This week, a Trump criminal trial actually started, and a jury is already in place. Opening arguments should begin this morning.
During jury selection, we saw right-wing media mount an all-out offensive against the fairness of the jury system. Trump, they claimed, could never get a fair trial in New York, or in any venue where most people didn’t vote for him. In the Manichean world of MAGA, there are Trump lovers and Trump haters, and no Trump haters could possibly put aside their hatred to listen objectively to the evidence of the case.
In this week’s featured post, I push back on that. I think we need to, because trial by jury is close to the heart of Democracy. If ordinary people can’t be trusted to be jurors, then how can we trust them to be voters?
I think it’s important to see this attack on the fairness of juries as part of a larger authoritarian attack on all sources of truth other than the Great Leader himself. Over the last few years, we have heard that we can’t trust public health officials, climate scientists, women, the news media, judges, election officials, historians, librarians, or pretty much anyone else. Only the Leader speaks the Truth. Only he can be trusted. That’s the essence of any authoritarian system.
I look back on my own experience on a jury and argue that we can trust juries, including this jury. Rigging a verdict, even if that’s what you intend at the beginning of the trial, is actually pretty hard.
That post should appear shortly.
The weekly has a lot of other news to cover, including some Trump trial news other than jury selection. But the big news is that Speaker Johnson stood up to Marjorie Taylor Greene and let Ukraine aid come to a vote. It passed easily, as it would have if it had come to the floor six months ago. The House also passed aid to Israel and Taiwan, as well as humanitarian aid to Gaza. MTG is promising a vote to depose Johnson as speaker, which may or may not turn into yet another pointless Republican circus.
It looks like the Iran/Israel trade of attacks won’t escalate into a larger war. A VW plant in Tennessee voted to unionize. The Senate gave the Mayorkas impeachment effort exactly as much attention as it deserved. The Supreme Court is about to consider several interesting cases. And somebody shot a video of an Icelandic volcano erupting under the Northern Lights.
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.
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.
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.
Trump’s let-the-states-decide statement looked clever until Arizona actually decided.
All across the country, the abortion issue has been helping Democrats and hurting Republicans.
For decades it worked the other way: Pro-choice women were confident the Supreme Court would protect their rights, so they mostly ignored the extreme positions Republican politicians took and based their votes on other issues. But since the Dobbs decision reversed Roe v Wade last year, the intentions of elected officials matter again.
After taking their lumps in the 2022 elections, Republican politicians have been trying to figure out how to finesse the issue. How do they avoid the ire of female voters without alienating their personhood-at-conception base? Last fall, Virginia Governor Glenn Youngkin thought he had the formula: a “compromise” abortion ban at 15 weeks. But that idea went down in flames as Republicans lost control of the Virginia legislature.
Trump also has been searching for an answer. For a while he also toyed with a 15-week ban, but then last week he stalled for time, saying he’d make a statement this week. I was skeptical about this, because Trump often says he’s going to do something and then doesn’t. But in fact he did make a statement on Monday.
I don’t usually post Trump videos, but I think you need to see this to appreciate just how far off-the-rails this guy has gone. To start with, his make-up is comical; he almost looks like he’s wearing blackface. Then there are the obvious, how-stupid-do-you-think-we-are lies about how “all legal scholars, both sides, wanted and in fact demanded” the end of Roe, and Democrats “support abortion up to and even beyond the ninth month”. (In fact, Biden supports restoring the pre-Dobbs status quo, which drew a line at viability, i.e. 24-28 weeks. More radical people, like me, want the government to butt out completely and let women decide how to handle their own problem pregnancies. But describing that view as “support” for abortion is dishonest. I, for one, am neutral on abortion; I have never tried to persuade a woman to get one.)
He’s also proud of being opportunistic on the issue.
You must follow your heart on this issue. But remember: You must also win elections.
That let-the-states-decide position looked clever for about a day. But then a state decided: Tuesday, Arizona’s Supreme Court reinstated an 1864 law banning all abortions that aren’t necessary to save a woman’s life. (In the previous post, I explain why I believe this is a correct reading of a horrible legal situation. It’s the legislature, not the court, that should never have allowed this to happen.)
Then Trump had to scramble: He said Arizona went too far, and predicted the situation would be “straightened out”. Arizona’s mini-Trump, Senate candidate Kari Lake, completely reversed her position. Previously, she had specifically endorsed the 1864 law (by its number in the legal code). But now she says
I oppose today’s ruling, and I am calling on Katie Hobbs and the State Legislature to come up with an immediate common sense solution that Arizonans can support.
But Lake hasn’t said anything. As of this moment, neither Lake nor Trump (nor any other Republican who either has real power or is running to get it) has made an actual proposal to fix Arizona’s draconian abortion law. When it comes time to govern — and not just posture — that’s what you need to do: put a real proposal on paper and vote it up or down, knowing that you’ll make some people unhappy.
Are any Republicans, at either the state or national levels, ready to govern? That’s what the coming weeks will tell us.
