The far-right Christian legal group whose work you’re almost certainly familiar with is in the news today for an incredibly befuddling reason: a Trump-appointed judge in Texas ordered lawyers with Southwest Airlines to attend eight hours of “religious-liberty training” courses with the group, Alliance Defending Freedom.

Jack Goldsmith has an op-ed in today’s Times in which he argues that the prosecutions of Donald Trump are likely to have terrible consequences for the country, regardless of the bad acts he may have committed. The gist of his argument is straightforward: Prosecution will only further delegitimize the Department of Justice for a large segment of the population, further criminalize the political process and open the Pandora’s Box of Presidents prosecuting their predecessors. I struggled with this piece a bit because I think Goldsmith is a good faith interlocutor. But while the sentiment is genuine the reasoning is sloppy and derives most of its strength from simply ignoring the most obvious counterarguments. 

This core weakness begins right in the first sentence. 

Like many who write this kind of op-ed, Goldsmith starts by saying that while it might be emotionally “satisfying” to see Trump held to account for his misdeeds, the damage greatly outweighs whatever benefit it brings. This is a dodge that turns out to be more consequential than one vaguely condescending throwaway line. In a highly polarized political culture of course there will be people celebrating. But the reason such indictments are important, really critical, is that a republican government cannot exist if electoral losers routinely use fraud, state power and violence to reject the outcome of free and fair elections. Accepting electoral defeat and orderly transfers of power is the glue that allows a republican government to function. 

While the details of and procedural developments surrounding the Big Indictment against the former president have consumed the news cycle since it came out last week, there’s still (at least) one more indictment heading toward Donald Trump that may come, if it comes, before we close out the summer.

I’ve been returning to this John Eastman interview again and again. In a way it doesn’t deserve so much attention. This is a shallow-thinking, casually self-justifying, fundamentally dishonest man. But his central role in America’s profound political crisis — one that is ongoing — makes him and his arguments important. What interests me are the sophisms he uses to justify his own criminality, attacks on the democratic process and more by projecting his own bad acts on to his foes.

The structure is consistently the same. Assert enemies were about to do X in the cause of the Deep State, wokeness and anti-Americanism so Eastman had to do X to preserve America. In a way he takes to the nation-state level the argument of every guy who blows someone’s head off and justifies it by saying he was afraid they were about to hurt him. Beyond these “I had to do it first” claims there’s another theme: a lot of railing against coastal intellectuals from the Eastman crew’s headquarters in Southern California while using layer upon layer of high-falutin’ fancy talk that falls apart when you kick any tire.

I want to return to this revelatory interview with co-conspirator John Eastman, the last portion of which was published Thursday by Tom Klingenstein, the Chairman of the Trumpite Claremont Institute and then highlighted by our Josh Kovensky. There’s a lot of atmospherics in this interview, a lot of bookshelf-lined tweedy gentility mixed with complaints about OSHA regulations and Drag Queen story hours. But the central bit comes just over half way through the interview when Eastman gets into the core justification and purpose for trying to overturn the results of the 2020 election and overthrow the constitutional order itself. He invokes the Declaration of Independence and says quite clearly that yes, we were trying to overthrow the government and argues that they were justified because of the sheer existential threat America was under because of the election of Joe Biden.

January 6th conspirators have spent more than two years claiming either that nothing really happened at all in the weeks leading up to January 6th or that it was just a peaceful protest that got a bit out of hand or that they were just making a good faith effort to follow the legal process. Eastman cuts through all of this and makes clear they were trying to overthrow (“abolish”) the government; they were justified in doing so; and the warrant for their actions is none other than the Declaration of Independence itself.

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.