Trump Claims He Has Every Right To Prosecute His Enemies

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

‘I Would Have Every Right To Go After Them’

Surveying the news of the past 24 hours, we’re presented with a particularly sobering reflection of our current state of affairs. I will lay it out brick by brick in the items below, but first I want to circle back to Donald Trump’s appearance two nights ago on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program.

Hannity asked a leading question, clearly trying to throw Trump a softball that will let him deny his intention to use the office of the presidency to exact retribution against his political foes – even though Trump has spent many months now promising to do precisely that.

At first, Trump took the easy swing and suggested that he won’t perpetuate what he implies is a cycle of retribution he’s already been victimized by. But then he launched into an extended justification of doing exactly what he had just disclaimed and asserting that he has “every right to go after them”:

Don’t be confused by the two-step shuffle Trump just did there. Disclaiming his intent to commit a bad act that he says he has the right to commit is not reassuring in the slightest. Committing or threatening to commit bad acts is the classic strongman move, but so is promising to forbear from committing a bad act.

Reserving to himself the power to decide whether to transgress is no less a strongman flex than actual transgression. It’s all part of the same dance of threat, intimidation, bullying, and aggression. To draw from the domestic abuse context: Don’t make me hurt you.

David Corn efficiently runs through the history of Trump’s promises of revenge, their inextricable connection to his obsession with violence, and how easily they flow from his preferred posture of victim. The bully as victim, the oppressor as oppressed, the abuser as abused.

Former U.S. Attorney Barb McQuade has a new essay on Trump’s threats of revenage and their consequences. After running through all the checks and balances that would limit the president’s ability to use the justice system as a tool of political reprisal, McQuade then asks what the point of it all really is. This part of her answer is spot on:

Even if politically motivated prosecutions ultimately fail, just bringing charges would be enough to tilt the playing field. If the public can be convinced that all prosecutors are corrupt partisan actors, then their work may be disregarded as mere political gamesmanship, and Trump’s convictions and impeachments will no longer matter. The result is to give Trump — and other political actors — license to commit all manner of crimes in the future.

It goes back to the classic strongman targets: judges, legislators, the press, the education system, even artists. Any power centers that are beyond the strongman’s control are a threat to him. Delegitimizing them serves the same purpose as more direct attacks. It undermines their power over him.

With that in mind, let’s survey the day’s news.

A GOP Election Clerk v. MAGA In A World Of Lies

An exceptional NYT piece on the plight of Cindy Elgan, the Republican election official in Esmeralda County, Nevada, who faced a recall attempt – in a county that went 82% for Trump in 2020 – because some conspiracy-minded residents thought he should have won by a larger margin.

The Grim New Reality

TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: Add Fentanyl-Laced Mail-In Ballots To The List Of Threats Election Officials Must Guard Against In The Fall

Capitol Police Jeered By GOP Legislators

Some Republicans in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives jeered, booed, and walked out when two former Capitol Police officers who defended against the Jan. 6 attack were introduced on the floor chamber Wednesday.

Trump II Will Assert Sweeping Powers Over Federal Spending

WaPo: Donald Trump is vowing to wrest key spending powers from Congress if elected this November, promising to assert more control over the federal budget than any president in U.S. history.

Does Trump Have A Deal With Putin?

Chris Hayes places Trump’s outrageous cooptation of the case of WSJ reporter Evan Gershkovich for his political ends into some dreary historical context:

Bannon Ordered To Report To Prison

Absent intervention by a federal appeals court, MAGA world figure Steve Bannon must report to prison by July 1 to begin serving his four-month sentence for contempt of Congress for rebuffing the House Jan. 6 committee.

‘Isolated and Inexperienced’

Former TPMer and Ft. Pierce, Florida native Tierney Sneed co-authors an in-depth profile of Ft. Pierce’s only federal judge: Aileen Cannon.

What To Make Of The Hunter Biden Case

With President Biden promising not to pardon his son Hunter, Ankush Khardori has a thoughtful look at the Delaware gun case brought by Special Counsel David Weiss and what makes it so unusual.

Stolen Valor

NOTUS: House Republicans are accusing fellow Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX) of stolen valor for continuing to wear a Combat Infantryman Badge pin from Afghanistan that he was awarded by mistake.

I’m Not Crying. Nope. Not Me.

Have A Splendid Weekend!

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More Posting

Posted on by Josh Marshall

An interesting perspective from TPM Reader CB on the unfolding Post drama …

We moved to the DC area – Maryland suburbs – straight from Northwestern Law in 1968 and have subscribed to the Post daily and Sunday ever since. From the elixir of the morning Woodward and Bernstein exclusives that chronicled  the unraveling of the Nixon presidency, to a daily paper thinner than a half used yellow legal pad in the dying days of the Graham family ownership, we have stuck with the Post. 

