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

Alina Habba Had An Unforgettable Day In Court

I can’t recall a lawyer having a worse go of it in open court than Trump lawyer Alina Habba did yesterday in the damages trial against Donald Trump by E. Jean Carroll.

Habba had the unenviable task of cross-examining Carroll, the 80-year-old victim of Trump’s sexual assault and subsequent defamation. But Habba made things so much worse for herself. So much worse.

U.S. District Judge Lewis Kaplan, a 79-year-old veteran jurist, shot Habba down so many times that I started to wonder if her misguided strategy was to somehow make the jury hate her more than her client. What good that would do, one can only imagine.

I counted at least five times that the judge ordered Habba: “Sit down.”

But there was also the one time that he ordered her to stand up: “Ms. Habba, when you speak in this courtroom or any other courtroom you’ll stand up.”

Habba struggled to make proper objections during Carroll’s direct testimony. She struggled to introduce evidence on cross. She struggled with the hearsay rule. It was epically bad.

I don’t usually like to clutter up Morning Memo with numerous tweets from the same thread, but these are so good (thanks to the work of Matthew Russell Lee) and so many of you are no longer on X/Twitter, that I’m going to make an exception today. Here’s a choice sample, in chronological order:

RW: Let's show this–
Habba: Objection
Judge Kaplan: Ground?
Habba: It's prejudicial.
Judge Kaplan: All evidence is prejudicial against the party it is offered against

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) January 17, 2024

Habba: She said too different things about Montana
Judge Kaplan: She said it's great and before she said, it's not boring – that's your difference?
Habba: I can ask another question.
Judge Kaplan: That would be a good idea.

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) January 17, 2024

Habba: You were a regular at Elaine's, right?
Carroll: Yes.
Habba: It's hard to get into, isn't it?
Carroll: No, not hard.
Judge Kaplan: It doesn't exist anymore. That's why it's hard to get into

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) January 17, 2024

Habba: Do you know if there is a communications team at the White House?
Carroll: I don't know.
Habba: I represent to you that it does –
Judge Kaplan: You're not going to be representing anything, or you'll be a witness.

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) January 17, 2024

Habba: How do you suggest I proceed?
Judge Kaplan: Show it to her, ask if she recognizes it.
Habba: Do you recognize it?
Carroll: Yes.
Judge Kaplan: It's not marked. It should be marked. Do it appropriately. Do it overnight. They. Need. To. Be. Premarked.

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) January 17, 2024

Habba: Ms. Carroll, are you aware it is illegal to delete evidence?
Carroll's lawyer: Objection
Habba: I move for a mistrial, evidence has been deleted
Judge Kaplan: Denied and the jury will disregard everything Ms. Habba just said

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) January 17, 2024

They're back.
Habba: Have you deleted text message and not just emails?
Carroll: When I see threats I delete them.
Habba: Can we have a sidebar?
Judge Kaplan: No.

— Inner City Press (@innercitypress) January 17, 2024

If you’ve spent most of the last decade yearning for someone to bring Trump to heel, perhaps you can vicariously enjoy Habba’s drubbing as a proxy for Trump himself.

Trump Almost Bounced From Court

As for Trump, Judge Kaplan confronted him directly for making comments about the proceedings that were audible to the jury in the courtroom.

If Trump continued to act out, Kaplan told him, he would forfeit his right to be present for the trial.

That led to a brief but charged back and forth between Trump and the judge.

Trump Self Bounces

Perfect little detail illustrating Trump's disrespect for process, judge, and jury: he walked out of the courtroom at the end of court day rather than standing for the jury and waiting for them to exit, as every litigant, lawyer, audience member knows to do.

— Harry Litman (@harrylitman) January 17, 2024

Quote Of The Day

I think a lot of people in this country are out of touch with reality and will accept anything Donald Trump tells them. You had a jury that said that Donald Trump raped a woman. And that doesn’t seem to be moving the needle. There’s a lot of things about today’s electorate that I have a hard time understanding.

