or draw general conclusions based on observing the social media arc of those hawking TradWife content.
When are people finally going to grok that the content produced for social media consumption is no more real than the scripted fictional character who starred in The Apprentice? And that, like all media properties, the content gets stale, folds its tent, and consumers move on to the next big thing.
TradWives are real, and they’re making a choice, for a variety of reasons, many of which aren’t simply because of a transaction to gain what appears to others choosing a different path a life of ease and leisure. Given that it’s a choice now, rather than the only option for most, it’s worth serious examination, and that requires a helluva a lot more than following a few IG accounts for however long it takes to whip up some dismissive derision and the easy narrative that eventually, these gold-diggers will get bored and self-actualize.