Continue reading “More Posting” →

Pucking and Bluffing

Posted on by Josh Marshall

A bit more on my love/hate relationship with Puck. As I said in today’s Backchannel, it’s a curious mix of the very best and the very worst. But as I also noted, it’s helpful to keep an eye on the worst because they can have a lot of influence. Occasionally you can even learn something. Which brings me to Tara Palmeri of Puck. Her dispatch on Trump’s conviction is just drenched in the contempt in which she holds all Democrats. After listing off Republicans’ absolute and total unity behind Trump she says this: “Ironically, it’s the Democrats who seem confused about how to handle Trump’s newly minted felon designation.”

Let’s go back a few more days to our earlier discussion of this. The roar of rage and total confidence in Trump has two purposes. The one is to keep Republicans on side. The other is to make Democrats doubt the obvious: that Trump’s new first name, “convicted felon,” is bad news for his campaign. And the more it’s flogged and made his official first name, the worse it is. We don’t know how bad it is. We don’t know how many voters it will move. But it’s definitely not good. So saying it over and over again and putting it at the heart of the campaign against him is certainly a good thing. Again, that’s most of the goal of the Republican fusillade: to raise doubt about that completely obvious point.

D-Day

Posted on by Josh Marshall

The news pages are filled today with D-Day anniversary messages and accounts. It’s 80 years ago. So we’re at the outer rim of time where anyone there that day must be in their late 90s at the youngest. The thing that seems most important to remember is that it was not clear that it would work. The death, the fear, the terror, the sacrifice all take on a certain hue and logic because we know it was a success that would open the door for the reconquest of Europe. But that wasn’t clear at the time. You’ve probably seen references in the anniversary stories to the message Ike prepared to announce the landing’s failure.

Continue reading “D-Day” →

The First Point Of Trump’s Abortion Policy: Do Not Talk About Abortion Policy

Posted on by Nicole LaFond

Donald Trump admitted Wednesday that Republicans have hurt themselves with how they’ve been talking about abortion this election cycle and in years past.

Continue reading “The First Point Of Trump’s Abortion Policy: Do Not Talk About Abortion Policy” →

Add Fentanyl-Laced Mail-In Ballots To The List Of Threats Election Officials Must Guard Against In The Fall

Posted on by Khaya Himmelman

Last November, just one day after a special election in Lane County, Oregon, an election worker opened an envelope addressed to the county clerk’s office. It contained a letter that read “stop elections now” and was accompanied by a suspicious-looking white powdery substance, Lane County Clerk Dena Dawson told TPM. The powder, which Dawson was not able to confirm pending an ongoing investigation, was feared to be fentanyl.  

Continue reading “Add Fentanyl-Laced Mail-In Ballots To The List Of Threats Election Officials Must Guard Against In The Fall” →

Bored Billionaire Syndrome

Posted on by Josh Marshall

From an anonymous reader on what this person calls the “bored billionaire” syndrome. I think this is very on the mark for what the billionaire savior wants to accomplish when they rescue a struggling publication and why they often get tetchy pretty quickly.

I wanted to add to your post about the situation at the Washington Post. If I worked there, the thing I would be most worried right now is that Bezos has entered a very familiar and dangerous phase of his ownership for the newsroom. I call it the “bored billionaire” stage and, in my case, it comes from lived experience.

New billionaires don’t buy money-losing publications as charities whose losses they are willing to underwrite because they believe those publications ought to keep existing. (Old billionaires did: the Fleishmans and then the Newhouses with The New Yorker, the Hedermans and the New York Review, Marty Peretz — via his wife’s Singer inheritance — and The New Republic, etc.) 

Continue reading “Bored Billionaire Syndrome” →

The Brass’s Take on the Shake Up at WaPo

Posted on by Josh Marshall

We’ve now got the brass’s take on the shake-up at The Washington Post via Dylan Byers at Puck. I subscribe to Puck, and some of the people there are extremely good. Others I read because I want to know what *those* people are thinking. Dylan Byers is in that category for me. He covers media but in a very corporate, rah-rah, mergery, no-actual-interest-in-journalism kind of way. William Cohan covers the titans for Puck too. But I always learn a lot from his reports. Byers is out now with his report on what happened. In his version of events, Buzbee, the departed executive editor, was a bit of a fuddy-duddy, the kind of serious and well-meaning editor you’d expect at the head of a dying institution. Indeed, she was so not a player that, in his account, she participated in the planning for the Post’s new direction, creating a “third newsroom” and such, without realizing until the last minute that it was in part an effort to ease her out. So not a player.

If you’re a subscriber, read his account and if you’re not I think you can read the article by, like, giving them your email. The are two points which suffuse his account and which he in various places states explicitly. The first is that the British newspaper execs have “swagger” and the current Post lacks “swagger” and needs it desperately. Buzbee is a fine editor but lacks “swagger.” She came from the AP, as he notes. How can you have less “swagger”? The second is that the Biden era is boring — “somnolent,” as he puts it — and lacks the “go-go” excitement of the Trump era.

Continue reading “The Brass’s Take on the Shake Up at WaPo” →

Don’t Let Aileen Cannon’s Sleight Of Hand Fool You

Posted on by David Kurtz

A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.