The result is horrible, but it’s a correct reading of the the legislature’s mess.
Before he was appointed to the Supreme Court, Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes is supposed to have admonished an idealistic lawyer: “This is not a court of justice, young man. It is a court of law.” In other words, courts exist to apply the laws, not to fix them.
I was holding that idea in mind when I read the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling reinstating an 1864 abortion law. Undoubtedly, this result — that all abortions are banned excepting only those that protect a woman’s life, and not excepting cases of rape or incest or even health consequences short of death — is horrible. But it could nonetheless be a correct reading of Arizona’s laws.
So here’s the timeline, as I understand it.
In 1864, the territorial legislature passed a law that said:
A person who provides, supplies or administers to a pregnant woman, or procures such woman to take any medicine, drugs or substance, or uses or employs any instrument or other means whatever, with intent thereby to procure the miscarriage of such woman, unless it is necessary to save her life, shall be punished by imprisonment in the state prison for not less than two years nor more than five years.
That wording got adopted as part of the penal code approved by the legislature in 1913, shortly after Arizona became a state.
The statute’s constitutionality got challenged in 1971, before Roe v Wade, and after some back-and-forth, an appeals court ruled it constitutional. Then the US Supreme Court’s Roe decision came in 1973, and Arizona courts recognized that the 1864 law was unconstitutional under Roe’s recognition of a federal constitutional right to abortion. But this didn’t stop the legislature from testing the boundaries of Roe.
Between 1973 and 2022, and conforming to the federal abortion right established in Roe, the Arizona Legislature codified dozens of abortion statutes in Title 36. … To the extent permitted by Roe and its progeny, all of these statutes restricted abortions, including adding many procedural requirements for physicians performing abortions.
In 2022, shortly before Dobbs was officially announced, the legislature passed S. B. 1164, which amended Title 36 of the state laws. The main thrust of S.B. 1164 was to ban abortions after 15 weeks, which would violate the rights established in Roe. This was one of many laws red-state legislatures passed after Trump’s three judges joined the Supreme Court. The purpose was to see if the new Supreme Court would chip away at Roe’s protections. What’s relevant for this case is the exact wording:
A. Except in a medical emergency, a physician may not perform, induce or attempt to perform or induce an abortion unless the physician or the referring physician has first made a determination of the probable gestational age of the unborn human being and documented that gestational age in the maternal patient’s chart and, if required, in a report required to be filed with the department . …
B. Except in a medical emergency, a physician may not intentionally or knowingly perform, induce or attempt to perform or induce an abortion if the probable gestational age of the unborn human being has been determined to be greater than fifteen weeks.
Notice that both provisions are phrased negatively: “a physician may not perform …”. Under the prevailing legal interpretation of 2022, i.e. Roe, the abortions not explicitly prohibited would be allowed. But nothing in S. B. 1164 says they are allowed. Quite the opposite:
This act does not: (1) Create or recognize a right to abortion or alter generally accepted medical standards. The Legislature does not intend this act to make lawful an abortion that is currently unlawful. (2) Repeal, by implication or otherwise, section 13-3603, Arizona Revised Statutes, or any other applicable state law regulating or restricting abortion
Section 13-3603 was the descendant of the 1864 law.
So then the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision reversed Roe. This undid the 1973 finding that the 1864 law was unconstitutional, leaving the current state court to pick up the pieces.
Arizona’s Democratic attorney general argued that by banning abortions after 15 weeks, S. B. 1164 implicitly authorized them prior to 15 weeks, and implicitly repealed the 1864 law. A dissenting opinion in the decision agrees with this argument, but I think the majority got it right: There is no affirmative language in S. B. 1164 that authorizes any abortions.
I agree completely with the moral arguments denouncing this outcome: It’s barbaric that Arizona’s women’s rights are constrained by a law passed before statehood and before women had a right to vote. No court of justice would allow this. But we don’t have courts of justice; we have courts of law.
What can be done? The obvious way to repair this situation is for the legislature to do explicitly what the dissenting opinion thinks it did implicitly when it passed S. B. 1164: repeal 13-3603. That would leave Arizona with a 15-week abortion ban recognizing certain exceptions — maybe not the ideal outcome, but a far better one than the current situation.
Sometimes unrealistic fantasies raise questions that deserve serious answers.
The Washington Post’s “Tradwives, SAHGs and the dream of feminine leisure” is one of those rare articles that is way more interesting than its apparent topic. OK, there’s a “tradwife” trend of sorts: social media influencers who style themselves as classic 1950s housewives, and a parallel group of stay-at-home girlfriends (or what we used to call “kept women”). But this “trend” doesn’t represent all that many women, and you probably don’t need a major newspaper to tell you what to think about them. After all, if women had been happy in these kinds of roles, second-wave feminism would never have caught on.
