I took a week off — to fly a kite, among other things — so I’ve got some catching up to do.
I don’t know about you, but “mercenary army marches on Moscow” wasn’t on my Bingo card. I totally didn’t see that coming.
It’s also been a bad couple of weeks for Republican conspiracy theories: John Durham was supposed to blow the lid off the Deep State conspiracy to smear Trump with Russia collusion, but his testimony to Congress went so badly for MAGA Republicans that Matt Gaetz accused him of being “part of the cover-up”. And a Trump-appointed prosecutor worked out a plea deal with Hunter Biden that includes none of the salacious things he’s supposed to have done — and also doesn’t include any jail time. The most reasonable interpretation is that Hunter really is accountable to the law, but he just hasn’t done that much.
But the featured posts look elsewhere. One of them is about Sam Alito, the latest conservative Supreme Court justice to be exposed living the high life on the dimes of billionaires who have business before his court. Alito defended himself by claiming that “no reasonable person” would find that suspicious.
I’m not the only person who disagrees with that judgment. The article should be out shortly.
The other featured post is somewhat longer and more detailed. I’ve been surprised to discover that some measurable fraction of Democrats believe that Biden should pardon Trump in order to “heal the country” and “reduce polarization”. So I did some thinking about the circumstances under which I’d be willing to show Trump mercy. There are some, but only if he does a few things I don’t expect him to do, like admit wrongdoing.
Anyway, I end up agreeing that we should suppress our desire to see Trump suffer if mercy works to the nation’s benefit, and I speculate about what kind of benefit we might hope for. But I question how likely those circumstances are.
I’ll try to get that out by around 10 EDT, and the weekly summary by noon.
No Sift next week. The next new articles appear on June 26.
One of the saddest lessons of history is this: If we’ve been bamboozled long enough, we tend to reject any evidence of the bamboozle. We’re no longer interested in finding out the truth. The bamboozle has captured us. It’s simply too painful to acknowledge, even to ourselves, that we’ve been taken. Once you give a charlatan power over you, you almost never get it back.
Jeff Sharlet takes a deep dive into the fascist codewords in Trump’s first post-federal-indictment speech. Among other things, Sharlet has the only coherent interpretation I’ve heard of “Jack Smith. Does anyone know what his name used to be?” Sharlet reads this as an implication that Smith is Jewish, and hence part of the conspiracy of “globalists” and “Marxists”, which are also fascist codewords for Jews.
Jack Smith, claims Trump, “caused” the IRS to “go after evangelicals, Christians, great Americans of faith.” Get the antisemitism? Jack Smith, who must have changed his name must be a Jewish enemy of Christianity.
Sharlet also has a principle I will have to keep in mind: You can’t fact-check a myth, but you can interpret it.
What he seems to mean by that is that it does no good to point out that what Trump (or some other fascist) says is untrue. His followers probably already know that it’s untrue, or they don’t care. The point of saying such things is to communicate something. Decoding the communication is more important than challenging the fact.
I believe he referenced the following Sartre quote somewhere, but I can’t find the link:
Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words. The anti-Semites have the right to play. They even like to play with discourse for, by giving ridiculous reasons, they discredit the seriousness of their interlocutors. They delight in acting in bad faith, since they seek not to persuade by sound argument but to intimidate and disconcert. If you press them too closely, they will abruptly fall silent, loftily indicating by some phrase that the time for argument is past.
and wildfire smoke
We usually associate wildfires with the West, and mostly with sparsely populated areas. But this week smoke from wildfires in Canada blanketed the densely populated Northeast, including New York, Boston, and Philadelphia.
Most of the time, climate change seems abstract, but scenes like the one below bring it home.
and the other Republicans running for president
There’s a type of self-fulfilling prophesy that always drives me nuts: Because everyone believes “You can’t do X”, nobody even tries to do X. And then the fact that X doesn’t happen is taken as evidence for “You can’t do X.”
One case in point is the belief among Republicans that “You can’t stand up to Trump.” So again and again we’ve seen some senator like Jeff Flake or Bob Corker or Ben Sasse criticize Trump in some fairly mild way, and then not seek reelection. At each impeachment trial, Mitch McConnell had it in his power to remove Trump from office and make him ineligible to run again, but he backed down both times. Trump was almost untouchable for a few weeks after January 6, but then Kevin McCarthy made a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to kiss his ring.
For six years now, Republicans who are secretly anti-Trump have been hoping that someone else — the Democrats, the courts, more courageous Republicans — would take Trump out, absorb the anger of his cult, and leave them to pick up the pieces. But it hasn’t happened.
Liz Cheney and Mitt Romney are the most visible Trump critics who did not voluntarily walk into the sunset. Cheney was expelled from the party, but Romney still seems to be doing fine. For the most part, though, the Republican Party has surrendered without putting up a fight. It’s hard to blame Republican voters for believing there’s no case against Trump, when none of their elected leaders are willing to make that case.
The first few candidates to challenge Trump for the 2024 Republican nomination continued the pattern. Listening to Nikki Haley or Tim Scott raises an obvious question: “Why are you running?” If the front-runner in the race was such a great president and you have no signature issue you would handle differently, why go to all the bother?
Mike Pence’s timid criticisms inspired this parody from Josh Marshall:
Pence: I should have been hanged. Trump couldn’t get it done. I will.
For a long time Ron DeSantis seemed to think he could handle Trump without confronting him, but that resulted in a collapse of the strong position he held in the polls after the midterm elections, where DeSantis did well and Trump-endorsed candidates did badly. But key Republican constituencies — White working-class men, Evangelical Christians — are looking for a fighter who will stand up to the cultural forces working against them. Every time DeSantis takes a punch from Trump without punching back, he convinces more voters that he’s not that guy.
Well finally somebody has entered the race to go after Trump: Chris Christie, who has a CNN town hall tonight.
The grift from this family is breathtaking. It’s breathtaking. Jared Kushner and Ivanka Kushner walk out of the White House, and months later get $2 billion from the Saudis. You think it’s because he’s some kind of investing genius? Or do you think it’s because he was sitting next to the president of the United States for four years doing favors for the Saudis? That’s your money. That’s your money he stole and gave it to his family. You know what that makes us? A banana republic.
He has almost no chance to be the nominee himself, but maybe he can wound Trump badly enough to give someone else a shot at the nomination.
and the voting-rights decision
Chief Justice Roberts has been chipping away at the Voting Right Act for years, so it was a surprise Thursday when Roberts wrote a majority opinion preserving what is left of the VRA. Roberts and Brett Kavanaugh joined the court’s three liberals (Kagan, Sotomayor, and Jackson) in a 5-4 decision rejecting Alabama’s congressional map, which is drawn so that only one of the seven districts has a non-white majority.
Decades of precedent have interpreted the VRA as requiring the creation of majority-minority districts when a state’s voters are racially polarized, the current map results in a congressional delegation where minorities are under-represented, and the districts can be drawn without violating other principles of sound redistricting, like forming compact and contiguous districts that don’t split cities and counties unnecessarily. This has become known as the Gingles test, after the 1986 case where it was spelled out.
Alabama could easily have created a second majority-minority district, bringing its congressional delegation closer to racial parity. But it chose not to, inviting the Court to replace Gingles with a less rigorous test. Justices Alito, Thomas, Gorsuch, and Coney Barrett agreed with Alabama.
So the current decision preserves the status quo. It doesn’t represent an advance in minority voting rights.
This decision concerns an injunction, not a final resolution of the case. But the injunction is based in part on the Court’s assessment that Alabama is likely to lose on the merits.
Personally, I remain skeptical of Roberts’ intentions. Like Ed Pilkington in The Guardian, I think Roberts plays a long game. Whenever he is about to push hard in one direction, he first makes a head fake in the opposite direction to give himself cover.
Any day now, I expect the Court to strike down affirmative action in college admissions. When that happens, the media will reference this voting-rights decision to frame Roberts as a “moderate”. Taken as a whole, though, the two decisions will represent a continued whittling down of minority rights, and Roberts can continue destroying the VRA in some later decision.
and the Right shutting down the House
The resolution of the debt-ceiling crisis showed that the far-right House “Freedom” Caucus has less power than they like to think. Naturally, they have to do something to strike back.
Originally, everyone expected they would exercise the concession they got when Kevin McCarthy needed their votes to become speaker: Any single member can introduce a resolution the “vacate the chair” and reopen the speaker election.
Apparently that didn’t suit their purposes, though, so they have struck back at the House as a whole rather than just McCarthy. They have been withholding their support on the procedural motions that bills need to progress towards passage, so the House is essentially shut down.
So far, this is just affecting Republican priorities, like a bill to stop the completely imaginary threat that Biden might ban gas stoves. But the federal fiscal year ends on September 30, so if new appropriation bills aren’t passed by then, the government will have to shut down.
and golf
Corporate PR efforts have expanded our language in so many ways. Many of the new terms spin off of whitewashing, a metaphor for putting a deceptively bright sheen on something rotten. For example, the NRDC has defined greenwashing like this:
Greenwashing is the act of making false or misleading statements about the environmental benefits of a product or practice. It can be a way for companies to continue or expand their polluting as well as related harmful behaviors, all while gaming the system or profiting off well-intentioned, sustainably minded consumers.
