Bathroom! Ballroom! Basement!

Hello it’s the weekend. This is The Weekender ☕

If nothing else, Trump may be one of the greatest entertainers our country has ever produced.

That’s not a moral or legal judgement. Entertainers can be cruel or oafish, they can be noble or kind (though the first type tends to be easier to watch). But the main thing is to maintain dramatic tension at all times to keep the audience engaged.

It’s great to watch, but terrible if you’re trying to avoid prosecution, steward the national interest, or govern a country. This quality shines through in the 37-count indictment that federal prosecutors smacked Trump with this week.

The document utterly reveals the man, showing him stumble between devious attempts to con his own attorneys into lying to the DOJ and clumsy attempts to hold onto what prosecutors describe as military and nuclear secrets, including by stashing boxes of them in the Mar-a-Lago shower and bathroom. Above all else, Trump is determined to hold on to the records, all but daring the National Archives, the FBI, and his own attorneys to come and get them.

It’s great drama, but please spare us the idea that any of this is somehow surprising or stunning. The facts as alleged are certainly revealing of Trump the man, but the qualities on display here — complete disregard for anything beyond his immediate desires, willingness to deceive those closest to him, the braggadocio — have all been known since before the 2016 campaign.

But the brazen criminality which emerges from that behavior, and which appears in the indictment, does set up the dramatic arc for a truly insane 2024 presidential campaign, where Trump can plausibly run in order to pardon himself, if elected. Will he make it or won’t he? The fate of the country hangs in the balance.
 

More next week and more on other news below. Let’s dig in. 

— Josh Kovensky

Opposite Day At The Supreme Court Pt. 1

A Voting Rights Act decision, authored by Chief Justice John Roberts, during this era of the Supreme Court? Usually, it’d be a recipe for disaster.

Hence the near-universal shock when, on Thursday, the Court handed down a 5-4 decision that preserved the VRA’s protections against racial gerrymanders and slapped down a new benchmark pushed by Alabama that would make it nearly impossible to bring similar cases.

It was a major voting rights victory, and is already rippling out to other cases: Hours later, a judge in a Georgia racial gerrymandering case asked for further briefing in light of the Court’s decision.

Justice Brett Kavanaugh was ultimately the swing vote, going from joining with the conservatives to block a lower court order that let Alabama redraw its maps before the 2022 midterms to joining Roberts and the liberals to uphold the voting law.

— Kate Riga

Opposite Day At The Supreme Court Pt. 2

The Court also handed down a much lower-profile decision Thursday, but one that similarly shocked all who were tracking it. In HHC v. Talevski, the Court in a relative landslide — 7-2 — upheld private rights of action for beneficiaries of federal spending programs, preserving their ability to sue should states violate their rights while providing programs including Medicaid.  

The threat to spending programs like Medicaid was existential; one expert told TPM that this case “was to Medicaid what Dobbs was to abortion.” Instead, the Supreme Court handed down “a grand slam for rights under federal spending clause programs,” per Tim Jost, professor of law, emeritus, at the Washington and Lee University School of Law.

Activists, many of whom had fought tirelessly (and unsuccessfully) to get the case dropped before it went to oral argument, were ecstatic.

“I think I’m going to cry now,” Bryce Gustafson, an organizer with Indiana’s Citizens Action Coalition and one of the leaders of the push to get the case dropped, told TPM.

— Kate Riga

Makes You Think 🧐

“President Trump said he has ‘been summoned to appear at the Federal Courthouse in Miami on Tuesday, at 3 PM.’ This is a perimeter probe from the oppressors. Hold. rPOTUS has this. Buckle up. 1/50K know your bridges. Rock steady calm. That is all.”

If your reaction after reading that is complete confusion, you’re not alone. That’s what Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA) tweeted on Thursday, shortly after Trump announced he was indicted. Many saw the cryptic tweet as, basically, a call for war, written mostly in a sort of right-wing militia code.

Journalist and author Jeff Sharlet called Higgins’ tweet “deep scary” and explained, “1/50 k refers to military scale maps & publicly available US Geological Survey maps of areas mostly surrounding military installations. This isn’t a metaphor. This isn’t slow civil war. This is a congressman calling for the real thing.”

Sharlet added, “Prepare for war. ‘Know your bridges’ is militia speak for closing them down. County level insurrection,” interpreting “Buckle up” as code for “prepare for war.”

Another sitting lawmaker got to the point more quickly. “We have now reached a war phase,” Rep. Andy Biggs (R-AZ) tweeted on Friday. “Eye for an eye.”

For this week’s words of wisdom, I have no words…

— Emine Yücel