But Monica Hesse takes a much more interesting approach. She doesn’t analyze tradwifery as a serious option, as in “Were women really happier before feminism?”. Instead, she approaches that vision for what it is: a fantasy. “I dream of feminine leisure”, say many of the tradwives and SAHGs. And then Hesse asks why that dream might be beguiling.
Her down-to-earth answer is simple: Life is hard these days.
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.
What if the problem is not feminism but capitalism — specifically the American version, where work-life balance is a punchline? What if instead of 11 paid vacation days, as the average American gets, these women got the full month that is standard in the United Kingdom? What if instead of five (or six or seven) days a week, they worked the four days that countries such as South Africa and Belgium are piloting? Would that allow enough time to do a full skin-care regimen and pack a great suitcase? If college weren’t so ghastly expensive here, maybe that one lady’s daughter wouldn’t be so keen on the patriarchy as a route to leisure that bypasses the long, uphill road to financial independence.
It wasn’t fair when women had no choice to stay home. It’s not fair if women are working but are still doing the work of maintaining a home. It’s not fair if both men and women are trying to juggle it together and are still finding that there aren’t enough hours or dollars in a day.
Who wouldn’t dream of feminine leisure?
To her credit, Hesse also imagines the male side of this fantasy: Who wouldn’t want to return from work each evening to find a home in perfect order, dinner on the table, and a well-rested spouse ready to draw you into the “ease” she has been cultivating all day? (Now you just need a willing partner and a senior-vice-president salary to pay for it all.)
Hesse’s article expresses a point of view that could generalize: Maybe we’re approaching retro conservative fantasies all wrong. At root, most of them aren’t really about then, they’re critiques of now: Why does life have to be so hard? Why is it so hard to pay for college? To get a career started? To find a serious relationship partner and stay together? To afford a home? To fit children into the equation and offer them at least as good a chance as you had?
Maybe people who are trying to wish their way out of this box deserve our empathy rather than our condemnation. The various retro fantasies they indulge may not be fact-based or workable in practice, but at least they address the question: Life wouldn’t be so hard if some sugar daddy would take care of me. Or if immigrants and minorities hadn’t stolen my place in line. Or if everybody went back to Jesus. Or if the government stopped sending our money overseas. Or if we had a strong-man leader who could make our country great again (whatever era “again” is supposed to point to).
Maybe the best liberal response isn’t a screed about the evils of sexism or xenophobia or authoritarianism. Maybe we should skip past the specifics and give our own answer to the underlying question: Why is life so hard these days?
We do have such an answer, one that I believe is far more realistic and supportable than anything conservatives offer: Life is hard because sometime in the late 1970s, the US scrapped the controls that kept the rich from capturing all the growth in the economy.
We scrapped antitrust enforcement, so as a consumer you have to take whatever deal monopolies offer you. (The endless “choices” you face at the mall are often just different tentacles of the same octopus.) We scrapped unions, so as a worker you have no negotiating power. And we changed the tax system so that whatever the rich capture, they keep. The result is this graph, which every American voter should be able to draw on a napkin.
If hourly compensation had kept up, the average Americans would make more than double what they do now. So you could afford a one-income household, if that’s what your family wanted. Or you could save up for year-long sabbaticals and return to the workplace with new vision and energy. Or you could retire at 50 and see the world.
Corporate talking heads may denounce this point of view as “class warfare” or “socialism”, but such name-calling isn’t really a refutation. And it is nostalgic in a manner of speaking, but the point isn’t to recreate some past era; it’s to get back to the trends that held in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s, when economic gains were widely shared.
I went kind of wild this week: Three short notes got out of hand a demanded to be featured posts. (I must be feeling better. I can even talk a little.)
The first spins out of a WaPo article by Monica Hess about the “tradwife” trend — the online influencers who post about their idealized 1950s-housewife lives. What I love about this article is that Hess doesn’t do the obvious (and dull) thing: take tradwives seriously and give a lecture about everything that was wrong with the actual 1950s and the few opportunities the decade offered women.
Instead, Hess looks at tradwifery as a fantasy, and asks why it’s attractive. What’s wrong with women’s lives today that might motivate this kind of escapism?
She got me thinking about how we might approach all kinds of conservative retro fantasies: not as workable options we need to knock down, but as symptoms of modern problems that need real (and liberal) solutions. That’s the theme of “A Different Take on Conservative Retro Fantasy”, which should be out shortly.
The other two featured posts have something to do with abortion, but didn’t combine easily into a single post. The first takes an unpopular position on the Arizona Supreme Court’s ruling that reinstated the state’s draconian 1864 law: I think they got it right. It’s a horrible outcome, but that’s because the legislature created a horrible legal situation. It’s not up to the courts to invent better laws. “The Arizona Abortion Ruling” should post around 10 EDT.
The final featured post looks at the political gyrations Trump and other Republicans are performing as they try to come up with a viable political position on abortion. Trump’s leave-it-to-the-states statement looked smart last Monday, but the next day Arizona turned the clock back to 1864, pointing out what’s wrong with leaving the issue to the states. “Republicans Scramble to Contain Their Abortion Disaster” should post by 11.