Sen. Mitt Romney (R-UT)

Maine Disqualification Clause Case Paused

A state court in Maine has ordered Secretary of State Shenna Bellows to hold off on implementing her decision to remove Donald Trump from the GOP primary ballot until after the U.S. Supreme Court decides the Disqualification Clause case out of Colorado.

Yesterday’s Biggest News

In oral arguments Wednesday, the Supreme Court conservative supermajority looked poised to radically rewrite its own precedent on administrative law, firmly grasping the brass ring the conservative legal movement has been reaching for for decades.

If that doesn’t sound particularly serious, let me be clear: It likely portends a fundamental reordering of public and private life in America that will endure for decades and be felt in more ways than we can possibly envision from our current vantage point.

Time To Step Up

Greg Sargent: Trump Pocketed Millions in Foreign Payments. Why Won’t Senate Democrats Investigate?

Rinse And Repeat

Brian Beutler: The Democrats’ Alarming Nonchalance About The Juggernaut Of Reactionary Media

For Your Radar

Iran and Pakistan have traded airstrikes this week in a dangerous and destabilizing tit-for-tat. This week alone, Iran has carried out strikes against Iraq, Syria, and now Pakistan.

Greenland Is Sending Out A Warning

The Greenland ice sheet is melting faster than previously thought, according to a new study that finds previous analyses underestimated the loss of ice by as much as 20 percent.

Iceland May Be In For A Long Eruption Cycle

As you may have detected by now, I enjoy the mind-fuck of geology, especially trying to wrap my head around geological time frames.

The latest eruptive cycle on the Reykjanes Peninsula comes after an 800-year period of quiescence. We’re four years into the current eruptive cycle, and rather than being a singular explosive eruption that quickly dissipates, the geological record suggests that Iceland could be in for decades of disruptive eruptive activity along the peninsula.

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!

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

Is Trump About To Get Rudy’d?

Carroll II, the second trial of Donald Trump for defaming E. Jean Carroll by lying about his sexual assault of her, got underway in Manhattan yesterday, and it’s shaping up to be a colossal financial threat to the former president.

Having lost in Carroll I, where a jury concluded he had raped Carroll, Trump is barred from contesting the fact of the rape in Carroll II. The only question is how big are her damages for his defamation.

While jury verdicts are notoriously difficult to predict, this case has the potential to do to Trump what a DC federal jury did to Rudy Giuliani in the defamation case brought against him by Georgia election workers Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss. The Giuliani jury reached a verdict against him of $148 million, including punitive damages.

Like Giuliani, Trump has been defiant throughout the two Carroll trials, constantly repeating the defamatory statements with impunity, and persisting in attacking the plaintiff even while the trial was underway.

Trump was in court Tuesday as jury selection got underway, but his social media operation launched what was clearly a pre-planned full-scale attack on Carroll, including repeating the defamation. (It was perhaps not a coincidence that a key Trump lawyer resigned the night before.)

Trump is risking a substantial punitive damages award by continuing to attack his accuser. It does appear to be a calculated risk, not merely shooting from the hip inadvisably. And that should only fuel the arguments Carroll can make to the jury about how severely it should punish Trump for his misconduct.

In opening statements, Carroll’s lawyers seized on the morning’s developments to urge the jury to make Trump pay until it hurt enough to get him to stop defaming Carroll:

.@lawofruby breaks down the opening arguments in Trump's second E. Jean Carroll defamation trial:

"She said, ‘I want you to think about this: How much will it cost to make him stop?’ and then paused and said, 'After all, this is a man who's a self-professed billionaire.'" pic.twitter.com/dDZ3PqD7am

— All In with Chris Hayes (@allinwithchris) January 17, 2024

Carroll is expected to testify at trial today.

