Editors’ Blog

I don’t pretend to even understand the moving parts of how this is supposed to work. But almost out of the blue Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to go all-in on an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. As this started to come into view over the last two or three days, I’ve had a number of TPM Readers write in to say, why is this happening? What’s the catch? Or, why is he walking the plank like this? What is he sacrificing his Speakership for? And I don’t have a really good answer.

Now that we’re getting a view of the dynamics of Donald Trump on trial — not indicted, not awaiting trial, not the first of this or that, but actually on trial — with the requirement to be there and, well, be on trial, it’s worth revisiting where we may be this fall. As we know, SCOTUS decided to do Donald Trump a massive solid by first refusing to take up Trump’s immunity appeal without it first being heard by the DC circuit court. Then they really piled on the favors by agreeing to take up the case in full after the circuit court emphatically shot it down. SCOTUS oral arguments are next Thursday and realistically we may not get a decision until June or July. That puts the beginning of the trial in late summer at the earliest and quite possibly into September.

Set aside for the moment that the appeal itself is baseless and out of sync with American law, and that few think there’s any chance of Trump actually getting any relief even from this Supreme Court. It’s been treated as a scandal that the Court has taken upon itself to delay the trial anyway from four to six months. It very much is a scandal and not one that can be explained by any sort of apolitical weddedness to procedure or practice. But sometimes getting what you want may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

Commentators have been going for months debating the merits of the New York/“hush money” prosecution of Donald Trump. Is it “serious”? Is it serious enough? How does it match up against the three other criminal prosecutions still looming over him? Does it lower the average level of seriousness when the independent seriousness of each is added together and divided by four? In the most general sense the entire conversation is an example of what we might call the Trump Reality Distortion Vortex. One of Trump’s great powers is that he is like a heavy magnet of distorted thinking. When he comes into proximity people start thinking stupid things, asking stupid questions. What opinion should we, who are not prosecutors, have toward a chronic lawbreaker who is charged with breaking the laws he broke? Will it make him stronger? Were the laws broken enough?

On the simplest level the first question has always seemed easy to me. People don’t just go to jail for crimes like this. One of Trump’s accomplices literally already went to jail for this specific crime. Indeed, he did so on charges brought by the Trump Justice Department. That speaks for itself.

As you can see here and here, I did a few posts over the weekend trying to make sense of just what was happening in the skies over Israel. As I noted, I initially thought the fusillade was essentially performative. The Iranians fired off a mix of drones and missiles they knew would be shot down, so they can make a big show of striking back while being confident that the damage would be limited enough to avoid the risk of further escalation. But as more information came in, that seemed less credible.