Then we get to the weekly summary, which still has to cover Trump’s Manhattan trial, which starts today. There’s also the Israel/Iran attack and counterattack, OJ, and a few other things. I’ll try to get that out by noon.
This week everybody was talking about signs and wonders
This morning, all eyes are on the narrow corridor of the total eclipse, which stretches from Texas in the South to Maine in the North, and goes through Dallas, Cleveland, and Buffalo along the way.
I’ve never experienced a total eclipse myself (and won’t see this one either), but I imagine there must be a significant oh-wow effect to seeing the Sun go dark in the middle of the sky. It’s not hard to see why pre-scientific peoples tried to read portents into such an event, just as they read meaning into the appearance of comets and other celestial phenomena.
It’s much harder for me to understand why so many people are still doing it. We know what causes eclipses and can predict them hundreds of years in advance.
Many have mocked and scoffed at this post and even put community notes. Jesus talked about that in Luke 12:54-56. Yes eclipses are predictable and earthquakes happen and we know when comets are passing by, however God created all of these things and uses them to be signs for those of us who believe.
First off, MTG should re-read Luke 12:54-56. I don’t think it says what she thinks it does.
But more importantly, I think signs and wonders appeal to charlatans like MTG precisely because they have no content of their own. The event itself is striking, but its meaning is wide open for whatever claims people want to make.
So America should repent? OK, how about we repent our long history of racism? our wasteful burning of fossil fuels? our cruelty towards refugees who arrive at our border seeking help? our willingness to let people die of preventable causes rather than provide medical care? the vast gulf between our rich and our poor?
No? Not what you wanted us to repent? Show me what part of the eclipse points out same-sex marriage or drag shows or socialism or letting people use the “wrong” bathrooms.
And what counts as a sign that demands interpretation? As several people have pointed out, the recent earthquake was centered in New Jersey, not far from the Bedminster golf club of a noted Bible salesman. Could that be what God is angry about?
Oh, and what about this sign? During the previous administration, God sent an actual plague that killed over a million Americans. The deaths continue to be concentrated in counties that support that leader. Is that something to interpret?
When MTG talks about “those of us who believe”, she means authoritarian communities, where some leader is empowered to define a sign and attach an interpretation to it without debate. As soon as the meaning is open to discussion, though, the underlying emptiness of the “sign” quickly becomes apparent.
In the women’s NCAA basketball tournament, both the Iowa/Connecticut final-four game Friday and the Iowa/South Carolina championship last night set records for TV ratings. Final numbers for last night’s game aren’t in yet, but Friday’s game drew 14.2 million viewers, making it the most-watched basketball game ever on ESPN.
Friday’s blockbuster matchup with a controversial finish peaked at 17 million viewers, surpassing every NBA Finals and MLB World Series game last year. It was only topped by five college football games in 2023. Meanwhile, no Daytona 500 race or Masters Tournament final round has exceeded Friday’s numbers since 2013. Game 6 of the 2019 NBA Finals between the Toronto Raptors and Golden State Warriors beat Iowa vs. UConn with 18.59 million viewers, but it was aired on ABC.
People who don’t watch sports usually don’t grasp the soap-opera aspect of being a fan. You watch not just for the competition and the beauty of the sport, but because you’re in the middle of a story and want to see how it comes out. Like soap opera, each episode/game answers some questions, but raises others that will keep you watching future games.
Women’s sports have languished behind men’s sports largely because of the inherent chicken/egg problem of attracting new fans: If you haven’t been watching, you don’t know what questions the next game is supposed to be answering.
This year, the stardom of Iowa’s Caitlin Clark got women’s basketball over the hump. Once you started watching, you also began to wonder about Paige Bueckers, Angel Reese, Kamilla Cardoso, and a bunch of other stars. You might continue to follow them in the WNBA or watch next year’s college games.
That may not be the case you’d really like to see. The Mar-a-Lago documents case is more open-and-shut, and the two January 6 conspiracy cases go to the heart of Trump’s assault on democracy. But it is a real indictment of a real crime. If any other ex-president faced such a thing, it would be extraordinary. We’ve just gotten used to taking Trump’s wrongdoing for granted.
You can tell Trump himself is worried, because he’s acting out. He’s been attacking the judge’s adult daughter, and now says that he is willing to go to jail on the free-speech principle that he can attack anybody he wants, no matter what the judge’s gag order says.
Trump says a lot of things, and most of them turn out not to be true. I think he’ll whimper like a small child if he has to go to a real jail. I also think Judge Merchan will have to do something to establish who is in control of his courtroom.
The drama of Trump’s bond isn’t over yet. So, two weeks ago, he was supposed to come up with nearly half a billion dollars to secure the civil fraud judgment against him while he appealed. But then at the last minute, a NY appeals court lowered it to $175 million and gave him ten more days to come up with it, which he appeared to do.
