Editors’ Blog

In the hours since special counsel Jack Smith announced charges against Donald Trump for his efforts to overturn the results of the 2020 election, Trump’s allies and the right-wing media have been pushing a weird theory that the special counsel wants to punish Trump with either hundreds of years in prison or … death.

Yes, death.

I mentioned this in my conversation with Josh Kovensky in our special edition of the podcast this morning. But I want to expand on it here. Jeff Clark comes off as a bit of a dweeb. And yes, I’m talking about his physical appearance. Some of my best friends are dweebs, of course, and there’s nothing wrong with that. In most cases I wouldn’t mention a person’s physical appearance. But I do so in this case because I think it’s shaped people’s reaction to this part of the story. Because he’s a bit nebbishy looking and because the whole plan was so crazy many people have looked on Clark as a kind of ridiculous figure.

Yet this comment about the Insurrection Act is a reminder that there’s nothing funny about the guy. He had a plan and was fairly cavalier about his plan to … let’s be direct about it, murder countless numbers of Americans who weren’t willing to let their Republic be torn away from them.

This was their plan: stop the count, allow Trump to remain President and then when everyone freaks out declare martial law and kill a bunch of people in order to overawe the civilian population and force people to accept it. That’s really the plan. This is a dark, evil, degenerate mindset, all for the purpose of retaining power against Constitution and law.

I wanted to note two points about possible Trump defenses that haven’t so much been ignored by legal experts as perhaps simply assumed and thus left unstated. It’s worth stating them explicitly.

In recent weeks I’ve written a number of posts looking at the possible schedule of Trump’s various criminal trials next year. (We now have three cases of the four we’ve expected. The fourth in Atlanta is likely to come this month.) In those posts either I or readers have suggested either that the January 6th case is likely to come after the Mar-a-Lago documents case or that neither trial is likely to be held prior to the 2024 presidential election. But several recent events — most but not all of which we learned about yesterday — throw those assumptions into some doubt.

From the legal theories to the obscure characters, much of what was in Jack Smith’s January 6 Trump indictment is stuff readers may have seen over the last three years at TPM. That, of course, is why you’re a member. (Unless maybe you’re not a member. In which case you should absolutely become a member!)

Some examples:

We’re going to have two episodes of the podcast out today. Kate Riga is on vacation this week, so last week we recorded this week’s episode with the expectation that the indictment would come down before it aired today. That episode is looking at the full range of criminal and civil cases that will be unfolding for Donald Trump in 2024. Again, we recorded it assuming this indictment was going to happen. Because it has happened, Josh Kovensky and I recorded a special instapod this morning about the new indictments themselves. That episode will show up first in your podcast feed and be followed later in the day by the regular pod with Kate and me.

I want to go back to something I noted earlier. The American Republic and the Constitution that sets out its rules and structure are the anchor of the law and the rule of law in this country. Attempts to overthrow the government, to overthrow the Constitution, are the gravest crimes since they challenge the basis of every other law. Murder may come with a stiffer sentence, but attempts to overthrow the Republic itself is still a graver offense.

I don’t have too much to add to the widely expected and yet still historic indictment revealed just moments ago. Our team is poring over the document as I write. No President, really no politician in American history has committed a series of crimes of the magnitude of those committed by Donald Trump in the final months of his presidency from November 2020 into January of 2021. While very serious, the documents case in Mar-a-Lago pales in comparison. Certainly the felony case in New York state pales in comparison. The probable indictments in Georgia are likely of comparable consequence. Indeed, they appear to be part of the same broad conspiracy that is being charged today. No crime, no violation of the law can be more consequential or grave than one that seeks to overthrow the basis of the law itself, which is to say, to overthrow the federal constitution and the state itself.

I wanted to follow up on my post below about this new Times/Siena poll. A number of you wrote in and made some of the following points. One was, isn’t it a mistake to be making much of anything about a poll almost 18 months before the election. Others pointed more generally to recent polling failures and more specifically to the fact that actual elections since Dobbs have showed Democrats overperforming both with respect to past elections and with regards to polls. One reader even noted that the Times/Siena poll was one of those which helped feed the “Red Wave” frenzy in 2022. That last point is I think only partly true. But the part that is true is worth keeping in mind.

In any case, these are all points well-taken. In general my aim in that post and other similar ones at this point in the campaign cycle is not to prognosticate but to look for vulnerabilities. We should always be on the lookout for facts or at least data that complicate our assumptions.

There’s a bit of a collective freakout this morning, at least in some quarters, about a new Times/Siena poll showing a tied race (link to crosstabs) between President Biden and Donald Trump in a 2024 rematch — a rematch which as we’ve discussed is almost a certainty. They’re currently tied at 43%. The upshot is that this shows a closer race than the 2020 election and, in the words of Times polling guru Nate Cohn, “to the extent the survey suggests a slightly closer race than four years ago, it appears mostly attributable to modest Trump gains among Black, Hispanic, male and low-income voters.” These days when a media organization invests in a big poll they really go to town with it, producing multiple articles. Here’s Cohn’s take on it. Here’s another focusing on the fact that Biden has consolidated Democratic support significantly since last year.

I’m still working through these numbers. But I wanted to share a few reactions and perhaps an outline guide to making sense of them.