This year, Saudi Arabia’s sponsorship of a new golf league, LIV, popularized a new -washing term: sportswashing, which Greenpeace defines:
Sportswashing is the act of sponsoring a sports team or event in order to distract from bad practices elsewhere. This tactic is often used by companies and governments with poor environmental or human rights records, exploiting people’s love of sport to ‘wash’ their image clean.
Saudi Arabia’s image desperately needs washing. They’re a repressive feudal monarchy with a wasteful and corrupt royal family. They export a dangerous strain of Islam. 15 of the 19 9-11 hijackers were Saudi, as was Osama bin Laden. They sponsor war crimes in Yemen. Their crown prince, Mohammed bin Salman, ordered the killing and dismemberment of journalist Jamal Khashoggi, who was residing in Virginia and working for The Washington Post at the time of his death. Currently, they are working with Russia to keep oil prices high, which helps Putin finance his war in Ukraine.
But on the plus side, they have oil and a huge amount of money: Their sovereign wealth fund is sitting on more than $600 billion. So the fund created the LIV golf tour and started writing nine-figure checks to secure the participation of big-name golfers.
This presented a moral challenge to golfers, and the words “blood money” came up fairly often. The previously dominant PGA tour capitalized on that. PGA Commissioner Jay Monahan challenged golfers by invoking the families of 9-11 victims:
I would ask any player who has left or any player who would consider leaving: “Have you ever had to apologize for being a member of the PGA Tour?”
Anti-abortion Republicans have been pushing 12-week bans as a “compromise”, citing similar bans in Europe. The Atlantic’s Julie Suk comments: Not only do Republicans offer far fewer and stricter exceptions than European countries do, but
Republicans are interested in only one part of the European approach to protecting life—the abortion restrictions. They seem to forget that every European country that protects unborn life by restricting abortion after the first trimester protects born life too, through prenatal health care, paid maternity leave, and a public infrastructure for child care and preschool. If Republicans are sincere in invoking Europe as a model, Democrats and other proponents of abortion access should seize this chance to find common ground on policies that would substantially improve the lives of mothers and children in this country.
After months of speculation, the Ukrainian counter-offensive has started. Ukraine reports some advances, but so far it’s hard to tell from the outside whether the offensive is going well or not.
Pat Robertson died at the age of 93. I mark his passing by remembering two moments in his career:
Robertson called feminism a “socialist, anti-family political movement that encourages women to leave their husbands, kill their children, practice witchcraft, destroy capitalism and become lesbians”. … [O]n his TV show The 700 Club, he agreed emphatically with his fellow evangelist Jerry Falwell’s theory that the 9/11 attacks were caused by “pagans, abortionists, feminists, gays, lesbians, the American Civil Liberties Union, and [the progressive advocacy group] People for the American Way”.
I am a Universalist, so I don’t believe in a vengeful God. If there is an afterlife, I picture it as a place of mercy and compassion rather than retribution.
Sometimes that belief is unsatisfying.
A novel lawsuit is going to trial today: 16 young residents of Montana are invoking a clause in the Montana constitution committing the state to “maintain and improve a clean and healthful environment in Montana for present and future generations”. The suit claims that the state’s energy policy, which encourages fossil-fuel production, is unconstitutional.
I’ll be shocked if any Montana laws are thrown out, but the suit will raise local awareness of climate change and frame it in generational terms. Similar cases are pending in Hawaii, Florida, Utah, and Virginia.
I can’t think of an easy way to check this claim, which is almost too good to check anyway: The LA Times article about newsroom layoffs at the LA Times is illustrated with a photo taken by one of the photographers they laid off.
Mike Pence also promises to restore the name of Fort Bragg. What’s up with that? Is the idea that the US Army should honor people who take up arms against the United States in defense of White supremacy?
and let’s close with a public service
As the summer vacation season kicks off, countless articles will tell you where you should go and where to stop along the way. But Explored Planet tells you something just as important: where not to go. What famous places are either over-priced, over-crowded, full of chain franchises you could find at home, or not worth the effort it takes to get there?
Legally, Jack Smith has Trump dead to rights. Now we get to see whether facts and the law still matter.
Thursday night, we heard (at first via Trump himself) that a Florida grand jury convened by Special Counsel Jack Smith had returned an indictment in the Mar-a-Lago documents case. At first, most observers expected that we wouldn’t see the indictment itself until tomorrow, when Trump will be officially processed. But Friday the indictment was unsealed. In all there are 37 charges against Trump:
31 counts of “willful retention of national security information”. This is one fundamental crime applied to 31 documents, some classified at the very highest levels.
one count of “conspiracy to obstruct justice”
one count of “withholding a document or record”
one count of “corruptly concealing a document or record”
one count of “concealing a document in a federal investigation”
one count of “scheme to conceal”
one count of “false statements and representations”
Trump’s valet Walt Nauta is also named as a co-conspirator in counts 32-36, plus has his own count of “false statements and representations”.
If you add up the maximum sentences of all the charges, Trump could theoretically be sentenced to hundreds of years. By that’s a pointless exercise, because sentencing seldom works that way. It’s enough to point out that (if convicted and jailed) Trump, who will turn 77 on Wednesday, faces a strong likelihood of dying in prison.
Special Counsel Jack Smith made his first public appearance Friday. His statement was short and made a few simple points:
Trump was indicted “by a grand jury of citizens in the Southern District of Florida”. In other words, while Trump may rail against Smith himself or Merrick Garland or President Biden, the ultimate decision was made by ordinary American citizens with no political ax to grind. Given that Trump carried Florida in 2016 and 2020, and that Republicans swept the state in 2022, it’s quite likely that many of the jurors are Republicans who have voted for Trump in the past. [1]
If you want to “understand the scope and the gravity of the crimes charged”, you should read the indictment.
“Our laws that protect national defense information are critical to the safety and security of the United States and they must be enforced. Violations of those laws put our country at risk.”
“Adherence to the rule of law is a bedrock principle of the Department of Justice. And our nation’s commitment to the rule of law sets an example for the world. We have one set of laws in this country, and they apply to everyone.”
The narrative. Smith has written an indictment that is more revealing and readable than the 34-count indictment Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg produced for the hush-money case in April. It tells the following story:
While he was president, Trump collected souvenirs (“newspapers, press clippings, letters, notes, cards, photographs, official documents, and other materials”) that he jumbled together in cardboard bankers’ boxes (like the ones in my storage space). When he left the presidency, he had “scores” of those boxes transported from the White House to Mar-a-Lago.
Beginning in May, 2021, the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) made a series of fruitless requests that Trump turn over the official documents, which belong to the US government. [2]
Meanwhile, stacks of Trump’s boxes were being shuttled from place to place inside Mar-a-Lago. In addition to being Trump’s residence, Mar-a-Lago was a club which (during the period in question) had more than 100 employees and tens of thousands of guests who were not cleared to see classified documents. Many of these locations (a ballroom, a bathroom) were highly insecure. On one occasion a stack of boxes tipped over, spilling the contents — including classified documents — onto the floor of a storage area.
In January of 2022, 15 boxes were shipped to NARA. These boxes included 197 classified documents, including 30 top secret documents, some of which had the additional markings of SCI (special compartmented information) and SAP (special access program), indicating that they were particularly sensitive, even compared to other top-secret documents. [3]
The indictment notes two occasions when Trump showed classified documents to someone without clearance to see them. In one conversation, which was taped, Trump showed a plan to invade “Country A” to an author, saying “When I was president I could have declassified it. … Now I can’t.”
NARA told the Department of Justice about these documents in February, 2022, and a criminal investigation was opened in March. A federal grand jury began investigating in April. On May 11, the grand jury subpoenaed “all documents with classification markings in the possession, custody, or control of TRUMP or The Office of Donald J. Trump”.
In conversations with two of his lawyers (one of whom appears to be Evan Corcoran), Trump suggested a variety of illegal strategies: simply not responding to the subpoena, saying there were no documents, or getting rid of the documents. He hinted that Corcoran should dispose of the documents for him, so that he could deny doing it. (These conversations are reminiscent of Michael Cohen’s descriptions of his conversations as Trump’s lawyer. “He doesn’t give you orders. He speaks in a code … much like a mobster would do.”)
When it became clear that Corcoran would not commit one of the crimes Trump was suggesting, Trump schemed with Nauta to circumvent Corcoran: He knew when and where Corcoran would search for documents subject to the subpoena, and he had Nauta move boxes around so that Corcoran wouldn’t find them.
After Corcoran found 35 classified documents, Trump made a nonverbal suggestion that Corcoran not turn them all over to the government.