The coverage came from Knight Specialty Insurance, whose CEO is Don Hankey, the “king of subprime car loans” and a major Republican donor. State AG Letitia James noticed that Knight is “not an admitted carrier in New York, and lacks the certificate of qualification required by New York Insurance Law Section 1111” so she challenged the sufficiency of the bond.
So now the question isn’t whether Trump has the money, it’s whether Knight does.
Steve Bannon, you may recall, was criminally charged in a scheme to defraud people who wanted to build chunks of Trump’s border wall with private funding. Trump pardoned him, so he wasn’t convicted with his co-conspirators, one of whom was recently sentenced to more than four years in prison. (Think about the weirdness of that for a second: Somebody defrauds your supporters, so you pardon them.)
The House goes back to work today, which means something will have to happen with Ukraine funding. Speaker Mike Johnson is damned if he does and damned if he doesn’t, so he might as well do the right thing. But we’ll see.
what I feel is happening right now is that we’re being gaslit. The press is pathologizing Biden’s normal signs of aging, and they’re normalizing Trump’s blatant signs of of dementia. And so the people are really being told a kind of double lie. Either it’s twice as many people believe Biden is not as cognitively fit as Trump. Or we have the tired old “two old men” narrative, you know, we have a gerontocracy. And the point is that, look, we’re talking about a tale of two brains here. Biden’s brain is aging, Trump’s brain is dementing. We’re comparing apples to rotted oranges here. They’re not the same.
One example I found persuasive is the Nancy/Nikki incident:
The Dementia Care Society says that a sign of advanced dementia is when you start combining people and generations. You literally mash people together into one person. … Trump showed us the combination of people when he made Nancy Pelosi and Nikki Haley one person. It wasn’t a slip of the tongue, okay? It wasn’t that he meant to say one name and he said the other. He gave a speech about the person I’m running against in this primary who was responsible for security at the Capitol. He actually confused the two people. You see the difference?
The Trump Media stock meltdown seems to be underway. It began publicly trading under the symbol DJT on March 26, and jumped up above $70 a share on the 27th. It closed Friday at $40.59. Last I checked this morning, it was $36.52.
DJT’s main problem is that the underlying business is worthless. The usual start-up story is that a company may be losing money right now, but its revenues and user base are growing fast, so profitability is going to happen eventually. DJT is losing money now, isn’t growing, and has no plausible plan to ever make money.
WaPo speculates on Trump’s plan to end the Ukraine War, which he has said he could do in 24 hours. The gist: Russia gets to keep Crimea and some section of eastern Ukraine. Ukraine gets … I’m not sure what. And the US drops its sanctions in an effort to make Russia less dependent on China.
The Munich analogy gets way over-used, but this does sound awfully Munich-like.
The underlying problem of No Labels is that it reads the electorate wrong. Yes, most people do wish that the two major parties would compromise and govern, rather than posture and logjam. But that desire for compromise has no content on particular issues. There is no centrist philosophy that informs centrist positions on economic and cultural matters, and no centrist vision of America’s future.
Worse, most of the specific positions centrist politicians stake out are actually compromises already proposed by Democrats and rejected by Republicans. Take the budget deficit. Want to split the difference between Democratic tax increases and Republican spending cuts? Good luck with that; Obama already tried it.
The lack of a No Labels candidate means RFK Jr. is the only significant third-party option. I think the way to run against him is to let him talk. He’s a loon who never met a conspiracy theory he didn’t like. The more people see him, the less they’re going to want him to be president.
Jon Tester’s seat in Montana might decide the Senate majority. (Democrats currently hold a 51-49 advantage, but the seat Joe Manchin is retiring from is considered unwinnable.) This week WaPo published a weird and complicated story about the main Republican challlenger, former Navy SEAL Tim Sheehy.
It’s about the bullet in his forearm, which he says he picked up in Afghanistan but never reported. Then he later told a park ranger a story about shooting himself accidentally in a national park. That lie was technically a crime, but the statute of limitations has passed. As to why he covered up the wound to begin with, I’m still confused.
and let’s close with something natural
One of the best photo contests online is Smithsonian Magazine’s. Here we see a glacial lake in Denali National Park in Alaska.
The Biden administration has finally begun to distance itself from the Netanyahu government. How much difference will that make?
Israel’s attack Monday night on a three-car convoy of the food-aid group World Central Kitchen brought to a head something that had been building slowly for a long time: American discontent with the war in Gaza.
Israel immediately said the attack, which left seven aid workers dead, was a mistake. But WCK Founder José Andrés wasn’t buying it:
This was not just a bad luck situation where, “Oops, we dropped a bomb in the wrong place.” … The airstrikes on our convoy I don’t think were an unfortunate mistake. It was really a direct attack on clearly marked vehicles whose movements were known by everybody at the [Israel Defense Forces].
The IDF’s investigation concluded that the army unit involved had believed the vehicles they were tracking from the sky had been taken over by Hamas gunmen, and that they were not aware of the coordination procedures put in place between the military and World Central Kitchen for that evening.