Slip Sliding Away …

The slow-walking of the Trump prosecutions works in two different ways. The obvious one is to push his trials past the election in the hopes he will win and use the powers of the presidency to make this all go away. The other way, less obvious, is to do the slow-walking itself so slowly that no single moment or decision can be targeted for public scorn and derision. It has the effect of keeping the pressure from building by obscuring what is happening.

So it’s important to be very clear each time that U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon stalls the case again. I can’t speak to her intent, but who needs to when her actions are so clear. This week alone she has:

(1) Taken the highly unusual step of allowing third parties not involved in the case, friends of the court in the parlance, to participate in upcoming arguments over whether the case against Trump should be dismissed. This is virtually unheard of in a criminal case or anywhere outside of oral arguments at the appeals level.

(2) Reshuffled the entire pre-trial schedule on her own yet again, giving extraordinary amounts of court time to hearings, including potential evidentiary hearings, on pre-trial matters that other judges would simply rule on based on the written filings.

(3) Delayed indefinitely – but promised to reschedule at some point in the future! – a highly unusual two-day evidentiary hearing on some of Trump’s most tendentious claims.

Don’t mistake what Cannon is doing as actually moving the case forward. She is still sitting on key pre-trial decisions that need to be made and should have been made weeks or months ago. This is rearranging of the deck chairs, a shell game, shuffling things around to disguise the sleight of hand.

As all this was happening in Florida, an appeals court in Georgia put a halt to the RICO case there while it considers the appeals of Trump and his co-defendants. That case was already doomed to go into 2025, so the immediate impact was minimal, but it had the effect of pushing it out even further into the future.

‘Among The Worst Crimes A Regime Can Commit’

The NYT’s Adam Liptak on Trump’s promise to use the Justice Department to retaliate against his political foes: “But if he is already challenging bedrock norms about the justice system as a candidate, Mr. Trump, if he wins the presidency again, would gain immense authority to actually carry out the kinds of legal retribution he has been promoting.”

Bannon In The Wringer

A federal judge will hear arguments today on whether MAGA diehard Steve Bannon should go to prison immediately for his contempt of Congress conviction for having stiffed the House Jan. 6 committee.

Don’t Let The Pressure On Alito Flag!

WaPo: Alito’s account of the upside-down flag doesn’t fully add up. Here’s why.

Crazy Town

Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has named two of the more extreme members of his conference – Reps. Scott Perry (R-PA) and Ronny Jackson (R-TX) – to the House Intel Committee.

Jackson you know as the former White House physician turned right-wing crackpot. Perry has been engaged in a long-running battle over the FBI’s access to his cellphone as part of its Jan. 6 investigation. From his new perch on the intel committee, Perry will now be overseeing the FBI counterintelligence operations.

Johnson’s appointment of these two whackos reportedly blindsided Intelligence Committee Chair Mike Turner (R-OH).

2024 Ephemera

  • The Trump campaign’s vetting of potential vice presidential nominees has entered the record request phase.
  • A couple of new polls are out on whether Trump’s conviction has had an impact on public opinion. The NYT re-surveyed some of its past respondents and found an infinitesimal move in Biden’s direction. But a new YouGov poll this week provides perhaps a clearer answer: The percentage of Republicans who say a convicted felon should not be president has plummeted from 58 percent in April to 23 percent now. So … there ya go.
  • Senate Republicans, forced into an awkward vote by Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY), blocked the advancement of a bill that would have protected access to birth control nationwide.

Another Major U.S. Climate Policy Fail

The most important news yesterday may have been New York Democratic Gov. Kathy Hochul’s intervention to block a new congestion pricing plan for vehicles in NYC.

Robinson Meyer at Heatmap News was unsparing in his assessment of the wrongheadedness of the move and the long-term implications for U.S. climate policy, calling it a “generational setback”:

It is one of the worst climate policy decisions made by a Democrat at any level of government in recent memory. …

It is so bad because it will set back the development of climate-friendly cities and rapid transit infrastructure in the United States for years if not decades. And it will deter other American cities from implementing the kind of time-saving, pollution-averting, anti-gridlock measure that the country desperately needs.

There is nothing good to be said for this decision. It is bad politics, bad economics, bad governance, and bad for the climate.

For additional coverage:

  • WSJ: New York Gov. Kathy Hochul Abruptly Halts Manhattan Congestion Pricing
  • Politico: House Democrats feared a New York City toll plan. Hochul reversed it.
  • WaPo: NYC had a plan to make it hard for cars to enter the city. Here’s why the governor blocked it.

Off The Charts

UPDATED: We have spent the past year way above climate norms, even by post-industrial standards. Global surface temperatures have now averaged 1.6 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels for an entire year. The 2015 Paris Agreement set the target at no more than 1.5C of warming:

80 Years Ago Today

US Troops wading through water after reaching Normandy and landing Omaha beach on D Day, 1944. (Photo by: Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images)

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