For now I’ll put this out there simply as an impression, an intuitive or atmospheric one. I think Donald Trump is going to have trouble keeping up the unified support and defense facing these indictments. To be clear, I’m still very confident that Trump will be the nominee. The basic dynamics are the same. The indictments all but seal the nomination for him; they hurt him in the general. But look close and the ship is taking on water, hemorrhaging a bit at the seams.

In the upside-down world of Trump the day he gets indicted, gets called into court and taken, albeit briefly, into custody is the high point. It’s the day of maximum unity.

But it wasn’t quite perfect.

We will have wall to wall coverage today of the significant developments in the prosecution of Donald Trump. But please give me two minutes of your time. It’s really important, particularly this year. We need to keep making progress on this drive. As a chronic procrastinator myself I’m sure many of your are planning to contribute but haven’t found a moment yet. Can you take a moment right now and do it? It allows us to bank critical progress and focus on the news. But it’s important, so if you can just take two minutes from your routine right this moment that would be great. Just click here. And thank you.

Despite intense security, the Trump militia turnout at Trump’s New York arraignment was fairly low energy. I suspect it will be the same in Florida today, too, though I hope and assume federal law enforcement is planning for the worst. To be clear, when I say low energy, I simply mean legitimate. There might be a big crowd of supporters saying nasty things. That’s their right. But I don’t think there will be violence.

One thing we need to remember is that Jan. 6 was, in a key way, a perfect storm. There was a specific operational thing the mob and the people who’d organized it were trying to do: stop the certification. Stopping the certification would give time for the fake electors scheme to work. If you stormed the courthouse and disrupted Trump’s arraignment, who cares? They’d just do it the next day somewhere else.

Juliette Kayyem made the point on Twitter that the big national right-wing paramilitary-type groups have been significantly disrupted by the Jan. 6 investigations. The temperature is possibly higher now. But the organization is lower. Lone wolves are the big danger now.

But there’s another factor worth discussing. Last night I was reading an email from TPM Reader JS (not the one from a couple days ago). He asked: “Could it be that perhaps the reason that only a few people showed up to protest the Manhattan indictment and this latest one seems to be producing a lot of Tweets and little action is because … the justice system prosecuted the perpetrators of January 6th, causing a deterrent effect?”

Comments from Nikki Haley this afternoon on Fox are getting some attention as a possible pivot away from the uniform and fulsome defense of Donald Trump we’re seeing from every Republican candidate aside from Asa Hutchison. It’s less than advertised but it’s not nothing. It’s also a bit of an incoherent mishmash. She’s going to purge the Deep State DOJ/FBI. Also Trump was reckless and endangered America and the American military. Also, can’t we just nominate me since he’s probably going to get indicted a few more times and it’s all getting to be a bit much and a distraction.

Watch the comments and decide for yourself.

I posted the video of Bill Barr’s Fox News interview on the Trump charges over the weekend. I’ve had several of you ask to see the transcript itself. So here it is.

With your support, we’ve managed to get to the 40% milestone on our way toward our goal in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re now at $202,575, which is great for five days. Still a very long way to go. But we’re encouraged by the response so far. (Really, it’s hard to convey how much of a relief, a show of support, a validation and above all a big, big assist on our collective work that is.) We’ve got an overflow of news, which is kind of inconsiderate of the ex-President. But we’ll do our best to drive and news at the same time. If you’d like to support our efforts in this critical drive, just click right here.

It’s a funny thing pointing to Bill Barr as an authority on anything. But it’s worth watching this interview with Barr about the Trump indictments on Fox News.

A few of you wrote in in response to my post on the sheer “normalness,” the “mundaneness” of the prosecution of Donald Trump. You took me to task, arguing that this is all far from normal. It’s a crisis, in fact. Nothing about Trump’s time on the political stage is normal.

I think we are speaking past each other.

From TPM Reader JS …

I’m getting so enraged by all of these headlines in the NYT and WaPo that claim this is “bad for Biden” or a “test for the rule of law.’ No.

I sort of held my tongue through most of the revelations and hijinks yesterday. I will share some thoughts later on the particulars of the indictment. (You can do no better than reading Josh Kovensky’s global wrap-up here.) But for now I wanted to share one thought.

That is the sheer ordinariness of the whole story. That may seem like an odd thing to say: ex-President facing multiple federal felony indictments for the first time ever, the bizarre details of this antic clown’s Florida Villa-cum-Hotel stuffed with banker’s boxes of classified documents, the bathroom chandelier, the power glitz jammed together with gaudy dime store aesthetic. But we grant Trump too much by lavishing, wearying too much in the purported weightiness of the moment. It’s very normal. Yes, powerful people get away with a lot. But if you commit crimes repeatedly and brazenly you’re very likely to get charged with one or more crimes, particularly if you’re in the public spotlight.