He made a funny motion as though – well okay why don’t you take them with you to your hotel room and if there’s anything really bad in there, like, you know, pluck it out. And that was the motion that he made. He didn’t say that.
Corcoran had the 35 documents turned over, and drafted a certification (which he had another lawyer sign) saying that a diligent search had been done and these were all the documents the subpoena sought.
In July, the FBI acquired Mar-a-Lago surveillance video showing the boxes being moved. In August, they returned with a search warrant and found 102 classified documents Corcoran had missed — 27 from Trump’s office and 75 from the storage room Corcoran had searched. 17 of the documents were top secret.
The 31 documents in the indictment. In his public statements, Trump has made fanciful claims that he could declassify documents by thinking about them, or that there was a standing order declassifying any documents he took up to the White House residence. [4] As anyone who has ever had a security clearance should understand, these claims are not just false, they are absurd; the system couldn’t work that way. [5]
The indictment faces a problem that shows up whenever someone is prosecuted under the Espionage Act: It can’t just tell us what information the defendant revealed or risked, because then the indictment itself would reveal that information. (It’s a problem similar to one in the stoning scene from Life of Brian, where the priest can’t specify the accused’s blasphemy without himself saying the forbidden name of God.)
This problem will only get worse when the case goes to trial: The judge will need access to the 31 documents, and large parts of them (possibly redacted, with the judge’s approval) will have to be made available to Trump’s lawyers.
But the indictment includes only terse summaries. Document 17, for example, is top secret with something about its special markings redacted. (I’d guess the markings included a code word.) The summary says only: “Document dated January, 2020 concerning military capabilities of a foreign country.”
The indictment also lists the intelligence services that classified the documents, which includes all the major ones: CIA, NSA, DoD, NRO, and several others.
From the list, and the fact that the totals in the indictment indicate that not all the top-secret documents are listed, we can make two deductions:
The most sensitive documents Trump compromised are not listed at all. So whatever you think after reading the listed summaries, the real security breach is worse than that.
All the intelligence agencies would have liked to leave their documents off the list and out of the trial, but they must have gotten together and agreed that they would each pony up something.
Assessing the damage. From the early days of the Trump administration, it was clear that Mar-a-Lago posed a security problem. He had not even been in office for a month when North Korea launched a missile test while Trump was entertaining Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe at Mar-a-Lago (and making a profit off the entourages of both leaders).
In previous administrations, the leaders would be ushered away into the White House situation room or the nearest secure location by their aides. The documents and advice they receive at such moments are often some of the nation’s most closely guarded secrets. … As CNN reported and the Facebook photos later illustrated, Abe, Trump and their parties stayed at their tables as their aides passed them bits of paper, lighting them up with their mobile phones so they could be read, while the keyboard vocalist hired for the night sang on and Mar-a-Lago guests huddled around to get a better view.
So foreign intelligence services have had years to place agents at the club, as members, guests, employees, or even gate-crashers. It seems likely that some have succeeded. (Picture this cover story for a spy: Some foreign friend or business associate of Jared Kushner has a nephew who just flunked out of Florida Atlantic and needs a job.)
WAGNER: Republicans in Congress have sort of been hiding behind the fact that the intelligence community assessment regarding the implications, the fallout from the retention of these documents — that assessment is not complete. And they’re saying “We don’t know yet what damage, if any, has been done to national security.” You’re suggesting that that assessment is quite complicated. Is your outside guess that this is going to take quite some time longer? …
BRENNAN: Quite frankly, I don’t think that the intelligence community will ever be able to determine conclusively what might have been compromised.
In addition to whatever our enemies may have found out, Trump has done incalculable damage to our relationships with our allies. Allied intelligence services (say, Israel’s Mossad or the UK’s GCHQ) risk revealing their own spies and capabilities when they share secrets with the US. What might they start holding back, now that they have seen how badly the US protects such information?
Likely defenses. Normally, when we talk about an indicted person’s possible defenses, we mean legal defenses — arguments or testimony or evidence that can be presented in court to undermine the prosecution’s case and convince either the judge or the jury to let the defendant off.
That’s not what we’re going to see from Trump, though, because he’s just guilty. Smith has him dead to rights. If this were an ordinary trial, any competent lawyer would be negotiating a deal to minimize his jail time.
But Trump’s hopes lie outside the courtroom. If he can stall long enough, the 2024 election might happen before he’s convicted. And if the economy is in bad enough shape — say, because Trump’s friends in Russia and Saudi Arabia engineer a huge run-up in gas prices — he could win it. Then he could fire Smith and pull the plug on any federal prosecution. And if New York or Georgia find him guilty of something, he can hole up in the White House and dare them to come get him.
Trump’s previous run-ins with the legal system have proceeded on two tracks: an in-court track where his lawyers present theories that are bizarre but are at least coherent, and an in-public track where Trump presents wild, baseless, contradictory arguments that are persuasive to his followers, but would get his lawyers sanctioned if they brought them into court.
That split was clearest in the 55 lawsuits he filed (and lost all but one inconsequential one) to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election. In public, Trump and his lawyer Rudy Giuliani were alleging all kinds of fraud for which they had no evidence. In front of judges, however, Trump’s lawyers said nothing of the kind, instead arguing that technical details about how small numbers of ballots were handled should invalidate elections in entire states.
We are already seeing the same kind of split in this case. Trump and his followers howled with rage after the indictment came out, but none of what they’ve said challenges the evidence in the indictment or the laws he is accused of violating. Instead, Trump issues blanket denials (“I am an innocent man“), attacks Jack Smith (“deranged”, “lunatic”, and most bizarrely suggesting that Jack Smith is not his real name, whatever that is supposed to imply), engages in whataboutism regarding the Bidens or the Clintons, and says that indicting a leading presidential contender makes the US a “banana republic“. [6]
None of that can be brought into court, where his lawyers will have to stick to this case and the evidence against him.
Worst of all, Trump and many of his allies are broadly hinting at violence. On stage at Trump’s Saturday rally in Georgia, election-denier Kari Lake said:
I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden — and the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one is for you. If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A. [7]
Needless to say, Trump’s lawyers would be disbarred if they went into court and threatened violence. They probably also will not mention obviously false interpretations of law, like the notion that the Presidential Records Act gives Trump the right to do “whatever I want” with highly classified documents [see endnote 2 again], or that he could declassify documents with his mind.
Trump also will not testify in his own defense, because Donald Trump is a terrible witness. He can lie proficiently when he monologues to a sympathetic crowd or is interviewed by a journalist he can talk over. But when he faces cross-examination, the penalty of perjury, and a judge with authority to hold him in contempt, he is unconvincing and likely to reveal (or even brag about) facts that hurt his defense.
A recent case in point is his deposition in the E. Jean Carroll lawsuit. (There is no Fifth Amendment right in civil lawsuits, so he had to submit to an interview.) Trump’s lawyers did not put him on the stand in his own defense, and his taped deposition was cited by Carroll’s lawyers, not Trump’s.
That will leave Trump’s legal team without much to argue, which is what happens when the evidence clearly says that a defendant is guilty.
The judge. Given that Trump’s main hope is to stall and hope that he (or some sympathetic Republican) wins the presidency in 2025, it was very disturbing to hear the case assigned to Judge Aileen Cannon, who was clearly in the tank for Trump when she oversaw his lawsuit challenging the FBI’s search of Mar-a-Lago and trying to get the seized documents back.
In issuing a series of rulings favorable to him, Judge Cannon, a Trump appointee, effectively disrupted the investigation until a conservative appeals court ruled she never had legitimate legal authority to intervene.
Her rulings were not just bad, they were outrageous. A three-judge panel of appeals court judges (two appointed by Trump) reversed her decisions unanimously.
The NYT went on to explain that the choice of Cannon was random, but weighted by various factors that made her a more likely choice than any of the six other eligible judges.
Cannon may be shy about showing such blatant favoritism again, but she doesn’t have to. She can just slow-walk the trial until after the 2024 election. If Republicans win, the case will likely go away.
People who are not worried about this possibility give two reasons for their calm:
The same appeals court that reversed Cannon the first time might keep Cannon in line or sympathize with a DoJ motion to assign the case to a different judge.
Jack Smith had to know Cannon was a possibility when he sought the indictment in Florida rather than DC. He must have had some reason to accept that risk.
We’ll see. The first hints will come tomorrow.
Endgame. But assume for a minute that a trial (either here or somewhere else) actually takes place and results in a prison sentence. Several people have remarked on the logistical difficulties of imprisoning an ex-president — like, does his secret service detail go to prison too?
But I don’t see Trump voluntarily submitting to demeaning restrictions, even if it’s just long-term house arrest. My opinion, based on very little, is that he’ll wind up in either Russia or Saudi Arabia.
People I’ve raised this possibility to are way too confident in the government’s ability to prevent it. “Take away his passport,” they say. But suppose Trump sees the writing on the wall while he’s still campaigning. He schedules a rally in Alaska, but his campaign plane passes the airport and just keeps flying towards Russia. What’s the government going to do, shoot it down?
