The Weekly Sift

A lot of the posts on this blog are motivated, in one way or another, by questions people ask me, or by worries I hear my friends express. They have concerns that they don’t have the time to research in detail, so I do that and report back.

My typical post is an expression of confidence: You may be wondering about this topic, but I think I’ve got it figured out, at least up to a point.

Lately, though, I’ve been hearing questions either from friends or via social media and thinking, “Those are good questions.” I usually have a few worthwhile thoughts on the topic, but nothing I can tie up with a bright red bow.

So this week I’m trying out a Q&A format as a way of lowering the bar a little. I don’t necessarily have the answers, but this is what I think.

Will Donald Trump ever be held accountable for the things he’s done?

I believe he will, but I can understand the frustration of all the people who ask this question. The justice system takes far too long under ordinary circumstances, and when a powerful man’s entire strategy is based on delay, the time lapse between crime and punishment can become enormous. Plus, I think the government lost about a year because Merrick Garland really didn’t want to start his term by pursuing charges against the former president. Trump keeps saying the charges are politically motivated, but I think what’s really political is that one-year delay. (This, I will add, is a theme in my thinking about the Trump trials: He believes — or says, it’s always hard to know if Trump believes what he’s saying — that he’s being persecuted for political reasons. But in fact he’s benefiting from favoritism.)

However, the mills of justice continue to grind. Trump is facing four separate indictments: federal indictments in D. C. and Florida, plus state indictments in New York and Georgia.

I can imagine the New York case failing for technical reasons. This is the case the comes out of the Stormy Daniels payoff, which Michael Cohen has already done jail time for. The charge against him is falsifying business records, and the 34 counts are 34 false documents. No one is even claiming the documents aren’t false, so he’s clearly guilty of the thing he’s been charged with. But it’s possible to argue that he should have been charged under the misdemeanor version of the law rather than the felony version, and if that’s true then the statute of limitations has run out.

The other three prosecutions look very solid to me, though, and if they get to a jury he’ll be found guilty. In his public comments, Trump doesn’t even address the evidence against him, because he can’t: He’s guilty and the government has the goods on him. (He talks about the prosecutions all the time, but mainly makes false ad hominem arguments: Jack Smith is a deranged thug, Fani Willis had an affair with a gang member, and so on.)

The big question is whether he can be tried before the election. His only hope of escape is to delay past the election, retake the presidency, and use the powers of his office to obstruct justice.

Unfortunately, the most open-and-shut case is the one that drew a judge biased in Trump’s favor: the classified documents case. After leaving office, he had no right to keep those documents, he said he had given them all back, he had them moved to avoid detection, and then a search found them in his possession. There’s really no defending that set of facts. (His only attempt to do so is a flight of fantasy: Trump’s claim that the Presidential Records Act gives him a right to keep classified documents at all, much less store them in cardboard boxes in his bathroom or show them to people he wants to impress, is legally absurd.)

The judge can’t change the facts, and probably would be reversed on appeal if she threw the case out for some bogus reason, but she can collaborate with Trump to delay past the election. The other judges won’t do that, so I’m pretty sure we’ll see a guilty verdict before the election in at least the federal election-interference trial. That’s the most important case anyway.

Undoubtedly Trump will find some excuse to appeal, so he won’t actually be in jail on election day. But to see him squirming out of accountability requires that the public witness a trial proving his guilt, that his guilt on a very serious charge be validated by a jury, and that he win the election anyway. That scenario seems unlikely to me.

Meanwhile, there are the civil cases. He’s already lost a multi-million-dollar settlement to E. Jean Carroll, and has been judged guilty of fraud in a New York case that could take down the whole Trump Organization. He hasn’t had to pay the money yet, though.

The New York civil case should end in a week or so, and the judge’s decision about damages should follow (in the NYT’s estimate) within a few weeks.

One final consideration: Can Trump count on higher courts (like maybe the Supremes) to save him? Probably not. We saw an example this week when an appeals court upheld nearly all of Judge Chutkan’s gag order on what Trump can say about the D. C. case. The Supreme Court had no appetite for getting involved in Trump’s lawsuits to overturn the 2020 election, and I doubt they feel much different now.

What’s going on with Ukraine aid?

In theory, nearly all Democrats and about half of the Republicans in Congress support continuing aid to Ukraine as it resists the Russian invasion. But somehow the aid doesn’t pass.

Currently, the aid package Biden proposed is tied to a border-security bill, which Republicans want to use to restore Trump border policies.

This is a tactic that I can’t remember Democrats using: claiming to support X, but refusing to vote for it unless they can also get Y. (Suggest an example in the comments if you have one.) But it’s a standard tactic for Republicans, and gets trotted out whenever there’s a budget impasse: We don’t want to shut down the government, but you have to give us something to keep us from doing it. Trump used to claim to want to give the Dreamers legal status, but no bargain the Democrats offered ever contained a big enough payoff to get him to agree to it.

Democratic Senator Chris Murphy suggests (but doesn’t get behind) a stronger spin: “If I were a cynic, I would say that Republicans have decided to tie support for Ukraine to immigration reform, because they want Ukraine aid to fail. But I’m not a cynic.”

