The Donald Trump we saw yesterday after his 34 felony convictions was angry, defiant but also visibly shaken, unsteady. His face and his hair and his comportment had that look I remember from childhood when I or other schoolboys would have the wind knocked out of them on the soccer field. We’ll see another version of him this morning in a press conference where he will no doubt expand his protestation of innocence and demand for vengeance. The spectacle is a reminder of and object lesson in what Donald Trump demands of his supporters and the country generally.
Continue reading “What Trump Requires”A Turning Point In America’s Cold Civil War … If We’re Lucky
This is special edition of TPM’s Morning Memo focused exclusively on the criminal conviction of the 45th president of the United States. Sign up for the email version.
The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Nearly a decade into the Trump era, he finally has a comeuppance worthy of the historical moment: a felony conviction on all 34 counts by a state jury sitting in Manhattan, the locus of his life and business career.
It took way too long. It doesn’t excuse or expunge all the previous failures to hold him to account. His conviction was on matters peripheral to his disastrous presidency. It doesn’t remove the threat of his re-election.
But it was a glimpse of what it looks like to uphold the rule of law, to stand up to a bullying wannabe dictator, to hold firm and do your job when madness is swirling all around.
We have certain expectations of the stories we tell ourselves, ingrained from millennia of storytelling around countless communal fires. Chief among them is that eventually there will be justice done to bad people who do bad things. We’ve constructed entire theologies around this notion. If justice is not done here on earth, don’t fret, god will exact eternal justice.
It is core to who we are and what we believe, and Trump’s fierce resistance to that narrative arc has shaken many of us to the core. I can’t begin to count the thousands of reader emails and comments from the past decade that boil down to despair that the Trump story is seemingly immune to the usual patterns we have come to expect: What can be done? Who is going to do it? Why hasn’t it been done already? And the what ifs … an endless string of what ifs. What if so and so did such and such? What if this clever tactic or that new strategy were to be deployed? Why hasn’t anyone thought to do this or that or some other thing.
We grasp for anything that will make the story turn out the way that we expect it to. We need Trump’s grand undoing because we anticipate that it will give some shape or meaning to this decade-long disaster that has cost the lives of so many people — in pandemic-burdened hospitals, on the Ukraine steppe, and under the unfolding threat of runaway climate change. As the years have passed and time taken its toll, it’s become grimly apparent that the expectation that justice will win out in the end is a luxury only available to the living.
The opportunity costs of the Trump era are so staggering that sometimes they almost bring me to my knees. It’s not the fight for the rule of law, or for a peaceful world order, or to protect longstanding institutions and norms that discourages me. Those are worth fighting for. It’s what we would have been fighting for instead, the battles we never got a chance to fight, the reforms that have been back-burnered for a decade, the lost ground on so many issue fronts. That’s what sobers me.
I’ve spent a lot of time in the past decade thinking about not just what might have been had we taken a different fork in the road in 2000 or 2016 — but about what it means to have the life’s work that so many of us anticipated doing taken away from us and to be thrust into fights we didn’t want and don’t savor. We don’t always get to pick our fights; they sometimes pick us.
In the great historical conflicts we grow up learning about, the heroes are those who rise to the occasion in that moment in time, their destiny seemingly preordained, their glory coming for having bent the narrative arc back toward justice. But the notion that they neither wanted that destiny nor asked for it — and that they probably had another destiny in mind for themselves, and that that destiny was forever lost to them — is startling and new to me. It was how I had always thought about the victims of past tragedies, but I had never really applied it to the heroes.
We had a chance to stand on the firm if imperfect foundation we had spent two hundreds years building and refining to do more great things, to help more people in more ways, to continue to level the playing field, to expand the good things we do and minimize the bad, to try to arrest our self-inflicted climate catastrophe. But instead we looked down and discovered a real estate barker turned reality TV star had formed a cult of the disagreeable under the banner of the Republican Party, handed out pickaxes and chisels, and had proceeded en masse to begin manically chipping away at that foundation.