[1] I wasn’t able to find the number of jurors on this specific grand jury, but by law a federal grand jury has 16-23 members, and 12 votes are required to approve an indictment. The exact number of votes for the Trump indictment is unknown, which is typical.
[2] Trump has tried to muddy up people’s understanding of the PRA, but it’s actually quite clear.
Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.
While he is still in office, a president can go back-and-forth with the Archives over what is a presidential or a personal record. But that negotiation ends when he leaves office. And much as I hate to agree with Bill Barr, he’s right about this:
Battle plans for an attack on another country or Defense Department documents about our capabilities are in no universe Donald J. Trump’s personal documents.
[3] I used to have a top-secret clearance, but never saw an SCI or SAP document. I know someone who was additionally cleared into at least one SCI compartment, but never saw an SAP document. I am personally appalled by the idea of such documents sitting in cardboard boxes in a Mar-a-Lago bathroom, and being moved about by Mar-a-Lago employees with no clearances whatsoever.
People with clearances — there are millions of us — routinely endure all sorts of hassles to secure their documents. For example, I used to have a safe in my office where the classified documents in my possession were supposed to be kept whenever I wasn’t using them. If I was reading a classified document, I couldn’t go to the bathroom without either taking a document with me, finding some other cleared person to babysit it, or putting it back in the safe. And I couldn’t write down the safe’s combination, because if I did, that note would become a classified document and belong inside the safe.
If you’ve jumped through such hoops for years, it is deeply offensive to read about Trump’s cavalier treatment of documents far more sensitive than anything I came into contact with.
[4] These defense are not just absurd (see next note), but they’re also largely irrelevant, because the Espionage Act is older than the classification system.
The World War One era law predates classification of documents but makes it a crime to willfully retain national defense information that could be useful to foreign adversaries.
A document’s classification is an indication of how useful it could be to foreign adversaries. But under the Espionage Act, the utility is the legal standard, not the classification.
[5] Trump talks as if pieces of paper are classified, and so their status can be changed by moving them from here to there. Actually, information is classified. So if a document is classified or declassified, all copies of it share the same status.
Suppose that a dozen people have copies of the same top-secret document. When Trump (while still president) looks at his copy and thinks “declassified” or takes it up to the White House residence, invoking his fantasized automatic declassification order, the other 11 copies would be instantaneously declassified as well, without their possessors being notified in any way. If any of them should happen to choose that moment to send a copy to The New York Times or the Russian embassy, that presumably would be OK.
It’s appalling that Trump would even imagine such a system. Documents are classified for reasons, which might include sources (i.e., protecting the lives of spies) or methods (i.e., not letting our enemies know how much our surveillance systems can see or what our analysts can deduce from that information). It would be ridiculously irresponsible to declassify a document without knowing those reasons and weighing the costs and benefits.
So the idea that anyone would declassify a document purely for personal convenience — because I want to read it here rather than there — should strike horror into the heart of any loyal American citizen.
[6] Apparently Scotland is a banana republic too, since Nicola Sturgeon, who was First Minister as recently as March, was arrested for questioning in a corruption investigation Sunday.
Current or former political leaders facing legal troubles is not not uncommon in countries that bear no resemblance to the stereotypical “banana republic” — a term which Latin Americans understandably find offensive. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has been charged. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi (who died this morning at 86) was convicted of several crimes. Former French Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and Jacques Chirac have been convicted. Former German President Christian Wulff faced trial for corruption, but was acquitted.
Healthy democracies recognize that their laws apply even to leaders and former leaders.
[7] Lake’s numbers don’t work. The NRA has only 4.3 million members, so they can’t constitute “most” of the 74.2 million who voted for Trump in 2020.
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.
This week everybody was talking about the debt ceiling
Saturday, President Biden signed a bill resolving the debt ceiling crisis and pushing the next possible confrontation off to 2025, by which time the American people will have had a chance to weigh in. I discuss this in detail in the featured post.
and the Trump indictment watch
The grand jury considering the Mar-a-Lago documents case last met in early May, prompting speculation that Jack Smith had all the evidence he needed and was now writing an indictment. NBC News claims it’s meeting again sometime this week, prompting speculation that Smith has an indictment for the grand jury to approve.
It’s not clear whether this indictment would just be about the Mar-a-Lago documents, or also include the more complicated January 6 investigation.
and LGBTQ issues
The Sift usually doesn’t take much notice of June as Pride Month, but this year seems different, because the whole concept is under increased right-wing attack. (Target, Bud Light, Kohl’s, Starbucks, Lego, Adidas, and North Face are all facing pressure for stocking Pride merchandise or marketing to transfolk.)
I’m straight, cisgender, and — come next March — I will have been married to the same woman for 40 years. But from time to time I have attended Pride parades or seen drag shows. I’ve always found such events uplifting and life-affirming. I’ve never felt like anyone was telling me I should be gay or trans or anything else. The point is that we can all be what we are, and maybe even what we want to be.
I see LGBTQ Pride as a little like “Black Lives Matter”; it’s a response to a negative. So often our society sends the message that Black lives don’t matter, or that being anything other than heterosexual is shameful or sinful. Simply saying “I’m not ashamed of what I am” doesn’t seem nearly strong enough, so I fully support people expressing pride in themselves.
Friday, a federal judge found that Tennessee’s anti-drag-performance law, the Adult Entertainment Act, is unconstitutional.
The 70-page ruling makes dense reading, because most of it discusses technical issues of whether the plaintiff has standing to sue (i.e., must drag performers wait for the law to be enforced first), and what standard of legal scrutiny (strict or intermediate) applies.
But the judge’s ruling hangs on a few points that aren’t hard to grasp:
Targeting “male and female impersonators” focuses the law on suppressing a particular viewpoint, rather than the law’s ostensible purpose of protecting children. If it’s harmful for a child to view some sexually suggestive act, it shouldn’t matter whether the actors are portraying characters of their own gender.
Banning drag performances anywhere that a child “could” be present is both vague and overbroad, because a child could sneak in just about anywhere. The law offers no “affirmative defenses”, like “We carded everyone at the door” or “The parents approved.”
The harmful-to-children standard is too broad, given how different five-year-olds are from 17-year-olds.
The debate in the legislature focused on drag performances, not on harm to children, suggesting that the legislature had the “impermissible purpose” of suppressing drag rather than protecting children.
The AEA uses text from previous laws, but significantly changes the context: The previous laws targeted businesses that host adult entertainment, while the AEA criminalizes performers. That raises the stakes on First Amendment issues.
Here’s the hypothetical example I would have brought up had I been arguing the case: What if a woman does a double impersonation, and pretends to be a male performer in drag? Her drag persona would then match her birth-certificate gender, so her act should be legal under the AEA, even if the audience (and especially any children in the audience) can’t tell the difference between her and a male drag performer.
I think a law is very suspect if I don’t show my genitalia in a performance, but police have to know what kind of genitalia I have to say whether my act is legal.
People who are worried about drag queens harming children may be looking in the wrong direction. In Texas, a school superintendent was arrested for online solicitation of a minor. He was caught in a sting operation where police officers posed as children aged 13-15.
June is the final month of the Supreme Court term. As usually, the big cases are waiting until the end: affirmative action at universities, whether student debt relief is legal, what kind of racial gerrymandering is allowed, and when “religious freedom” trumps anti-discrimination laws, just to name a few.
I can’t decide whether to take this graphic at face value. Maybe people really do have a lot fewer friends than they used to. But it’s also possible that the definition of friend has gotten stricter over three decades. Suppose I run into someone regularly and have pleasant interactions. Is that a friend, or is more intimacy required? I wonder how my parents would have answered that question, or how many friends they would have claimed to have.
Something cultural makes me take the decline of friendship a little more seriously, though. I’m seeing more and more fantasy series on TV where, when you strip away the supernatural and pseudo-science trappings, the real fantasy is about having friends, in spite of how uncool or fundamentally unlikable you are. Stranger Things is about having friends. Wednesday is about having friends.
Another poll result I don’t know how to interpret is the one where college students, especially conservatives, say they censor themselves on campus. Conservative politicians frequently quote such surveys to justify pushing universities to the right, as Ron DeSantis is doing in Florida.
But what does self-censorship mean in this context? If it means “I won’t say that I oppose abortion” or “I won’t express my doubts about affirmative action”, that’s concerning, because college students ought to be debating such issues and convincing each other via argument rather than shutting their fellow students up through peer pressure.
OTOH, if self-censorship means “I’ve stopped saying the N-word”, well, that’s the virtue known as tact. Mature adults learn to stifle the gratuitous insults that may pop into their minds.
One thing I hope all students are learning is what words other students take offense at. I was in high school before I discovered that Jews took offense at using Jew down to mean bargaining for a lower price. I had to censor myself until I lost the habit of saying it. I was out of college before I learned that gyp (cheating someone) is a slur on the Roma (i.e., Gypsies), or that welshing on a bet insults people from Wales.
