The Weekly Sift

When the latest Trump indictment got unsealed Friday, I took it as a personal favor. Otherwise, we wouldn’t see it until tomorrow, when Trump makes his first court appearance. And since I’m planning not to do a Sift next week, it would be two weeks before I got a chance to comment.

So this week’s featured post is “The Mar-a-Lago Documents Indictment”. The indictment is getting plenty of coverage, so I assume you’ve already seen the pictures and heard the basics. The purpose of my article is to pull it all together, filter out the nonsensical Trump defenses and baseless speculations, and make a few personal observations based on my own experience (decades ago) of having a top-secret clearance. That should be out shortly.

The weekly summary has a few other things to cover: the smoke cloud that covered the Northeast earlier this week, the growing number of Republicans running for president, the Supreme Court’s surprising refusal to keep chipping away at the Voting Rights Act, the revolt of Kevin McCarthy’s right wing, the golf merger, and a few other things, leading up to an amusing article about where not to stop on your summer vacation. I’ll try to get that out by noon.

I got a late start this morning, so everything is likely to show up later in the day than usual.

The big news this week is the debt-ceiling deal, but it’s still too soon to say whether Congress will pass it without major changes, or at all. The weekly summary will discuss what we know and the deal’s prospects.

There’s also another Trump indictment looming. The special counsel’s investigation of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents seems to be winding up, and the possible charges are looking more serious than originally expected. Meanwhile, the leader of the Oath Keepers got sentenced to 18 years in prison for the seditious conspiracy he participated in on January 6. The open question is whether Jack Smith can trace that conspiracy all the way up to Trump.

Ron DeSantis is officially a presidential candidate now. He announced his candidacy on Twitter in an interview with Elon Musk. It’s a curious choice and the event was embarrassingly glitchy. Those two seem to me to deserve each other.

Ken Paxton got impeached. Turkish strongman Recep Tayyip Erdoğan got re-elected. Tina Turner died, and a bunch of other things happened that I’ll cover in the weekly summary. I hope to get that out by 1 EDT.

But the featured post isn’t about any of that. One of the head-shaking facets of our political system — which the DeSantis announcement and the debt-ceiling deal bring into focus — is that many of our most serious problems, the ones that have the biggest impact on Americans’ lives, aren’t being discussed at all.

This week’s featured post is the first of what I hope will be a series on these neglected issues. It will focus on the decline in Americans’ life expectancy over the last few years, and the decades-long trend of American life expectancy falling behind that of comparable countries. We often tell this story in terms of individual moral failure — bad diet, lack of exercise, etc. — but each of the major factors is rooted in political decisions that could be reversed, if we had the political will to do so.

I’ll try to get that out by 10.

One measure of how busy a week has been is how distant Tuesday’s news seems by the next Monday. Last Tuesday is when the E. Jean Carroll verdict was announced: The jury refused to say definitively that Trump had raped Carroll, but it did rule that he sexually assaulted her and then maliciously lied about her when she went public.

Seems like a while ago, doesn’t it?

Immediately after the verdict, this conventional wisdom seemed to be everywhere: Satisfying as it is to see that Trump’s lies don’t fly in a court of law, the verdict won’t actually mean anything politically. If anything, Trump’s personality cult will just double down on the Deep-State-persecution narrative and support him more than ever.

In this week’s first featured post, I’m going to challenge that view. The Carroll verdict might matter, even to dyed-in-the-wool Trumpists. But if you’re waiting for one of them to announce their re-evaluation of Trump on television, you’ll wait in vain. That’s not how sea changes happen on the Right. But they do happen sometimes. So in “Why the Carroll Verdict Might Matter”, I’ll describe how conservatives actually change their minds, and what you should be listening for. That’s ready to go and should be out shortly.

The second featured post concerns the Trump town hall that CNN aired Wednesday. I’ll let other people correct all the lies Trump told and lament how he mistreated the “nasty” moderator. (It’s amazing how many Trump lines sound like they could come from Gollum. Somebody needs to redub Trump clips with Gollum’s voice.) In “Normalizing Trump normalizes political violence” I’ll focus on his unapologetic embrace of January 6. Can we really debate a violent attempt to overturn an election as if it were an ordinary political issue? That should be out between 10 and 11 EDT.

The weekly summary will cover the end of Title 42 on the southern border, the start of Ukraine’s spring offensive, Turkey’s election, Elon bending his knee to Erdogan’s demands for censorship, and a few other things. That should appear sometime around noon.

Most of the news that attracted my attention this week happened at the state level, where Republican majorities and supermajorities have gotten increasingly extreme. Separately, these are stories that might travel below your radar (like the Texas Senate passing a bill to eliminate tenure in the state universities), so I’ve pulled several of them together in a piece I’m calling “Laboratories of Autocracy”. Among other things, the post will explain why you need to learn the German word gleichschaltung. That should be out maybe around 10 EDT.

In another era, President Biden announcing his reelection bid would be the week’s lead story. But there are continuing scandals at the Supreme Court, everybody’s still speculating about the real reason Tucker Carlson was fired, and a civil trial just started that will hang on whether a jury believes the previous president committed rape. So Biden gets pushed well down the page. One of the things Biden promised was not to be in our face 24/7 like Trump was (and largely still is). That’s a promise he’s kept, but it must be frustrating not to be able to grab public attention when you really want it.

Oh, and there’s been another mass shooting. We still cover those, don’t we? They haven’t quite reached the dog-bites-man stage yet.

Anyway, I’ll aim to get the weekly summary out by noon.

Not much happened this week: The FBI caught the guy who leaked all those documents (and Trump supporters rallied around him). The abortion-pill injunction rose through the judicial system, but is still unresolved. The Fox News trial is about to start. Clarence Thomas is even more corrupt than we realized last week. The Justins made a triumphant return to the Tennessee legislature. Idaho outlawed “abortion trafficking”, while the Missouri House tried to defund all the state’s libraries. Alan Bragg sued Jim Jordan in an attempt to stop his interference in the Trump prosecution. Something something something Bud Light. Oh, and we had another mass shooting of teen-agers.

Hardly anything, in other words.

But I decided to take a step back and look at something longer term: Why is all this happening? Yes, it almost all revolves around the Republican Party’s continuing descent into fascism. But why is that happening? Why now? What global trend opened up opportunities for the likes of Trump, Modi, Orban, Netanyahu, et al?

I found two recent essays that look at this question from different directions, but coalesce around this framing: Fascism is an eternal temptation of modern politics. The mystery isn’t why we have to deal with it now, but why we didn’t have to deal with it for so many years after World War II. How did those lessons get lost?

That post still needs work, so it probably won’t show up until 10 or 11 EDT. (I’ve made it back as far as the central time zone, but I’m trying to run on my usual east-coast schedule today.) The weekly summary will cover the other stuff, and appear by about 1 or so.