Not everyone saw it right away. Not everyone wanted to see it. Many still don’t see it. But in the hours since the verdict in New York City, it’s been made clear again, if there were any doubt, that they will not stop their attack. I expect you’ll see it reengaged in its fiercest form at Trump’s press conference scheduled for 11 a.m. ET. The rule of law, democracy, justice, freedom itself remain deeply in peril. Just as much as we yearn for the story to turn out the way we were raised to expect it to, they must feverishly tear it all down to keep the narrative arc from bending back toward justice.
Trump’s conviction was a battle won. The war rages on. It’s not clear yet who will win out in the end.
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
Jury Finds Trump Guilty On All Counts
Follow along with us below.
A Few Quick Thoughts on the Verdict
My main thought on this verdict, globally, is that I don’t know what it means in a political and electoral context.
It’s a good thing that Trump faced accountability, for once in his life, for his own conduct. It is ironic on many levels that this case, by far the poor relation of the family of Trump prosecutions, is the one that actually went to trial and actually secured a conviction. It’s a disgrace that the others are unlikely to go to trial before the election. But that’s where we are.
Continue reading “A Few Quick Thoughts on the Verdict”TRUMP CONVICTED IN HISTORIC FIRST
NEW YORK — After years of scandal, allegations of criminal schemes, two impeachments, and four indictments, Donald Trump has been found guilty by a Manhattan jury.
Continue reading “TRUMP CONVICTED IN HISTORIC FIRST”BREAKING …
Verdict in the Trump trial. Standby …
Back to the Two States Thing
I got a note this morning from TPM Reader CH who asked me a question I get with some frequency. He basically asks, why does the end-state need to be two states? Why won’t it be ethnic cleansing or genocide or bantustans? These are good questions. And it makes me realize that I may need to state more explicitly what is maybe too implicit.
I am certainly not arguing that there is some natural or inevitable progression to two states. On the available evidence there’s a much better argument that there is a natural and irremediable inertia holding the status quo of the last half century in place.
I usually use words like “viable” or “plausible.”
Continue reading “Back to the Two States Thing”He Won’t Do Either. But Alito Needs to Resign, Not Just Recuse
I wanted to share a few thoughts about the Sam Alito problem. I don’t want to preach to the choir on this, but there are two points which should be highlighted. The first is that even on its own terms, Alito’s rationale for not recusing himself doesn’t hold up. His argument is essentially this: My wife is her own person with her own views and ways of expressing herself. I asked her to stop but she refused to do so and I couldn’t compel her to do anything. He notes that they co-own the properties in question, so even in the narrow sense of control over a piece of property, he couldn’t dictate anything. It was his wife, not him. He did what he could, but couldn’t do more. End of story.
This is not how federal ethics guidelines work. They make very clear that the appearance of a conflict of interest or impropriety, for these purposes, counts as much as actual ones. They also make clear that the actions of a spouse count toward creating such appearances even though, certainly in the early 21st century, a judge can’t dictate a spouse’s actions. The ethics guidelines specifically deal with the spouse issue. And they say “it’s my spouse, not me” isn’t a defense.
Continue reading “He Won’t Do Either. But Alito Needs to Resign, Not Just Recuse”Donald Trump Bear Hugs Sam Alito At Height Of Flag Flap
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo. Sign up for the email version.
Congratulations, For Not Recusing Yourself From My Cases!
In his singular way, Donald Trump managed to undermine Sam Alito at the very moment the flag-whipped Supreme Court justice was trying to extricate himself from his ethics morass.
In his usual grandiose style, Alito not only refused to recuse, but in a letter to Democratic senators engaged in a paucity of real legal analysis and suggested there was no possible good faith argument for recusal, which is of course silly, reductive, and self-serving.
Nonetheless, Alito baldly asserted there was no basis for recusal, used the Supreme Court’s weak self-enforcing code of conduct as an imperative to do the wrong thing as opposed to rigorous standard to meet, and thumbed his nose at his naysayers with typical relish.
To which the man whose cases Alito is compromised on rose up in his defense, even as a jury in Manhattan deliberated on criminal charges against him:
It was a marvelous distillation of the corrupt conservative-supermajority Supreme Court that Trump helped to create and which he sees as his ultimate salvation against the four – count ’em, FOUR – ongoing criminal prosecutions he faces.
Nevertheless, She Persisted?
Justice Alito’s letter contained one of the most remarkable lines in recent political history: “My wife is fond of flags. I am not.”