The Atlantic writes a lengthy account of how Chris Licht tried to change CNN, and wound up with the debacle of Trump’s recent townhall meeting. David Roberts boils Licht’s mistake down to one paragraph.
CNN can’t be what he wants it to be as long as Trump & the GOP are what they are. It simply doesn’t work. You can’t report “just the facts” AND have a better relationship with Trump & his base. The two are incommensurate! It simply doesn’t work. The right is going to accuse CNN of being biased for the left unless & until it becomes Fox. That’s how the right has worked for decades now. You can’t report “just the facts” AND escape right-wing accusations of bias.
For reference, the Dominion lawsuit showed us how it works at Fox News. Here’s one producer texting another:
We can’t make people think we’ve turned against Trump. Yet also call out the bullshit. You and I see through it. But we have to reassure some in the audience.
If CNN wants to serve that audience, it will have to make the same choice not to call out the “bullshit” the audience wants to believe.
A study just published in the PNAS journal says that police stops of Black drivers that escalate from minor traffic violations to searches, handcuffings, and arrests diverge from other stops in the first few seconds. If the officer’s first statement is a command (“Keep your hands on the wheel.”) rather than a question or an explanation (“Do you know how fast you were going?”), the encounter is much more likely to escalate, even if the driver is cooperative.
The extreme example here is George Floyd.
We analyzed the first 27 seconds of Floyd’s encounter with police on that day. And we found that Floyd apologizes to the officers who stand outside his car window, Floyd requests the reason for the stop, he pleads, he explains, he follows orders, he expresses fear. Yet every response to Floyd is an order.
The study is based on police body-cam videos.
[The researchers] initially set out to look at patterns related to traffic stop escalation for white drivers too, but realized that it happened so infrequently for white drivers that there just weren’t sufficient numbers to even include them in the analysis.
The WaPo ordered the same takeout from the same restaurant four times, but did it four ways: through DoorDash, UberEats, GrubHub, and the restaurant itself. It then figured out how much money went to the restaurant, the driver, and the apps.
I found this to be discouraging reading: IMO the apps take way too much of the money, and yet the app companies are all posting losses. Meal delivery looks like an everybody-loses phenomenon.
and let’s close with something honest
June is wedding month, so you’re going to hear a lot of the same songs you hear at every wedding reception. (Or not. One reception I attended started with “All in Love is Fair”, which made me wonder what they were suggesting.) But what if you could change the lyrics to be more honest? The Holderness Family demonstrates.
The peaceful resolution of the debt-ceiling confrontation is the latest example of a pattern: Unlike his predecessor, President Biden doesn’t brag and exaggerate. He just gets stuff done.
Saturday, President Biden signed a bill that suspends the debt ceiling for the rest of his presidency, ending a crisis that threatened to cause a global economic catastrophe. I’ve explained previously why the debt ceiling shouldn’t exist at all, so I’d have been happier if it were eliminated completely. But by pushing the next crisis off until at least 2025, Biden has ensured that the American people will have a chance to remove Republicans from the levers of power before they can hold the US economy hostage again.
How we got here. Some kind of debt-ceiling showdown became likely last November when the 2022 elections gave Republicans a narrow majority in the House. It seemed almost certain in January when Kevin McCarthy had to make big concessions and promises to the far-right “Freedom” Caucus in order to become Speaker. [1]
This left Biden in a tricky position. On the one hand, he didn’t want to pay ransom (in the form of budget cuts and policy concessions) to McCarthy in response to what was basically a terrorist threat. [2] On the other, the Republican House majority has a legitimate role to play in working out future budgets. So Biden did need to negotiate with McCarthy, he just didn’t want to negotiate over this. Above all, he didn’t want to pay ransom in exchange for a debt-ceiling increase that would run out before the end of his term, setting up a second ransom payment later. [3]
The political implications of the federal budget are also tricky: Polls regularly show that the American people believe the federal government spends too much. But they also dislike cuts to the big-ticket programs the government spends almost all the money on — Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and defense — as well as many other programs. [4] So politically, the ideal position is to demand spending cuts in general without totaling up the numbers or targeting any specific programs.
Biden began fencing McCarthy in almost immediately. During his state of the union address in February, he baited Republicans into yelling out against his claim that they wanted to cut Social Security and Medicare. Rather than argue, Biden deftly accepted their nationally televised pledge not to make such cuts. “As we all apparently agree, Social Security and Medicare is off the books now, right?”
Biden’s second tactic was to insist that McCarthy put his demands on paper and prove that his caucus supported them. After all, Biden could hardly be expected to compromise with House Republicans if they couldn’t compromise among themselves.
This almost worked, but in April, by a 217-215 vote, McCarthy managed to get House approval of a bill to extend the debt ceiling until March, 2024, while rolling federal spending back to 2022 levels and imposing a 1% per year cap on total spending growth, which would be less than inflation. [5]
But while McCarthy succeeded in the task Biden had set him, the bill gave Democrats a target to shoot at. The White House responded by listing programs that Republicans hadn’t exempted from cuts. McCarthy’s bill would
strip away health care services for veterans, cut access to Meals on Wheels, eliminate health care coverage for millions of Americans and ship manufacturing jobs overseas.
Then Biden and McCarthy started negotiating directly. Biden had a clear strategy:
In pursuit of an agreement, the Biden team was willing to give Republicans victory after victory on political talking points, which they realized Mr. McCarthy needed to sell the bill to his conference. … But in the details of the text and the many side deals that accompanied it, the Biden team wanted to win on substance.
The result was an agreement that in essence paid no ransom for the debt ceiling; it was more-or-less the deal that might have been expected from a pure budget negotiation after a clean debt-ceiling increase. Vox summarizes:
Neither party got everything it wanted. Domestic spending will effectively be held at something close to the status quo in nominal terms, which means a cut when accounting for inflation. It’s still at a much higher level than Republicans wanted, and lower than Democrats would have preferred (though they do not see the cuts as devastating).
On a set of other policy issues where Republicans made big demands, Democrats granted only some limited concessions — for instance, on work requirements for some food stamp recipients, and on agreeing to restart student loan repayments in August, the latter of which the Biden administration had already said they’d do.
“[O]ne of the things that I hear some of you guys saying is, ‘Why doesn’t Biden say what a good deal it is?’” President Joe Biden said to reporters yesterday afternoon before leaving the White House on the Marine One helicopter. “Why would Biden say what a good deal it is before the vote? You think that’s going to help me get it passed? No. That’s why you guys don’t bargain very well.”
After the bill had made it through both the House and Senate, but before he signed it, Biden did make a statement [video, transcript]. In it he did two things: outlined what was good about this agreement,
We averted an economic crisis, an economic collapse. We’re cutting spending and bringing the deficits down at the same time. We’re protecting important priorities, from Social Security, to Medicare, to Medicaid, to veterans, to our transformational investments in infrastructure and clean energy.
and shared credit for it.
I want to commend Senator — Speaker McCarthy. You know, he and I, we — and our teams — we were able to get along and get things done. We were straightforward with one another, completely honest with one another, and respectful with one another. Both sides operated in good faith. Both sides kept their word.
And I also want to commend other congressional leaders: House Minority Leader Jeffries, Senate Majority Leader Schumer, Senate Minority Leader McConnell. They acted responsibly and put the good of the country ahead of politics.
The final vote in both chambers was overwhelming, far more bar- — bipartisan than anyone thought was possible.
I am reminded of a famous Harry Truman quote: “It is amazing what you can accomplish if you do not care who gets the credit.”
The mess he inherited. The one negative consequence of Biden’s refusal to tout himself (as President I-Alone-Can-Fix-It ceaselessly did, often by lying) is that he doesn’t get nearly enough credit for a remarkable economic performance.
On Inauguration Day, the country was bottoming out from the disruption of the Covid pandemic. Unemployment was at 6.3% and many businesses were still closed, many schools were holding classes remotely, the FY2020 budget deficit was a record $3.1 trillion, and more than 23 thousand Americans were dying of Covid every week.
Today, unemployment stands at 3.7%, with more Americans working than ever before. The FY 2023 deficit is coming in around $1.5 trillion, and weekly Covid deaths are down to 2,216.
The cost of creating 12 million jobs has been inflation, which the Federal Reserve has countered by raising interest rates from barely above zero to 5%, which has inflation falling from a peak of 9.1% a year ago to 4.9% last month. Ordinarily, that would lead to a recession, but it increasingly looks like the Fed and the Biden administration may engineer a soft landing for the economy.
Some kind of recovery was probably inevitable. Unemployment was going to drop as businesses reopened, and Covid deaths were going to drop as people got vaccinated. But the speed and smoothness of the recovery has been amazing, and Biden’s policies have a lot to do with that.
Partisan and bipartisan accomplishments. Biden has never had the big congressional majorities President Obama enjoyed in his first two years, or that LBJ and FDR had in their transformational eras. And yet he has gotten a lot done, finding bipartisan support for bills like infrastructure, the CHIPS Act, and the debt ceiling, but not being afraid to push bills like his Covid stimulus plan and the Inflation Reduction Act through on party-line votes (which required all fifty of the Democratic votes in the Senate).