Maybe I am that cynical: It’s credible to me that MAGA Republicans are doing the bidding of Vladimir Putin, who helped put Donald Trump in the White House and is a hero of the global white-Christian-supremacist authoritarian movement. According to The Guardian, unnamed Republicans in Congress are meeting with representatives of Hungarian authoritarian leader Viktor Orbán “to push for an end to US military support for Ukraine”. The Hungarians are in town for a two-day conference sponsored by the Heritage Foundation.

Are liberal media outlets giving Liz Cheney too much good publicity? Didn’t she used to be evil?

Politically and philosophically, Liz is a clone of her father, who was the dark heart of the Bush II administration. So it’s not hard to imagine a Princess-of-Darkness role somewhere in her future.

However …

During Bush II, just before the public began turning against the Cheney-inspired Iraq War, I heard Michael Moore speak to a crowd in Manchester. He predicted that people would soon start turning against the war, but told us that we needed to make it easy for them to do that. When people joined us, he said, we needed to welcome them.

Well, Liz Cheney has joined the effort to stop Donald Trump from bringing an end to the American experiment in democracy. And she hasn’t joined in an I’ll-give-one-interview way, like John Kelly, or in a now-that-I’m-out-the-door-I’ll-reveal-what-I-think way or in a making-excuses-not-to-help way like Mitt Romney. Liz is out there touring the country, talking to anybody who will listen to her, and telling them “our focus has got to be on defeating Donald Trump“.

At the moment I’m about half-way through her recent book. While making serious claims about Trump and his Republican allies, it’s impressively down-to-Earth: I saw this. I did that. I talked to this person. She’s managed to sound the alarm without sounding alarmist.

Is she convincing anybody who wasn’t already convinced? I have no idea. But I don’t see how we save the Republic without more people like her.

If everything works out, maybe I’ll have the luxury of demonizing Liz Cheney again someday. That would be nice.

What should we make of the whole Hunter Biden thing?

Hunter received a new batch of indictments this week, all having to do with tax charges. For Hunter himself, this is a big deal. If found guilty, he could serve years in prison.

This is also a big deal for Joe Biden the person, a father who loves his only surviving son despite all the ways Hunter has screwed up his own life and made trouble for his family.

Republicans love to claim that Hunter’s troubles implicate Joe Biden, the president. But so far they’ve shown no connection. We know that Hunter took advantage of his name to do business with foreign companies, a practice which is unethical but not necessarily illegal, and which implicates the Trumps far more than the Bidens. Hunter may have told people that he had pull with his Dad and could get them special favors, or maybe he just didn’t correct them when they assumed he could. That, again, is unsavory.

But here’s what I would need to see to say that President Joe has been implicated: evidence that he knew Hunter was making promises in his name, together with instances where Hunter’s associates arguably got some kind of special treatment from the Biden or Obama-Biden administrations. I’d also be impressed by evidence that some of the money Hunter was making found it’s way back to his Dad. (If you read the tax indictment, it looks like Hunter blew all the money on himself.)

If that kind of evidence exists, then by all means impeach President Biden. (Feel free to bookmark this page and quote that line back to me sometime in the future.) But while Republicans keep making wild claims that they will produce such evidence any day now, they still haven’t.

Should President Biden be running for reelection?

I hate to even raise this question, because in some sense the controversy is self-sustaining: People are talking about it because people are talking about it.

Here’s what I think: President Biden has done an amazing job and deserves to be reelected, but so far the public is not hearing that story.

He has dealt with the post-pandemic economic upheaval extremely well: We have full employment again, and inflation is returning to pre-pandemic levels. (I’m currently in South Carolina, where gas is back under $3 a gallon.) He pulled NATO back together after Trump tore it apart, and engineered a Ukraine aid pipeline that has kept Putin from conquering the country. He got us out of Afghanistan. He kept the promise Trump repeatedly broke, and got a bipartisan infrastructure bill passed to rebuild America. Working with tiny majorities in both houses of Congress, he got the first serious anti-climate-change bill passed.

It’s a fine body of work, making him one of the best presidents of my lifetime. He absolutely deserves another term, and ought to be leading Trump in the polls by a wide margin.

But he isn’t. Why is something of a mystery. “Generic Democrat” is leading Trump in the polls, though no specific Democrat is doing much better than Biden.

You can read that two ways: Nate Silver claims that other Democrats suffer from lack of name recognition, and that if they were nominated, they’d run closer to Generic Democrat. The alternate view is that the full force of right-wing propaganda is aimed at Biden, and would train itself on any alternative candidate as soon as Biden stepped aside.

I tend to lean the second way, but I’m not sure about it. Again and again, we’ve seen people claim that they’d like to vote for a Democrat, but there’s something wrong with this Democrat: Biden’s age, Hillary’s emails, Obama’s birth certificate, and so on.

When you have the kind of resources conservatives command, and the willingness to use those resources without any scruples or standards, you can create an issue about anybody. So if you can find me a Democrat mud won’t stick to, I’ll support that candidate in a heartbeat. Otherwise, I think I’ll stay with the old guy.