Andrés is calling for an independent investigation.
One reason this particular incident has had such an impact on world opinion is that it is part of a larger pattern.
Scott Paul, of Oxfam, said in a briefing with other relief organisations on Thursday before the results of Israel’s investigation were released: “Let’s be very clear. This is tragic but it is not an anomaly. The killing of aid workers in Gaza has been systemic.”
“Systemic” seems very carefully chosen. It does not necessarily mean “intentional”, but it includes that possibility. What “systemic” suggests to me is a kind of indifference: As things are, aid workers die on a fairly regular basis. This fact does not cause the system to change.
According to AP (which attributes the number to the UN) “at least 180 humanitarian workers have been killed in the war so far”. Those 180 are again part of a larger whole: around 33,000 Gazans, at least 13,800 of them children, have died since the war started. A much larger number of people are at risk due to the famine developing as insufficient quantities of food are brought in.
The larger numbers, though, are harder to form clear opinions about. Some of the 33K dead were the Hamas fighters Israel has every right to target. Some civilians were Hamas supporters, and some probably ventured into places they had been told to stay out of or ignored Israeli warnings about impending attacks.
But the seven WCK workers did everything right. They told the IDF what they were doing, which centered on delivering food to people who need it. They, like the 180 dead aid workers they joined, were people risking their lives to make sure strangers got food and medical care. We are, in short, talking about seven (and 180) of the best people in the world.
Until now, the Biden administration has chosen to keep its conflicts with the Netanyahu government behind closed doors. The public would hear reports that Biden was pressuring Netanyahu to be more forthcoming in negotiations over the ceasefire-for-hostages deal the US would like to broker, but publicly the US had Israel’s back at the UN and in every other public forum. Biden has paid a fairly large political price for this among progressive Democrats, especially young people. More recently, even longtime supporters of Israel, like Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, have begun criticizing Netanyahu.
Thursday, Biden and Netanyahu had a phone call. The White House account of that call had a significantly different tone: Biden was demanding specific actions, and threatening consequences if they didn’t happen.
President Joe Biden ticked through several things that he needed to see Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu do immediately: open up the Erez crossing into northern Gaza and the port of Ashdod in southern Israel for humanitarian aid; significantly ramp up the supplies getting in through Kerem Shalom.
For now, Israel seems to be doing what Biden asked. But it will take time to see whether anything has substantively changed: Will more aid get through to Gazans? Will the famine abate? Will an attack on Rafah produce a new spike in civilian casualties? Will some kind of ceasefire-for-hostages deal actually happen? And if nothing changes, will Biden follow through with the “changes in our own policy” Secretary Blinken has suggested?
I think it’s important to keep repeating a point I’ve been making from the early days of the Gaza conflict: Americans should not be bringing this war home. American Jews are not the Netanyahu government. American Palestinians are not Hamas.
Memo to the bigots. Israel does not set its policies or run its war from: Synagogues, Jewish community centers, Holocaust museums, Kosher grocery markets, Jewish-owned cafes & shops
Bringing a mob to scream outside these places is an act of hate and antisemitism, not protest.
Thanks to everybody who wished me good health this week. Your wishes have kinda-sorta been granted. Every symptom of this illness — fever, congestion, coughing, etc. — has gotten significantly better, with one exception: My voice still isn’t coming back.
Some people pay significant sums of money to go on silent retreats, where they aren’t supposed to talk to anyone. Well, this week I’ve had a silent retreat in the comfort of my own home. So far, though, the spiritual benefits of this practice seem to be escaping me. I have never thought of myself as the kind of person who loves the sound of his own voice, but it turns out that I do.
There have been two big news stories this week: the eclipse and the Israeli attack on a convoy of World Central Kitchen vehicles in Gaza. I don’t have a lot to say about the eclipse; it’s like the kind of oh-wow event you either do or don’t find moving. The WCK attack, on the other hand, has taken on a symbolic significance beyond the simple facts. It has brought to a head the discontent with Israel’s prosecution of the Gaza War that has been growing for some while, pushing the Biden administration to take a more forceful approach to the Netanyahu government. Whether anything will come of it remains to be seen.
So this morning’s featured post is “Will the World Central Kitchen attack change anything?” I don’t try to answer that question. The article mainly pulls together what we know at this point. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary includes a discussion of the eclipse, and in particular of the strange tendency on the Christian Right to attach meaning to it, along with other signs and wonders like the New Jersey earthquake and the Baltimore bridge collapse. At long last, it looks like one of the Trump criminal trials will start next week. The predicted meltdown of Trump Media stock has started. No Labels is not going to field a candidate. That should be out before noon EDT.
So have a great week, everybody. And don’t forget to appreciate the sound of your own voice.
This week everybody was talking about the Key Bridge collapse
My wife and I drive past Baltimore at least twice a year, and we disagree about whether we’ve ever been on the Key Bridge. (Usually we take the I-895 tunnel.) Nonetheless, I’ve seen an exit for the bridge many, many times, and it feels like a real place to me.