In an era when everyone says Washington is broken, Joe Biden has made it work better than many presidents with much more support in Congress.
On the world stage, Biden has deftly repaired the NATO alliance Trump had left frayed, and mobilized it to help Ukraine defend itself against the Russian invasion.
Age? Biden’s age, combined with a lifelong stutter that often causes him to stumble over words, has made him vulnerable to being smeared as senile. Fox News hosts often reference Biden’s “dementia” as if it were an established fact. Last summer, Tucker Carlson said this on the air:
Everybody watching, everyone in the media, that would include Barack Obama’s former advisers, is now in agreement that Joe Biden is senile and cannot govern the United States.
And yet, whenever Biden needs to perform, he does. At the state of the union address, he didn’t just mumble through a teleprompter speech, he engaged the audience and recognized when his Republican hecklers had dug themselves a hole he could take advantage of. He baited the likes of Lauren Boebert and Marjorie Taylor Greene, and then sprung a trap on them.
That’s quite a trick for a dementia sufferer.
House Freedom Caucus member Nancy Mace of South Carolina inadvertently called attention to the contradictions in Republican talking points when she responded to the debt ceiling deal by saying: “Republicans got outsmarted by a President who can’t find his pants.”
We don’t know for sure whether Biden was wearing pants during the 90-minute phone call with McCarthy that firmed up the debt-ceiling deal. But if “everybody watching” is honest with themselves and looks at the record of accomplishment over the last 2 1/2 years, I think they’ll have to admit that somebody in the Biden administration is pretty sharp. My best guess is that it’s Joe Biden.
Contrast with The Former Guy. Starting with his pre-presidential best-seller The Art of the Deal, Donald Trump has always touted himself as a great negotiator, and has made amazing claims about what his deal-making prowess can accomplish in the presidency. He’s still doing it today, claiming that he can settle the Ukraine War in “one day, 24 hours” and negotiate a compromise on abortion “so that people are happy“.
His actual record in deal-making, though, is full of failure. He tore up Obama’s nuclear deal with Iran, claiming that once sanctions were reimposed, Iran’s leaders “are going to want to make a new and lasting deal.” But that deal never emerged, and today Iran is on a path to getting nuclear weapons.
He said he would get North Korea to give up its nuclear weapons (and even claimed Kim Jong Un had agreed), but that never happened either.
When he pulled the US out of the Paris Climate Accords, he said he’d negotiate “something that we can do that’s much better than the Paris Accord. And I think the people of our country will be thrilled, and I think then the people of the world will be thrilled.” That also never happened.
Biden’s bipartisan infrastructure bill represents success in an area where Trump repeatedly failed. The Trump administration’s many attempts to declare an “infrastructure week” eventually became a joke. Even when his party controlled Congress, he couldn’t make a deal.
Likewise, his promise to repeal-and-replace ObamaCare fell apart despite unified Republican control of Congress, because Trump couldn’t lead his party to agree on a replacement plan. (During the 2016 campaign, he claimed to have a plan that would “save $’s and have much better healthcare!” During his four years in office, he never revealed it.) Democrats were willing to give him $25 billion to build his wall (another major 2016 campaign promise) in exchange for a path to citizenship for the Dreamers, but Trump couldn’t take “yes” for an answer.
Trump’s lousy deal-making ability comes down to two shortcomings
His zero-sum worldview leaves no room for a win/win outcome. He can only win if the other guy loses.
His playbook only has one tactic: Make big demands, and then keep ratcheting up the pressure until his opponent gives in. This works fine if he holds all the cards, but in any more equal situation the other side eventually walks away.
2024. If we really do have a Biden/Trump rematch in 2024, it will be a test of the American electorate: Can a majority of voters tell the difference between hype and reality? Will they vote for a guy who puffs himself up and makes exaggerated claims of accomplishments he didn’t achieve and abilities he doesn’t have? Or will they recognize the guy who has been working hard for them and getting results?
If we can’t make that choice correctly, then I would claim it’s the American public that has suffered a severe cognitive decline.
The emerging agreement also addresses the looming need to raise the debt ceiling indirectly, declining to commit conservatives to supporting any hike without other budgetary austerity they have insisted on.
[2] When I use loaded terms like hostage, ransom, and terrorist, I feel obligated to explain why they’re justified.
In a negotiation, it’s normal and acceptable to threaten actions the other side won’t like if they don’t give you what you want. What tips that tactic over into hostage-taking is if you’re threatening actions that nobody wants and nobody benefits from.
That’s what happens when kidnappers threaten to kill their hostage, or a terrorist threatens to blow up the plane he’s on. Killing the hostage doesn’t benefit the kidnappers in any way, but they’re counting on the hostage’s loved ones to dislike that option even more than they do.
Same thing here. Sending the United States into default wouldn’t accomplish any purpose for Republicans, and would in fact harm the constituents they represent. But they assume that Biden and the Democrats like that option even less than they do.
[3] If Biden is reelected, he’ll face the debt ceiling again in 2025. But by then, McCarthy may no longer be speaker.
[4] If you force voters to resolve this contradiction, they’ll usually grossly exaggerate the amount of money the government spends on something they don’t like, such as foreign aid, or subsidies for art they find offensive, or welfare payments to able-bodied adults who don’t want to work. In truth, you could zero out these kinds of payments without making much of a dent in the budget deficit.
[5] The narrowness of his margin is why McCarthy can’t let the House expel indicted fraudster George Santos. If Santos had been expelled and replaced by a Democrat, McCarthy’s bill would have failed.
The big news this week is that we won’t have a self-inflicted economic disaster after all. Biden and McCarthy were able to push their debt-ceiling deal through Congress before the Treasury ran out of cash.
This makes an opportune time to point out something that’s been flying under the mainstream media’s radar: Joe Biden is actually pretty good at governing. Part of his technique is to share credit for success and not humiliate his rivals, so he doesn’t do the kind of victory dances his predecessor would do (even when he hadn’t really won). If you’re not paying attention, you may not notice the amount of skill in Biden’s performance. And if you’re watching too much Fox News, you might even think he’s senile (while being totally confused by how he keeps getting things done).
So this week’s featured post lays it out: “Joe Biden is Good at Governing”. It should be out shortly.
The weekly summary discusses the debt ceiling, the reasons to think another Trump indictment is coming soon, a federal judge tossing out Tennessee’s anti-drag law, a survey on the decline of friendship, the Sacklers escaping with billions, and a few other things. It should be out before noon.
Of course I am quoting the statement above ironically. What DeSantis has been doing in Florida these past few years is what’s been giving me a new appreciation for the fragility of our freedoms.
This week everybody was talking about the debt ceiling
Saturday, President Biden and Speaker McCarthy announced an agreement to raise the debt ceiling, which Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen expects to be breached next Monday.
Something like this set of concessions was more or less baked in the moment Republicans won control of the House.
In other words, Biden seems to have negotiated the kind of deal you would ordinarily expect between a president and speaker from different parties. It doesn’t look like McCarthy exacted any special ransom for threatening global economic catastrophe.
Assuming this agreement can be turned into law without further concessions, this has to be counted as a win for Biden.
BTW, this should be a moment of cognitive dissonance for Fox News watchers who hoped for more out of this deal. “You mean the guy with dementia bamboozled our guy?”
and the prospect of another Trump indictment
Numerous sources say that Special Counsel Jack Smith has wrapped up his investigation of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, and that an indictment is coming soon, i.e. sometime in June. A major reason to think so is that the grand jury hasn’t met since May 5, suggesting that Smith has all the testimony he needs and is writing an indictment.
If that’s true, it suggests that the Mar-a-Lago indictment will be separate from the January 6 indictment, if such an indictment is coming at all.
A major scoop from the WaPo indicates that the case for obstruction is very strong. Their report has Trump’s people moving boxes of documents the day before his lawyers (falsely) told a DoJ prosecutor and the FBI that the 35 documents they were turning over (in response to a subpoena) constituted the entire stash. It looks like Trump kept secrets from his lawyers so that they could make false statements to the government without intentionally lying.
Additionally, WaPo says Trump kept classified documents in his office and sometimes showed them to visitors.
The most explosive and most speculative line of investigation concerns Trump’s business relationships with foreign countries, including a lucrative contract from the new Saudi golf tour (LIV) to play tournaments at Trump’s courses (including one this weekend). Did the Saudis pay him to get, say, information on Iran’s missile programs? That would be espionage.
But as I keep saying, it’s a mistake to invest too much energy in speculation. If an indictment really is coming soon, we’ll be able to read it and see what’s in it for ourselves.
The conventional wisdom says that an indictment won’t matter politically, because nothing matters to Trump’s supporters. Reporters are constantly talking to various Trump voters, who keep telling them that another indictment or two won’t change their mind about him.
