We’ll be recording and posting this week’s episode of The Josh Marshall Podcast later this week.

Yesterday I noted that January 6th remains radioactive for the GOP in a way that Trump’s other crimes simply don’t. It keeps coming up again because they’ve never dealt with what happened. And they haven’t because that would mean dealing with Donald Trump. And, let’s be honest, they haven’t because a substantial minority (or more?) of their supporters are in fact insurrectionists and unreconstructed ones.

The preference at all times is to ignore January 6th. The next line of defense is to offer general condemnation but say it’s time to move forward. If that doesn’t work the defense moves to “politicization” and general arguments that the Justice Department should never bring charges against the man the incumbent defeated or the one he’ll face in the next election. But defending Trump’s actions on and around January 6th remains basically impossible for all but the most authoritarian and criminally minded Republicans. Because January 6th is simply indefensible. What I wanted to note today is that the insider sheets, the ones generally inclined to say that in fact this is good news for Trump or, more seriously, that Republicans have a plan for this, are generally saying the same thing. This Axios update from last night is a good example. January 6th is different. There’s no denying it.

As you know, this morning ex-President Trump announced that he’d received a target letter from prosecutor Jack Smith. While nothing is certain, this means there’s a strong likelihood that Trump will be indicted for his attempted coup in late 2020, culminating on January 6th, 2021. Yesterday Georgia’s Supreme Court unanimously rejected Trump’s Hail Mary bid to shut down Fulton County (Atlanta) DA Fani Willis’ investigation into Trump’s election tampering in Georgia. Indictments there seem likely as well. Trump has of course already been indicted for his theft and refusal to return classified documents in federal court in Florida as well as fraud in New York City. It now appears all but certain that Trump will A) receive the Republican presidential nomination with little real opposition and B) face four separate batches of felony indictments in four separate jurisdictions for crimes ranging from comparatively minor fraud to the greatest crime of all, attempting to overthrow the state and the constitution itself.

Those two almost certain probabilities — seemingly facts in utter contradiction — are in fact mutually reinforcing. A normal candidate would be driven from the race. For Trump they become just more evidence of a larger battle that validates his status as not simply the head but the inevitable leader of the Republican Party. His role as victim effectively boxes out any serious challenger for the nomination.

Trump says he got a target letter from Jack Smith in the J6 probe. Normally that means an indictment is quite likely. And with the pattern of the letter followed by the indictment in the Mar-a-Lago case, even more so. Nothing’s for certain. But we should now operate on the assumption that Trump will be indicted for the January 6th coup, which of course involves acts going back a couple months before the violence on January 6th. Josh Kovensky has our first report.

You’ve probably seen the brouhaha about ersatz Democratic presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. getting in trouble for saying that COVID was “ethnically targeted” to “spare the Jews.” I wanted to take a moment to dig into just what happened, just what he said and what if anything it all means. This is one of those crazy and yet in many ways predictable stories that manages to be both deeply stupid and yet also quite illustrative of our times.

First, what’s the story? I noticed immediately that all the coverage stemmed from a single story in The New York Post (not a great sign) by Jonathan Levine. I’ve had a couple run-ins with Levine over the years, or at least I’ve seen pieces of his that struck me as tendentious, either by design or lack of familiarity with certain political questions. Don’t get hung up on whether I was right or wrong about him. I note this only to highlight that even though I have an extremely low opinion of RFK Jr. I went into this story with more than a little skepticism.

But in this case, Levine was right on the mark. Kennedy’s words are his words. In fact Levine was so right on the mark it’s a bit shocking he was the only one to write it up. Lots of reporters were at this dinner and a lot of them wrote it up. But none mentioned this. The most one can say about Levine’s reporting in this case is that he drew out the obvious implication of Kennedy’s remark which was necessary because Kennedy used the standard many-people-are-saying and just-asking-questions type phrasings that are the calling card of his brand of conspiracy freaks. But again, his words are his words. He’s guilty as charged.

Here’s what he said …

If you’ll remember the last time we discussed Incel Chieftain Ron DeSantis the story was that even though his polling numbers had faltered and campaign discourse had settled into describing his deep personal weirdness he was still sitting on a mountain of money. Well, maybe not. Now DeSantis has been forced to fire staff amid a spending crunch. A campaign insider tells Politico the number was “fewer than 10 staffers.” NBC says it was a dozen. The first reports tried to suggest this was part of a strategy shift as opposed to spending woes. But in those terms the new strategy seems to be to not run out of money before the end of the summer.

If you spend time listening to Trump/Musk/Sacks/Bitcoin anti-Ukraine discourse you’ll hear the following argument: while the U.S. launched (by remote control presumably) its Russia/Ukraine proxy war to degrade Russian military power, quite the opposite has happened. Now the U.S. is running out of artillery shells, thus degrading its own military power. Meanwhile, Ukraine is doomed because we can’t send them any more and Russia can sustain its supply forever. In other words, the U.S. is owned; Russia is on the march; Ukraine is doomed.

This is a bogus argument. The U.S. hasn’t run out of artillery ammunition. Not even close. The U.S. has what amounts to a one-and-a-half-war doctrine. The U.S. needs to be able to fight two major wars simultaneously or, short of that, needs to be able to defeat its adversary in one major war while holding its adversary in the second at bay long enough to win war one and move on to winning war two. A bureaucracy like the Pentagon takes the official doctrine and computes what amount of human and material resources are required to make good on it and then is responsible for making sure all of that is available if and when those wars break out. This is basically what Joint Staffs do. That includes, among many other things, stockpiling enough artillery and ammunition to meet the needs of fighting those two wars. That’s an almost unimaginable amount of stuff that is still sitting in U.S. stockpiles.

I want to follow up on Nicole’s Where Things Stand from yesterday afternoon, where she notes that the Murdoch family seems to be wearying of Meatball Ron⁽™⁾ as his hapless campaign continues to stumble and the prospect of his ridding billionaire GOP donors of Donald Trump seems ever more remote.

At the moment, DeSantis’s zombie campaign rests on the support of an odd-couple mix of the incel-adjacent far right, the GOP donor class and the operatives who serve them. But if you accept that DeSantis won’t be the GOP nominee, which you should (trust me), who replaces him as the Great Hope of the GOP Donor Class? Or, to put it differently, who is the next non-Trump GOP memestock who will get all the investment and attention before plummeting back to the ground?

You’ve probably seen some coverage of the NATO summit in Vilnius this week. With that meeting we’ve seen an acrimonious debate over whether Ukraine should be allowed to join NATO now, arguably when it needs to most. Ukraine wants it. Indeed, it’s demanding it. Many of Ukraine’s most ardent supporters in Europe and North America are too. So I wanted to take a moment to go on record as saying this is unwise, unnecessary and, to a non-trivial extent, borderline insane.

The arguments I’ve at least seen come down to versions of “moral clarity,” the importance of making a clear and emphatic statement about Western commitment to Ukraine and the unacceptability of Russian behavior. These are important goals. But it’s a good rule of thumb that when people lean too hard on “moral clarity” there are good reasons to believe it’s because more considered and logical arguments can’t sustain the idea.

It’s certainly true that mainstream media organizations have published stories on the sometimes clownish work of House Republican investigators. But even this doesn’t detract from the fact that new accusations from the same folks are routinely presented to the public as credible, serious, even damning news. I was considering this this afternoon and it’s hard to think of any other part of life, personal or professional, in which someone’s claims are so consistently shown not only to be inaccurate but comically cynical and dishonest and yet continue to be treated with great seriousness and respect. It’s a sort of credibility Groundhog Day, in the sense of the movie. Just the same damn thing from scratch every time.