Anyway, the bridge’s collapse looks like a series of unfortunate events: A big container ship lost power, lost control of its steering, and rammed the bridge, bringing it down. Some quick work closing the bridge to traffic saved a lot of lives. (In the video, you can see the last few cars and trucks getting across.) The lives not saved were workers doing maintenance late at night. All six were Central American migrants here legally.
The Port of Baltimore, one of the East Coast’s busiest harbors, is closed until the wreckage can be cleared away. That’s going to have economic consequences all over the country.
What should happen next is fairly obvious: rebuild. Baltimore needs its outer beltway. People (like me) who drive down the east coast do not need or want to add to the city’s congestion. And the two alternate routes are tunnels where it’s illegal to carry hazardous materials. If this bridge were in a red state, Congress would quickly approve bipartisan funding and the rebuilding process would begin.
But Maryland is a blue state and Baltimore is the kind of city Republicans like to demonize. So nothing will be simple.
The immediate media response to the disaster illustrated the disadvantage pundits labor under when they care about facts.
TV talking heads who were trying to be honest and responsible had to admit they didn’t know what had happened or why. Not so, Marjorie Taylor Greene, who instantly raised the issue of whether this was a terrorist attack. Misogynist Andrew Tate (who had been successfully deplatformed from social media until Elon Musk brought him back) declared the event a “cyber attack” and predicted a “Black Swan event” would follow. Alex Jones then upped the ante, announcing “WW3 has already started.”
Fox Business host Maria Bartiromo immediately thought of “the potential for wrongdoing or the potential for foul play given the wide open border”. Utah legislator and candidate for governor Phil Lyman tweeted, “This is what happens when you have Governors who prioritize diversity over the wellbeing and security of citizens.” Matt Schlapp of the American Conservative Union pointed at “drug-addled” employees and Covid lockdowns as possible causes. Both the Baltimore mayor and the Maryland governor are Black, which has made them tempting targets.
But remember: All the local emergency response people performed admirably. Eventually we’ll find out the root causes, which quite probably have nothing to do with the mayor or governor. And the central victims of the tragedy — the people who died — were migrants doing hard jobs.
I wish Fox Business had interviewed me. I could have raised my theory that God was angry over the blasphemy of the Trump Bible. It makes as much sense as anything else.
More than a year ago, a three-judge panel ruled that the congressional districts drawn by the South Carolina legislature were an unconstitutional racial gerrymander. In particular, Black voters were intentionally moved out of the 1st district, currently represented by Republican Nance Mace.
South Carolina appealed to the Supreme Court almost exactly a year ago, and the Court has done nothing. But while the Court was “considering” the appeal, nobody else could do anything either. So there is no alternative map, and the electoral process has to move forward, with the state required to mail overseas and military ballots by April 27 for the primary June 1.
Thursday the three-judge panel relented, giving the state the OK to use the racially gerrymandered map for this election cycle. Quite possibly, this will result in an ill-gotten House seat for the Republicans.
We see what they’re doing. We know the conservative majority of this Supreme Court decided to let Black voters continue to be discriminated against in South Carolina this year in violation of the Constitution
This was part of a larger segment where Hayes also discussed the Court helping Trump stall his federal January 6 case until after the election.
and other right-wing freakouts
The Fox News silo worked itself into a lather about the ways Joe Biden has “disrespected” Easter. Jay Kuo explains two that Trump raged about in one tweet. The marketer of the Trump Bible described these actions as “blasphemous” and “examples of the Biden Administration’s years-long assault on the Christian faith”.
First, Biden proclaimed Easter as Transgender Day of Visibility. OK, Biden did make a proclamation recognizing the Transgender Day of Visibility, which has been on March 31 since it was established in 2009. Easter, which is the first Sunday after the first full moon after the vernal equinox, happened to fall on March 31 this year, as it tends to about one year in every 23. If this upsets you, you should blame the Sun and Moon, not Biden.
BTW. The whole idea that Christianity has something to do with gender Identities is suspect. No matter how hard people work to inject their bigotries into the Bible, their bigotries remain their bigotries, not their religious convictions.
Second, Biden supposedly banned religious designs from the White House Easter-egg art contest. This also is true, sort of. But religious designs have been banned from the contest for 47 years, including the four Trump-administration Easters. The contest, it turns out, is partially funded by the Department of Agriculture in cooperation with the American Egg Board as a promotional event for eggs. (There had to be a propaganda purpose somewhere, right?) AEB President Emily Metz explains:
So when we say, “can’t be overtly religious”, we just can’t be seen to be promoting one religion over the other, the same way we can’t be seen to be promoting one political viewpoint or ideology over the other. We have to be totally neutral in everything we do and have it just be focused on egg promotion and marketing activities.
If you ever find yourself wondering why MAGA conservatives can’t raise any outrage over climate change or mass shootings, just remember that they have far more important things to get upset about.