But I wonder if that’s true. Right now, a Mar-a-Lago or Georgia or January 6 indictment is just an idea. But when those indictments drop, they will tell stories. And stories are more powerful than mere ideas. Right now, his cultists can say, “I don’t care if Trump had some classified documents. Biden and Pence had them too. So what?” But it would be much more difficult to say, “I don’t care if Trump showed classified documents to the Saudis in exchange for golf money” (if that’s what the indictment says).
If the cult does start to turn, it won’t happen via former supporters speaking out against him. Instead, they will just go silent. People you would expect to defend him will instead change the subject.
Another indication an indictment might be coming is that Trump’s lawyers sent a letter to Attorney General Garland requesting a meeting. I don’t put much stock in this sign, because the letter clearly wasn’t serious. It was written for public distribution and not to persuade Garland to do anything.
No president of the United States has ever, in the history of our country, been baselessly investigated in such outrageous and unlawful fashion.
That’s political rhetoric more likely to anger Garland than to make him sympathize. What’s the point of meeting with Trump’s lawyers to hear more nonsense like that?
The Oath Keepers convicted in November of seditious conspiracy related to January 6 were sentenced this week. Leader Stewart Rhodes got 18 years. Other conspirators got lesser sentences that were still substantial.
Again, the significance of the three seditious conspiracy trials (all resulting in convictions) is that juries have been convinced that January 6 was not just a mob that got out of control. Somebody intended the mob to do what it did. One of those somebodies was Stewart Rhodes, but it’s very unlikely he was at the top of the chain.
and Ron DeSantis’ glitchy campaign launch
After a technical delay of around 20 minutes, Ron DeSantis officially announced his candidacy during a live Twitter interview with Elon Musk. DeSantis supporters made a big deal about the 300K viewers, which nearly crashed Twitter’s diminished infrastructure. But 3 million watched Trump’s CNN town hall a few weeks ago, and 400K watched AOC play a video game over Twitch in 2020.
DeSantis said a lot of false and/or misleading stuff. For example, when challenged on Florida schools removing books from their classrooms and libraries because of his Don’t Say Gay and STOP Woke Acts, he deflected onto the left, saying that liberals were banning To Kill a Mockingbird. Here, DeSantis is doing a much worse version of what he accuses the media of doing: calling something a ban that is really a much less serious restriction.
I can’t say whether this is a complete view of the topic, but if you google “ban on To Kill a Mockingbird” and look for liberal examples, what comes up is a Washington school district deciding to stop requiring the book for ninth graders, which makes perfect sense. If you assume a required-reading list has a limited number of spaces for novels about the Jim Crow era, it makes sense to shift to one by a Black author with a Black central character. But TKaMB remains available in school libraries and can be assigned by teachers who make that choice.
Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R-FL) signed a bill regarding spaceflight on Thursday just one day after he announced his presidential run in a glitch-filled interview with Elon Musk on Twitter Spaces. … Florida is a known launching point for [Musk-owned] SpaceX aircrafts, and the new law could potentially shield Musk and other space flight companies from being sued for accidents that injure or kill crew members. …
Last month, SpaceX’s privately owned spaceport in South Texas launched the most powerful rocket ever built before the spacecraft exploded over the Gulf of Mexico. The explosion reportedly hurled chunks of concrete and metal thousands of feet away into sensitive habitat, and sparked a 3.5-acre fire on state park lands near the launch site.
Or maybe, coupled with his war against Disney, it tells us about DeSantis’ theory of government: Use government power to reward your friends and punish your enemies. If Musk turns against DeSantis, this favor from the State of Florida could be revoked, the way DeSantis has tried to revoke Disney’s special taxing district.
NBC News spoke with 10 Republican lobbyists in Florida, all of whom said they couldn’t remember being solicited for donations so overtly by administration officials — especially at a time when the governor still has to act on the state budget.
That process that involves DeSantis using his line-item veto pen to slash funding for projects that the same lobbyists whom they are asking for political cash have a professional stake in. Most of the lobbyists said they felt pressure to give to the governor’s campaign.
“What the f— am I supposed to do?” one lobbyist said. “I have a lot of business in front of the DeSantis administration.”
and Ken Paxton’s impeachment
Apparently there are limits, even for MAGA politicians. Saturday the Texas House impeached Attorney General Ken Paxton “on articles including bribery and abuse of public trust”. Trump and Ted Cruz support him, but the vote was 121-23.
Paxton will be suspended from office while the Texas Senate hears his case.
and you also might be interested in …
Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan won a run-off election yesterday, netting himself a third term in office. In the run-up to the election, there was some hope that an Erdogan defeat might mark a global turning away from autocratic rulers. But it was not to be.
Conservatives get closer and closer to just admitting that they’re bad guys. A few weeks ago, Senator Tommy Tuberville took offense at Biden wanting to get White nationalists out of the military. “They call them [White nationalists]. I call them Americans.” In a later interview he dug in deeper. “I look at a white nationalist as a Trump Republican. That’s what we’re called all the time. A MAGA Person.”
If he thinks that characterization is unjust, i.e., if sees any difference between a Trump Republican and an actual White nationalist, Tuberville didn’t explain what it was.
Of course, sometimes liberals also own the negative labels people throw at them. The Satanic Temple is running the Samuel Alito’s Mom’s Satanic Abortion Clinic out of New Mexico, providing telehealth abortion services nationwide, particularly to states where abortion is illegal. As the Temple says:
The Satanic Temple, on behalf of its members, objects to government interference with abortion access and contests that laws that impede our faith in bodily autonomy and our ability to perform our Religious Abortion Ritual violate the First Amendment and the Religious Freedom Restoration Act.
TST Health’s first telehealth clinic will provide medication for safe abortions through the mail for members and for those who wish to perform TST’s Abortion Ritual. The goal of this first clinic is to allow our members to have access to safe and legal abortions, no matter where they live or what their financial situation may be.
One of the manifest hypocrisies of conservative legal activism is pushing a notion of “religious freedom” that really only applies to Christians, and in practice grants them special rights. TST is the most out-there group pushing for equality of religious freedom: If Christians have all these rights, explain to us why Satanists don’t.
Target has removed some Pride-month merchandise from its stores and moved other items to less prominent locations in response to objections and threats from conservatives
As Target explained in a statement, some customers had knocked down Pride displays at stores while others outraged by Pride-themed merchandise angrily approached workers as well as posted threatening videos on social media. Target has been celebrating Pride month for a decade, but as the company noted, “Since introducing this year’s collection, we’ve experienced threats impacting our team members’ sense of safety and wellbeing while at work.”
Targets in several states subsequently received bomb threats appearing to come from Pride supporters angry about the pullback, but these appear to be hoaxes that originated overseas.
What’s not a hoax is the violence-themed rhetoric right-wing pundits have been directing at Target. 2024 presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy said that Target had “put a target on its back”. Charlie Kirk said “the only thing they understand is force. Pain is a teacher”. No doubt if they were challenged, each would deny promoting literal violence, but they have to know that some portion of their audience will take it that way.
If you’re wondering what’s supposed to be so terrible about Target’s pride display, the Heritage Foundation produced this video tour of Target’s Pride section to outrage you. Strangely, though, I’m not outraged — at least not at Target.
Heritage’s claim is that Target is pushing LGBTQ messages at young consumers, who presumably go in as blank slates without any opinions or intentions or identities of their own. It’s a weird point of view for a group that ordinarily is so pro-capitalist. Obviously, Target puts stuff out there because the corporation expects to sell it, and not because Target has some sinister agenda about “grooming” children to be gay or trans.
If you think the products have some negative effect on society — I don’t in this case — well, that’s capitalism, isn’t it? Exxon sells fossil fuels and Colt sells AR-15s. Those products have negative effects on society, but I suspect the corporations sell them to make money rather than because of some pact with Satan.
Case in point: a teen-sized sweatshirt that says “Not a Phase”. The narrator interprets this as Target “grooming” kids into believing they won’t grow out of their “gender confusion”. This woman clearly has no memory of being a teen-ager and (whatever you happened to be into) being fed up with condescending adults. The shirt expresses a timeless teen attitude, and I see why Target expects to sell a lot of them.
Back when Parkland-massacre-survivor David Hogg was starting his gun-control activism, Fox News host Laura Ingraham mocked him for being rejected by four colleges, because she’s classy that way. This week he graduated from Harvard.
The Supreme Court took power away from the EPA this week by reading the Clean Water Act narrowly. The immediate result is that some wetlands will lose protection, but the precedent may have larger implications. The case deserves more attention than I’ve been able to give it.
The Nature Conservancy has an annual photo contest. This is one of the winners in the “Plants and Fungi” category. These are Dragon Blood Trees. The story behind the tree’s name isn’t all I was hoping for: apparently it has red sap.
