Reminder: Your TPM evening briefing, written by me, has moved to a new location — same time, same place, but we’ve moved it out of the editor’s blog and onto the main frontpage.

Court has convened in Atlanta at this late hour. The presumption – unconfirmed – is that state Judge Robert McBurney will accept the grand jury’s indictment(s) in the 2020 election interference case. Follow our coverage here.

For those of you following along at home, your TPM evening briefing, written by me, has moved to a new location — same time, same place, but we’ve moved it out of the editor’s blog and onto the main frontpage. You can now find Where Things Stand over here ➡︎➡︎➡︎

As you know, there’s been chatter about whether President Biden should pardon Donald Trump. Of course, before that there was a lot of discussion about whether Trump should be indicted at all. (Jack Goldsmith is still discussing it.) In both cases, the reasoning, such as it is, has been about bringing the country together, avoiding national divisions or sparking a pattern of tit-for-tat presidential prosecutions. It’s also possible the same underlying question could come up again.

There are some who think there’s a non-trivial chance that at some point perhaps early next year Trump will seek a plea deal. I really can’t imagine that happening. But some people whose common sense and judgment I put a lot of stock in do. Their reasoning isn’t bad. If you put all these cases together Trump is highly likely to be spending the rest of his his life in prison. Staying out of jail requires winning the 2024 election. He might get lucky in one venue. He might get a hung jury. He might beat some of the charges. But even batting .500 likely gets a de facto life term. And Trump, for all his bluster, is deeply risk averse. That’s where the plea deal idea comes in. Again, I think this is unlikely. But if it does we will come back to the same question, how much punishment is required? Either for justice, equality under the law or deterrence. Can he bow out of the race, admit to some offenses and get off with a comparatively light global sentence? What would justify that?

My reason for writing this post today is that I think this way of looking at the question gets the calculus wrong. The news David covers today, of Trump spending the weekend attacking DC district Judge Tanya Chutkan, explains why. This entire range of cases Trump faces, indeed Trump’s whole decade-long smash and grab run through American public life, is about one thing: who is bigger? The American republic, the state, or Donald Trump?

Just a short note about a relatively minor topic. But with new Trump indictments almost certainly coming next week in Fulton County (Atlanta), Georgia, I wanted to return to a simple point. Remember the call in which then-President Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and demanded he find him 11,780 more votes and threatened him with prosecution if he didn’t. That call alone should be more than enough to send Trump to prison for years. In its own way it’s worse than almost everything else noted in the federal indictments. It is so stunning that I’m writing this post just to step us back and refocus our attention on just how stunning it is.

If his impeachment inquiry noise-making gambit doesn’t work in swaying far-right House Republicans to get in line and move forward with appropriations bills that are at least passable in the Democrat-controlled Senate, then House Speaker Kevin McCarthy may have to grovel at House Democrats’ feet — again.

A new episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast is live! This week, Josh and Kate discuss a big election in Ohio, John Eastman’s admission that he did try to overthrow the government and an eyebrow-raising New York Times opinion column.

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

From TPM Reader DS …

I was in college from 2002-2006 so the Iraq War for better or worse will always be one main prism through which I think about American politics. And one of the things that always amazed me most about the whole thing was that the neocons and armchair strategists had spent more than a decade obsessed with toppling Saddam Hussein, yet had absolutely no idea what to do the day afterwards.

The defeat of Issue 1 and the win for abortion rights in Ohio last night stands as another datapoint in an ongoing trend: abortion rights have consistently prevailed when placed on the ballot — an observation that, notably, holds in red and purples states — since Roe’s overturning last year. And it emboldens ongoing efforts by pro-abortion rights and left-leaning groups to push Democrats to embrace the issue as a wedge that could help them hold the Senate and take back the House in 2024.

Robbie Robertson of The Band has left us. This one really hits like a gut punch. Robertson also has extensive collaborations with Bob Dylan and Martin Scorsese. Robertson was The Band’s principal songwriter though others in the band usually took the lead vocals. The announcement says only that he died after a long illness, surrounded by family.