A day after NBC chief political analyst Chuck Todd told “Meet the Press” viewers that McDaniel “has credibility issues that she still has to deal with,” hosts on the network’s cable affiliate — including Rachel Maddow, Nicolle Wallace, Joy Reid, Joe Scarborough, Lawrence O’Donnell and Jen Psaki — echoed the rebuke, citing her support of Donald Trump’s baseless claims of a stolen 2020 presidential election.
The Detroit News reported that McDaniel was on a phone call where Trump pressured Michigan election officials not to certify the election returns from Wayne County. MSNBC host Joy Reid commented:
We welcome Republican voices. The reality is: This isn’t a difference of opinion. She literally backed an illegal scheme to steal an election in the state of Michigan.
Conde said in his memo that the decision to bring McDaniel on board was made “because of our deep commitment to presenting our audiences with a widely diverse set of viewpoints and experiences, particularly during these consequential times. We continue to be committed to the principle that we must have diverse viewpoints on our programs, and to that end, we will redouble our efforts to seek voices that represent different parts of the political spectrum.”
David Roberts, who has no connection to NBC, summed up my point of view:
The basic dilemma facing media, which they are still trying to wriggle around (see: the McDaniel affair), is that elevating voices genuinely representative of MAGA means tolerating lies, bigotry, & anti-democratic sentiment. You can’t have one without the other.
and you also might be interested in …
I had expected the Right not to start their campaign against the 22nd Amendment (which stops presidents from running for a third term) until Trump had actually won his second. But no.
Conservatives have gritted their teeth for years as the Left, in their hatred of Trump, has attempted to pervert the meaning of first the Twenty-fifth Amendment and, more recently, the Fourteenth Amendment. The case for repealing the Twenty-second Amendment is far more straightforward: As with Prohibition, it is simply a matter of finding the will to get rid of a bad idea that needlessly limits Americans’ freedom.
And don’t worry about him being five months older in 2028 than Biden is now because of “the glaringly obvious differences between the men in their brain power, physical strength, and ability to walk in a straight line”.
They’re clearly not seeing the fat, out-of-shape Trump I see, or listening to the incoherent speeches I hear.
The motivating vision here is of the Great Leader as president for life. Anything that stands in the way will have to go.
Crypto-currency fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried was sentenced to 25 years in prison for a multi-billion-dollar scheme that caused the collapse of FTX, the crypto exchange Bankman-Fried founded. He simultaneously ran a hedge fund that made risky bets with clients’ assets.
The FTX fraud has no direct connection to the Trump real-estate fraud, but it does illustrate a related point: Fraud is fraud, whether the target loses money or not. The FTX collapse started when the relationship to the hedge fund was exposed by CoinDesk. But if everyone had stayed ignorant, the risky bets might well have paid off and everyone would still have their money. That wouldn’t make the whole scheme any less fraudulent.
Trump misbehaved in his typical democracy-threatening ways this week. He repeatedly attacked the adult daughter of the judge in the Stormy Daniels case. And he reposted on Truth Social a video involving a truck with a life-sized full-color back-gate image of Joe Biden bound and gagged.
Imagine the impact all of this is having on potential witnesses and jurors in the criminal cases against Trump. If Trump can get away with threatening a Judge’s daughter, if he can do this to the President of the United States, then what’s going to happen to them if they take the witness stand against him or vote to convict?
I don’t know whether Judge Juan Merchan could scare Trump straight with a few days of revoked bail pretrial detention, or whether that’s what Trump wants to happen, the better to make his victimhood case to the voters. But I’m starting to think the experiment is worth trying.
The October 7 attacks unified Israel, but that unity is starting to come undone again. Sunday evening, thousands protested in Jerusalem.
Wall Street Journal reporter Evan Gershkovich has now been under arrest in Russia for a year. Many voices in America noted the anniversary, but one did not: Trump. America-First clearly has an exception when it comes to Putin’s Russia.
By the end of this year, the trucks will for the first time start traveling alone, without human minders like Jenkins, as two major companies — Aurora and Kodiak Robotics — launch fully autonomous trucks in Texas. …
By default, driverless passenger vehicles and trucks can ride anywhere in the United States, unless a state explicitly says they can’t. That means companies can test and operate their vehicles across most of the country. Two dozen states, including Texas, Florida, Arizona and Nevada, specifically allow driverless operations, according to data compiled by Aurora, while another 16 states have no regulations specific to autonomous vehicles.
The number of jobs that could be replaced here is in the millions.
Here’s what I predict: The overall accident rate of autonomous trucks will be lower than human-driven trucks, but they will have different accidents. The question is what the public will do when somebody dies in a way that would never have happened if a human were involved.
For reasons I explained in the teaser, I’ve had to cut corners this week. The closing is supposed to be orthogonal to the news, with a touch of the humorous, amazing, uplifting, or silly. I don’t have one this week, so please help me out: Talk among yourselves about suitable closings for a week like this one.
The Weekly Sift 