Editors’ Blog

There’s a big flutter in GOP primary election news today that Dead Bounce Ron (formerly known as Ron DeSantis) is edging his way up to denouncing the Big Lie. In Iowa today he declared that “all those theories that were put out did not prove to be true” and, even worse, that they were “unsubstantiated.” TPM Reader AB told me it could be a tipping point: “If the other candidates finally call Trump out as a loser, and he has to run on the lame ass claim he actually won within his own party, it could pierce his armor.” While noting that it could just be wishful thinking, he insisted that “once Trump gets branded a loser by members of his own party he could go down fast.”

As you’ll see from the first quote, DBR leveled the accusation in the passive voice, both substantively and grammatically. He didn’t even use the guy’s name! Indeed, as per usual, the purported swipes at Trump tell us not so much about any true slackening of Trump’s domination but rather the vast extent of it.

There’s this strong tendency with some people, that whenever you point to any comment from former Vice President Mike Pence that’s non-terrible, to immediately chime in, “It’s too late!” “He had his chance!” “Pathetic!”

But really all those things are a given and yet it’s still worth noting even his most trivial shifts in the direction of salvaging some frail shadow of dignity. I say this all to preface the observation that Trump’s coup indictment and his own conspicuous role in the indictment narrative and chain of evidence seem finally to have convinced Pence that this is a divide he simply cannot straddle. You’re either on Team Coup or you’re not.

Some quotes from the 48 hours after the indictment was handed down.

I deliberately avoided getting pulled into today’s play-by-play and drama. I kept up on it by dropping in on our team’s live blog. But with the day over, every account and image I’ve seen of today’s events reads like a man, yes, overcome by rage but even more overcome by fear. His Truth Social platform has a bit of an air of The Wizard of Oz, bellowing and menace. But out from behind the curtain he’s a much smaller figure.

The simple fact is that if Donald Trump isn’t elected in November 2024, there’s a good chance he’ll spend a good part or most of the rest of his life in prison. That would terrify anyone. Especially someone who experiences powerlessness, being dominated as a kind of death.

An Arizona county run by Republicans recently voted against moving forward with plans to try to get rid of electronic ballot-counting machines and to conduct the tabulation of the 2024 election by hand. While initially propelled in part by conspiracy theories about voting machines, the all-Republican county board of supervisors determined that ultimately moving to a hand count would be too expensive and the methodology too unreliable.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate look at the sheer number of criminal and civil cases that will dominate Donald Trump’s 2024 calendar, while he’s also running for President on the side.

You can listen to the new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast here.

Plus a bonus pod! What’s the Deal with the Jan 6 Indictment?

Josh and TPM’s Josh Kovensky go through the big questions surrounding Jack Smith’s 4 count indictment of Donald Trump over the post-2020 election coup plot.

A desperate DeSantis showed up in New Hampshire for a three day trip. On federal employees, he told attendees at a campaign barbecue in Rye: “We are going to start slitting throats on Day One.”

I’m glad David hit this point in The Morning Memo. In addition to the Times article he references, the Times also published a piece by Tom Edsall (the writer who perhaps most consistently drives me crazy) casting the Trump indictment as part of a larger story of “the left’s” turn away from free speech. That premise about free speech is a complicated matter in its own right. But, as David notes, it has nothing to do with this case. The case has nothing to do with platforms or hate speech or misinformation or anything else. This is a case of a group of individuals taking coordinated and affirmative non-speech steps (i.e., a conspiracy) to fraudulently change the results of a lawful election.

Ron Brownstein: “With polls showing that most Republican voters still believe the election was stolen from Trump, that the January 6 riot was legitimate protest, and that Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 results did not violate the law or threaten the constitutional system, the United States faces a stark and unprecedented situation. For the first time in the nation’s modern history, the dominant faction in one of our two major parties has repeatedly demonstrated its willingness to accept antidemocratic means to advance its interests.”

You can read the whole piece here at The Atlantic.

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.