Trump Miscellany

• In the first E. Jean Carroll case, the Second Circuit Court has rejected Trump’s appeal that he was protected from lawsuit by presidential immunity.
• The high court in New York denied Trump’s appeal of the gag order imposed on him in the NY civil fraud trial.
• Politico: Trump signals he will invoke executive privilege to block testimony in Jeff Clark’s disciplinary proceedings in DC.
• The full DC Circuit Court of Appeals has declined to reconsider the ruling that gave Special Counsel Jack Smith access to Donald Trump’s Twitter account – but all four Republican-appointed judges on the court filed an unusual “statement” (not a dissent) complaining that executive privilege had not been raised on appeal.
• New filing from Trump in the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case seeks to paint Trump as the victim of the intelligence community and a politically motivated prosecution:

While the 68-page filing was formally a request by Mr. Trump’s lawyers to the office of the special counsel, Jack Smith, to provide them with reams of additional information that they believe can help them fight the charges, it often read more like a list of political talking points than a brief of legal arguments.

Navarro Bid For New Trial Fails

The trial judge rejected Trump White House official Peter Navarro’s last-ditch bid to avoid being sentenced for contempt of Congress on Jan. 25.

Revisiting Iowa

I noticed an undercurrent of quibbling yesterday that the Iowa caucus is small and irrelevant, that Trump received a minuscule number of votes compared to the size of the national electorate, and that his Iowa caucus win was too thin a reed upon which to rest broad pronouncements about his viability as a candidate.

In isolation, each of those things has an element of truth to it. But they’re not in isolation. They’re in the context of there being no viable opposition to Trump within the Republican Party right now. This is the contest for the GOP nomination, and there’s no one who can dare attack Trump let alone mount an effective challenge to him. Period.

You can conjure up make-believe scenarios where the GOP electorate suddenly sees the light but to whom does Trump’s votes go? At present, no one has proven their ability to stand in for Trump. If Nikki Haley were to somehow pull of the unexpected and defeat Trump in New Hampshire next week … we can revisit this assessment.

2024 Ephemera

• The Messenger: The Inside Story of How Ron DeSantis Got Crushed by Donald Trump
• Politico: Trump’s win in Iowa shows big strengths and hidden warning signs
• Good point:

My problem with the "yes but 49% of Iowans wanted a Trump alternative" take is that the alternatives are aligned with Trump. Look at it this way:

MAGA (Trump): 51%
Reformed MAGA (DeSantis): 21%
Orthodox MAGA (Vivek): 8%

Republican Classic: 19%

— David Weigel (@daveweigel) January 16, 2024

Texas Border Stunt Is Getting Dangerous

TPM’s Josh Kovensky on the latest developments in Texas and at the Supreme Court:

The confrontation between federal power and an unruly state government came to a head this weekend after Gov. Greg Abbott (R) and Texas state lawmakers have spent years laying the groundwork to annex what has, until now, been a core federal responsibility: securing the U.S.-Mexico border.

Now, Texas is physically blocking border patrol agents from accessing parts of the frontier, an extraordinary usurpation of federal authority. …

The entire confrontation is reaching a head in part because of a December injunction from a federal appeals court which bans federal agents from removing barriers placed by the state of Texas. The Biden administration is appealing, and dropped a flurry of filings before the Supreme Court this weekend about the confrontation.

Pay Close Attention To The Supreme Court Today

The Supreme Court’s conservative supermajority gets a chance to take a hatchet to the administrative state in oral arguments today. TPM’s Kate Riga will be covering the threat to the landmark Chevron decision.

Biden Summons Congressional Leaders To White House

The meeting today will focus on the stalled talks over aid to Ukraine and Israel and its unfortunate companion issue: security at the U.S. southern border.

The Price of Netanyahu’s Ambition

The New Yorker’s David Remnick draws on his trip to Israel in late December to assess the post-Oct. 7 landscape through the prism of the Netanyahu family.

Epilogue

This brings it all together: The E. Jean Carroll trial and the willingness to let Trump off the hook to somehow try to wrest his voters away from him without criticizing or confronting him. If Nikki Haley is the last best hope to keep Trump from the GOP nomination, then god help us.

DANA BASH: How do you feel about your party's frontrunner being found liable for sexual abuse?

NIKKI HALEY: First of all, I haven't paid attention to his cases. All I know is he's innocent until proven guilty. You have investigations on Trump and Biden. pic.twitter.com/cqlX6QITZ9

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) January 16, 2024

Do you like Morning Memo? Let us know!