A number of decades ago, I attended an Arlo Guthrie concert. A presidential primary campaign cycle was heating up — probably 1980, but I’m not sure. Guthrie, in his wise-fool persona, claimed to be anxious about the state of the nation because “All these people on TV, they’re telling me we need leadership and we’re just not getting it.” Then he described how on some recent evening, just before going to bed, he had brushed his teeth and then looked in the mirror and asked himself: “Arlo, did you need leadership today?”
That line was funny — and continues to be funny years later — because it captures the disconnect between political rhetoric and our actual lives. Guthrie’s joke is on us, and how easily manipulated we are. In the heat of a campaign, it’s easy to become either excited or enraged over some “issue” that (when you boil it down) really has no effect on either yourself or anyone you know or care about, and may be little more than a phrase or an image.
And so, during his campaign launch Wednesday, Ron DeSantis talked about the “the woke mind virus”, “woke ideology”, and “critical race theory”. The Republican he hopes to catch up to, Donald Trump, spends most of his speeches talking about his persecution by the Deep State. He offers to replace President Biden’s “weakness” with his own “strength”. Kevin McCarthy and Republicans in Congress have been focused on America’s “spending problem”, an issue whose lack of substance I examined a few weeks ago.
Any of those “issues” might take the place of Guthrie’s “leadership”. I can imagine myself staring into my own bathroom mirror and asking, “Doug, did you need protection from the woke mind virus today?”
Meanwhile, President Biden has been spending his time trying to avoid crashing into the debt ceiling, a looming disaster that is real enough, but is also entirely manufactured. Rather than solve our problems, politicians have created a new one to wrestle with.
Isn’t it wonderful that the external world isn’t presenting any challenges that require our collective action?
And then there are the problems that neither party is talking about. In the coming months I plan to call attention to a few, starting with: declining life expectancy in the United States. It would be bad enough if our political system were simply oblivious to the problem. But in fact political action is causing a lot of it.
Talk about a matter of life and death.
Declining life expectancy. In the United States, like most of the world, life expectancy had gone up and up for centuries, until the last few years. Here’s a graph of US life expectancy from 1860 to 2020.
Except for brief glitches during the Civil War and the World War I/Spanish flu era, life expectancy at birth goes inexorably upward, almost exactly doubling from 39.41 in 1860 to 78.94 in 2015. Not even World War II could bring it down (probably because the health advantages of ending the Depression overcame the casualties of war). Until recently, Americans had come to think of increasing lifespans as an inevitable dividend of scientific progress. Of course our generation would live longer than our parents’ generation, and our children would live longer yet.
Different sources produce slightly different numbers, but just about everybody sees a leveling-off in the mid-2010s, followed by a sharp drop in the last few years to levels not seen since 1996. Nearly three decades of progress have vanished.
Now, there’s an obvious reason for this: the Covid pandemic, which has killed 1.1 million Americans since it started in 2020 (and is not done, even if we’ve stopped paying attention to it). Largely because of mismanagement by the Trump administration and misinformation from the larger MAGA movement (which encouraged lax attitudes, snake-oil cures, and vaccine resistance), we took a bigger hit than most comparable countries. The US has had 3,480 Covid deaths per million people, while Canada has had 1,364, Norway 986, and Australia 801. Even some of the countries hit earlier and harder than the US have fared better in the long run: Italy has had 3,159 deaths per million and Spain 2,595. One likely reason: 86% of Spaniards and 81% of Italians have been vaccinated, compared to 69% of Americans.
But OK then: If Covid is the problem, it should go away as Covid recedes. And that’s happening in the rest of the world. But not here.
The headline from this graph is that life expectancy in comparable countries bounced back in 2021, almost regaining its 2019 level, while life expectancy in the US dropped further. But there’s also a long-term story here: In 1980, US life expectancy was lower than the comparable-country average by less than a year. By 2021, though, the gap had grown to more than six years. Even pre-Covid, there was a 3.8 year gap.
Where did that come from?
Bad habits or bad government? The simple explanations for our long-term life expectancy gap focus on our bad habits: We’re too fat, we’re out of shape, we take drugs, and we kill ourselves and each other at a high rate. It’s easy to tell the life-expectancy story as a crisis of individual moral gumption: If Americans would just eat better, get off the couch, get clean from drug abuse, and deal with our depression and anger problems, we’d live longer.
And all that is true as far as it goes. But if you look at those “moral” problems, each one has a political component.
Guns. Most obviously, our high suicide and murder rates are related to our gun policies. People get depressed and angry in other countries too. But depressed or angry Americans are more likely to have ready access to guns. In 2020, researchers at Stanford published a study on the relationship between guns and suicides:
The researchers found that people who owned handguns had rates of suicide that were nearly four times higher than people living in the same neighborhood who did not own handguns. The elevated risk was driven by higher rates of suicide by firearm. Handgun owners did not have higher rates of suicide by other methods or higher rates of death generally.
The researchers themselves wrote:
Suicide attempts are often impulsive acts, driven by transient life crises. Most attempts are not fatal, and most people who attempt suicide do not go on to die in a future suicide. Whether a suicide attempt is fatal depends heavily on the lethality of the method used — and firearms are extremely lethal. These facts focus attention on firearm access as a risk factor for suicide especially in the United States, which has a higher prevalence of civilian-owned firearms than any other country and one of the highest rates of suicide by firearm.
Food policy. Obesity is a major factor in Americans’ poor health, and is the one most likely to be seen as a moral issue. (“Just stop stuffing your face, fatso.”) But while we can all imagine ways that we could improve our discipline regarding diet and exercise, it’s also true that it’s hard to live a healthy lifestyle in the United States.
Nationally, our food policy tilts towards putting high-fructose corn syrup in just about everything. Our giant factory farms make meat and dairy cheaper here than in many other countries, but also less healthy. Particularly in our poorer neighborhoods, fast food is easier to find than fresh vegetables. The food industry spends billions every year trying to persuade us to eat fat- and sugar-laden foods.
Compared to cities in other countries, American cities encourage travel by car and discourage walking.
In short, there are reasons we’re fat. And not all of them are lack of willpower.
Healthcare. Some politicians like to claim that American healthcare is “the best in the world”. And that may be true if you’re rich or have excellent health insurance, live near a top medical center, and need the kind of major medical interventions American medicine specializes in.
But overall, our public health is terrible compared to other rich countries, all of whom spend less per capita on healthcare than we do. For example,
Among 11 developed countries, the United States has the highest maternal mortality rate, a relative undersupply of maternity care providers, and is the only country not to guarantee access to provider home visits or paid parental leave in the postpartum period, a recent report from The Commonwealth Fund concluded. Compared with any other wealthy nation, the United States also spends the highest percentage of its gross domestic product on health care.
Maternal deaths have been increasing in the United States since 2000, and although 700 pregnancy-related deaths occur each year, two-thirds of these deaths are considered to be preventable.
The statistical term for preventable deaths is “amenable mortality”. In 2019 — pre-Covid, in other words — amenable mortality in the US was responsible for 177 deaths for every 100K people, compared to a 38-country average of 126. Japan and Switzerland had 83, and Canada 116.
The difference is our reliance on the private sector. In the US health-insurance business, the way to make money is to insure only healthy people. Much of the administrative effort in our health-insurance companies is devoted to shifting costs onto someone else, rather than improving health overall.
And of course, the private health-insurance industry has no interest in the poor at all. If poor and lower-working-class Americans aren’t on Medicaid, they’re probably uninsured. Uninsured people fear our expensive healthcare system, and are likely to hope problems go away on their own rather than get them checked out. Those decisions end up killing a lot of people.
One conservative policy designed to limit healthcare spending is to give people more “skin in the game“. In other words, to increase copayments so that people (especially the poor) have more incentive to ignore problems and hope they go away on their own.
Red states and blue states. The policies I’ve been talking about — limiting gun access, subsidizing healthy food choices (or penalizing unhealthy ones), promoting public health, lowering medical copayments, pushing for walkable cities, and making it easier to get health insurance — are classic liberal policies that conservatives ridicule as examples of the “nanny state”. Blue states are more likely to take these actions than red states.
And guess what? Blue states have higher life expectancy than red states. Paul Krugman tweeted the following chart comparing Biden’s margin over Trump in 2020 to each state’s change in life expectancy over the previous 30 years:
Life expectancy is hugely unequal across U.S. regions, with major coastal cities not looking much worse than Europe but the South and the eastern heartland doing far worse.
But wasn’t it always thus? No. Geographic health disparities have surged in recent decades. According to the U.S. mortality database, as recently as 1990, Ohio had slightly higher life expectancy than New York. Since then, New York’s life expectancy has risen rapidly, nearly converging with that of other rich countries, while Ohio’s has hardly risen at all and is now four years less than New York’s.
Summing up. Life expectancy ought to be a major political issue. Americans aren’t living as long as citizens of other rich countries, but that isn’t due to some unforeseeable act of God. We’re doing it to ourselves through our political choices.
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.
:format(webp):no_upscale()/cdn.vox-cdn.com/uploads/chorus_asset/file/10259683/mother_jones_gun_deaths_by_state.png)
The Weekly Sift 
