Less Useless Than You Might Think

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

The most shocking thing to come out of Tucker Carlson’s interview with Vladimir Putin was how genuinely unprepared and surprised he seemed to be to interview Vladimir Putin. Putin has spent years now writing long essays and giving lengthy speeches on medieval history and how, if you tweak your view of just a few Varangian princes, the whole concept of “Ukraine” starts to look like a fiction foisted on Russia by conniving Polish noblemen.

That’s the basis which Putin offers when asked why he ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Ukraine isn’t a real country, Putin argues, just a construct invented to weaken Russia.

Putin went so far as to hand Carlson a binder supposedly full of historical documents during the interview to make the case. It left Carlson in the ridiculous position of having to prod Putin to make the case for the invasion that he wanted to hear: that it was the product of reckless American elites, NATO expansion, cultural decadence. This reached its peak when Carlson suggested to Putin at one point that the U.S. was demolishing the dollar’s position as the world reserve currency by sanctioning Russian foreign exchange reserves after the invasion; at another, he prompted Putin to articulate the NATO expansion rationale for invading Ukraine.
 

What’s deeply revealing about Carlson’s obsequiousness isn’t so much servility before the Russians, however. It’s what it says about his outlook towards political power back home. We’re in a moment right now where, exaggerated or not, intentionally provocative or not, the presumptive nominee of a major political party is running on a vision of himself as a revenge-seeking authoritarian. Putin himself is up for re-election (re-coronation) next month. Tucker Carlson might present himself as a renegade willing to tell the truth like no other, but the spinelessness we saw when confronted before a real dictator is as close to a version of his true self as we’ll see.

For a body supposedly intellectually and spiritually divorced from the rest of us plebs, the Supreme Court sure sounded Thursday like it’d sauntered into arguments over Donald Trump’s disqualification having absorbed the conventional wisdom and determined to rule that way. 
 

Much of the chattering class had landed against disqualifying Trump for a largely political reason: It feels uncomfortable and undemocratic to boot the almost-certain nominee for one of two parties off the ballot.

Experts of the disqualification clause have long held that, putting aside the squicky feelings, it’s an open-and-shut case, that Trump’s goading on of the mob leading up to Jan. 6 and on the day itself precluded him from running for office again.  

But the justices weren’t interested. They spent most of the arguments trying to find a pseudo-legal way to justify this end point, most expressing enthusiasm in the hastily pulled-together idea that states can’t disqualify a federal candidate. This “they” included Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson full-throatedly and Justice Elena Kagan a bit more mildly. Justice Sonia Sotomayor seems to be the only real question mark. 

Details of what happened on Jan. 6 and Trump’s role in it were completely absent from the proceedings — helping the justices and Trump’s lawyer keep the discussion in the land of abstraction, far away from the injuries and deaths his supporters caused that day.
 

Most thought this case was almost certain to go Trump’s way, if not that the liberals would be so eager to get it there. 

I’m most interested to see what happens next with the immunity case. If the conservatives want a unanimous opinion here — both to cover their partisan inclinations and lend the case gravitas — the liberals should demand a favor in return. Again, almost everyone expects even this Court to find against Trump’s immunity arguments, which are as silly as they are self-serving. But even if the Court does so, the speed at which it does it is nearly as important as the decision itself. 
 

If it slow-walks the case, it gives Trump a win by another name, helping him push the Jan. 6 case past the 2024 election. 

If (best) the Court quickly decides not to take up the case, to let the D.C. Circuit decision stand, or (fine) takes up the case and dispenses of it quickly, like it’s doing with the disqualification one, it’ll show that it takes anti-Trump cases as seriously as it does pro-Trump ones. 
 

These right-wing justices are unlikely to be moved by that motivation alone. If they want a compelling or unanimous majority on the disqualification case, liberals should demand the trade.

The true believers were buzzing. 

It was Jan. 2 and former President Trump had just used his “Truth Social” platform to release a 32-page “Summary of Election Fraud in the 2020 Presidential Election in the Swing States.” The document rehashed thoroughly debunked claims, promoted blatantly false information, and repeatedly cited other reports that do not actually appear to exist to make the patently absurd assertion there is “no evidence Joe Biden won.” In other words, it was everything many hardcore Trump supporters who refuse to accept his defeat had been waiting for. 

On the site formerly known as Twitter where election dead-enders have taken advantage of Elon Musk’s permissive attitude towards right-wing conspiracy theories, a few thousand pro-Trump activists spent nearly 13 hours in an audio chat discussing the document, which they dubbed “The Nucleus File.” But the report was more than an object of fascination for the pro-Trump fringe. 

Along with becoming a hot topic in delirious Twitter Spaces, the report was cited in a Jan. 2 federal court filing by Trump’s attorneys, part of a wild strategy to argue he was immune from prosecution in the election interference case brought by special counsel Jack Smith. 

Read more about the mystery behind the origins of the anonymous conspiracy-fueled document Trump’s lawyers cited in federal court here. 

• During Wednesday’s arguments over the language of a proposed ballot initiative to protect abortion rights, Florida Supreme Court Chief Justice Carlos Muñiz kept returning to a well neither side had briefed: Florida Chief Justice Pushes Fetal Personhood At Argument For Abortion Amendment
• What Does Today’s Immunity Decision Mean For Trump’s Delay Strategy?
• Matt Gaetz, the perpetual chaos agent, is very upset. Congress is not working. The Democrats have the spotlight. But he knows who might be able to fix it: Kevin McCarthy.
• A new episode of Kate Riga’s podcast Belaboring The Point: We Demand Debates, in which the University of Pennsylvania’s Dr. Kathleen Hall Jamieson changes the minds of Kate and TPM’s Nicole Lafond on the importance of debates.