That bit of misdirection and minimizing came as he recounted in evolving fashion the upside-down American flag incident at his Virginia home.
His latest version is that he didn’t know about it until he did and then he asked her to take it down (he doesn’t say why but implicit in the request is that it was inappropriate to have the insurrectionist symbol flying in front of his home) and … she REFUSED!
Alito proceeds to offer a pre-law-caliber legal defense of Martha Alito’s joint ownership interest in their Virginia home and her right to exercise her constitutional freedoms independent of him, an irony so excruciating coming from the justice who authored the Dobbs decision that it’s hard not to view it as a deliberate troll of his critics, even though his account in its entirety casts him as small, powerless, and clueless.
A Benign 18th-Century Foam Finger
Dahlia Lithwick, bringing the withering scorn even before Alito’s comical letter surrendering the flagpoles at his homes to his wife:
When the New York Times reported last week that Samuel Alito, an associate justice of the Supreme Court, had been flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his vacation home on the New Jersey shore last summer, the legal world was confronted with yet another classic case of how to deal with the current warring textual methodologies for interpreting the law. One could either “read” this obscure-to-some pine-tree flag in the way the New York Times and its experts did—as a signifier of insurgent Christian nationalism. Or you could read it as a kind of benign 18th-century foam finger: “Gooooo George Washington!”
Jury Digs In On Its Trump Deliberations
A lot of speculation, attempted tea leaf reading, and bloviating about how to interpret the first two notes from the Trump jury yesterday. Journalists abhor a vacuum and so they will fill it, but there was in fact very little to go on from what transpired. Just chill. Juries are notoriously hard to predict.
TPM’s Josh Kovensky is at it again today, with a liveblog going. You can check in periodically to see if anything has happened.
We expect the judge to respond to both jury requests this morning: re-reading his instructions to them and reading some key trial testimony from the court transcript. This will happen in open court and take a while to complete. I doubt we’ll see a verdict this morning, but by afternoon we should be back on verdict watch.
Trump Trial Misinformation On Overdrive
A new round of furious spinning from the right commenced as soon as the jury got the case. You can safely ignore the substance (or lack thereof) of it, but between Fox News and at least one sitting Republican U.S. senator, there was a brain-eating level of dumb misinformation flying around.
This Didn’t Make It Into Evidence At Trial
The Daily Beast: “Donald Trump boasted about having sex with adult film star Stormy Daniels at the 2006 golf tournament where the two met, a celebrity athlete who played the tournament has said.”
The Price Of Resisting Trump
The mother of former police officer Michael Fanone, who was nearly killed defending the Capitol on Jan. 6, was swatted at her Virginia home on Tuesday, just hours after her son made a campaign appearance for Joe Biden outside the courthouse where Donald Trump’s trial is being held, NBC News reports.
Quote Of The Day
What would’ve happened if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol? I don’t think he’d be talking about pardons. This is the same guy who wanted to tear gas you as you peacefully protested George Floyd’s murder. It’s the same guy who still calls the ‘Central Park Five’ guilty, even though they were exonerated. He’s that landlord who denies housing applications because of the color of your skin. He’s that guy who won’t say Black lives matter and invokes neo-Nazi, Third Reich terms.
President Joe Biden, in a campaign speech to Black voters in Philadelphia
Oligarchs Of The World, Unite!
WSJ: “Donald Trump and Elon Musk have discussed a possible advisory role for the Tesla leader should the presumptive Republican nominee reclaim the White House, the latest sign that the once-frosty relationship between the two men has thawed.”
New Eruption In Iceland
The ongoing series of eruptions on Iceland’s Peninsula resumed Wednesday morning with the most intense lava flow yet:
Although there was a more abundant level of magma, the eruption followed the pattern of previous ones, with an initial surge of magma followed by a gradual slowing of the rate of flow. The new lava mostly stayed with in the confines of previous flows in recent months:
Here’s a time-lapse video of the initial unzipping of the ground:
Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!
God Forbid Women Have Hobbies
The basis for Justice Samuel Alito’s rejection of congressional Democrats’ request that he recuse himself from Supreme Court cases tied to Jan. 6 was literally a meme.
Continue reading “God Forbid Women Have Hobbies”