I’m trying to write less about Trump and his trials, but this week that really was the news. Trump and his companies got fined hundreds of millions of dollars for fraud. Georgia prosecutor Fani Willis testified to defend herself against salacious claims that she should be disqualified from the Georgia RICO case against Trump. The New York case stemming from Trump trying to hide his hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels will be the first of Trump’s criminal cases to go to trial (on March 25). Trump’s lawyers and Jack Smith traded filings to the Supreme Court on presidential immunity. And we’re still waiting for the Court to rule on whether the 14th Amendment disqualifies Trump from running for office again.
You can be forgiven for seeing a Trump-trial headline and thinking, “Wait. Which case is this again?”
Most weeks I try to keep all this in the weekly summaries, but this week sheer length made that infeasible. So the featured post is “A Big Week in the Trump Trials”. That should appear shortly. BTW, I think the mainstream media has done a bad job explaining how Judge Engoron came up with his $355 million figure, which he didn’t just pull out of the air, so I think most people will learn something from this post.
It’s not like nothing else happened this week. Putin critic Alexei Nevalny died in a Siberian prison, and Russian forces captured a Ukrainian city, calling extra attention to the Putin sympathizers in the House and their continuing blockade against resupplying the Ukrainian forces resisting Russian conquest. The Democrats flipped George Santos’ House seat, shrinking the Republican House majority by one, and raising questions about what this means for the November elections. The guy whose testimony was the lynchpin of James Comer’s effort to impeach President Biden was indicted for making the whole thing up. The group behind the whole 2000 Mules election-fraud conspiracy theory admitted in court that they have no evidence. There was a mass shooting at the Super Bowl victory parade in Kansas City. Ezra Klein posted the first Biden-shouldn’t-run argument that has made sense to me. And a few other things.
That will all be in the weekly summary, which I’ll try to get out by noon EST. I’m planning to do something a little different with the closing this week: I want to start a conversation about dealing with fear and finding courage as we move towards the November elections. I hope a lot of readers will comment.
The Weekly Sift 
Comments
regardless of this interference with an attempt to take away the rights from we the people to choose who we wish to vote for the Supreme Court will see through this and Trump will win in the end and in a landslide
Our founding fathers fought a war to free themselves from a king. Why do you wish to bow down to one?
I wish to vote for Barack Obama. Is it “interference” with my “rights” that I’m not able to because he’s disqualified by our Constitution from holding the office of POTUS?
An honest SCOTUS – which clearly this one is not – would read the plain text language of the 14th Amendment and declare the person who not only gave aid and comfort to the insurrectionists who violently attacked our Capitol on Jan 6th in order to help overturn the election results but who led the overall seditious conspiracy to keep himself in power disqualified.
If the Supreme Court decides that Trump had absolute immunity while he was in office, then Biden could shoot and kill him before the inauguration (e.g. during a Presidential debate). The worst that could happen is that Biden might get impeached (not a sure thing that he would be convicted) and we would become a banana republic. I don’t advocate this but I hope the Supreme Court considers this in their decision.