The Backchannel

Commentators have been going for months debating the merits of the New York/“hush money” prosecution of Donald Trump. Is it “serious”? Is it serious enough? How does it match up against the three other criminal prosecutions still looming over him? Does it lower the average level of seriousness when the independent seriousness of each is added together and divided by four? In the most general sense the entire conversation is an example of what we might call the Trump Reality Distortion Vortex. One of Trump’s great powers is that he is like a heavy magnet of distorted thinking. When he comes into proximity people start thinking stupid things, asking stupid questions. What opinion should we, who are not prosecutors, have toward a chronic lawbreaker who is charged with breaking the laws he broke? Will it make him stronger? Were the laws broken enough?

On the simplest level the first question has always seemed easy to me. People don’t just go to jail for crimes like this. One of Trump’s accomplices literally already went to jail for this specific crime. Indeed, he did so on charges brought by the Trump Justice Department. That speaks for itself.

As you can see here and here, I did a few posts over the weekend trying to make sense of just what was happening in the skies over Israel. As I noted, I initially thought the fusillade was essentially performative. The Iranians fired off a mix of drones and missiles they knew would be shot down, so they can make a big show of striking back while being confident that the damage would be limited enough to avoid the risk of further escalation. But as more information came in, that seemed less credible.

It is bracing, remarkable and simply amazing to watch the sheer panic among Republicans, and especially Donald Trump, in reaction to the Arizona Supreme Court decision which put the state back under the near-absolute 1864 abortion ban. We talked a few days ago about Kari Lake’s desperate attempts to get out of the way of the backlash. Today Donald Trump went on Truth Social and demanded that Gov. Katie Hobbs and the Republican state legislature “remedy what has happened.” But if you look at what he says he doesn’t seem willing to call for anything more than adding rape and incest to the list of possible exceptions under the 1864 law? “We must ideally have three Exceptions for Rape, Incest, and the Life of the Mother.”

OJ Simpson’s death today at 76 seems and by all rights should be a smallish blip on the news horizon. He hasn’t been a public figure of any consequences in more than 26 years and he hasn’t been a truly public one in the sense of being successful or beloved in 30. But it’s still some milestone because of what a seismic event his killing of his estranged wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and her friend, Ron Goldman, and his subsequent trial truly were.

There are so many dimensions of this event you could write whole books about — a good half a dozen meta-topics spring to mind without even giving the matter much thought. Though it was essentially a pre-internet story, it was unique to the early cable news era, a kind of progenitor of today — CNN, national tabloid culture, the birth of commentator culture. In a way it created each. The story had this criss-crossed relationship with racism and the country’s racial politics and the state of the criminal justice system, one which was upended, hopelessly upside down and yet somehow deeply true. It was at heart of horribly ordinary story about chronic spousal violence which finally escalated to murder. There was the DNA, the glove, the perjurious racist cop. The whole thing was like a universal text.

Over the coming months we’re going to see a lot of articles about some secret plan Republicans have to totally undermine or destroy Democrats, like this one in the Times. These will all of course be pitched by Republicans eager to spread the word about their devious secret plans, pump up their partisans and demoralize Democrats. The one I’m flagging here has some of that. But it’s worth reading because it is what this campaign will almost inevitably come down to — third party candidates and whether Republicans will be able to elevate them enough to allow Donald Trump to win.

One thing we should expect is for all of the “major” third party candidates — Kennedy, Stein, West — to be funded in part by ultra-high-net-worth Republicans. That’s already happening to some degree.

I don’t think it makes a lot of sense to be too focused on polls more than six months before a presidential election. But since polls have had such a big impact on the political mood and almost everything about how Democrats see their candidate, their coalition and the election itself I think it’s important to keep an eye on them. Or rather, since you’re inundated with them via commentary, it’s worth actually looking at the polls themselves, especially when they’re in flux.

All to that end, for months President Biden has been between 2 and 4 points behind in the polls — basically since late summer. But over the course of March that’s reversed and the average of recent polls puts him either tied or slightly ahead.

Let’s look.

This is one of the most amazing stories to come down the pike in I don’t know how long, published over the weekend in The Washington Post. The short version is that Tim Sheehy, probable Republican nominee for Senate in Montana, is a comical liar and is trying to cover up that lie with a story so preposterous that it’s kind of a joy to run through because it’s so hilariously bad.

Seriously, I’m not overstating the case.

Let’s dig into the details.

One of the abiding themes of election coverage this year is that if there’s a second Trump presidency it will be more extreme, more organized and ideologically coherent and more prepared. There’s some level of psyching out the opposition going on here. But it’s still mostly correct. The major guideposts in the storyline are first that the various forces that went into Trumpism came into 2016 and 2017 not really realizing Trump was the guy. And that’s not surprising. He was Donald Trump after all, something our whole political system has difficulty remembering. Trump also staffed most of his administration with what for him were the equivalent of Hollywood leading men: ex-generals, legitimate multinational corporation CEOs, Wall Street sharks. They weren’t people Democrats like but they weren’t ideologues or even very in line with the goals Trump was pursuing by the end of his term.

The part of the story that is still too little articulated is how Trump’s personal and legal challenges galvanized and really created the whole thing. Trump’s desire for dictatorial power, to control the government in depth, to have the entire state mirror and obey his will grew from his frustration and fear of the various legal probes that stalked him. He thought when he became President that he had managed a hostile takeover of a rival company. The state and the country was his. So he could do whatever he wanted. But it didn’t turn out to be that way. And that’s how the drive to vanquish the “Deep State” was born. In other words, the kernel of Trump’s dictatorial, strongman ambitions were there from the start. But it was only the shock and ego injury of being faced with the difference between owning and governing that set him on the track, for entirely personal and self-protective reasons, of transforming the state to make it serve him in the way he wanted.

We have a cluster of new national polls out today. And they continue to show a bumpy and uneven but still clear movement in Joe Biden’s direction. Polls are complicated these days because there are so many different ones and more importantly the quality and reliability of those polls vary greatly. So we have five polls out since the 25th. And those are Marist (Biden+2); Data for Progress (Biden +1), Big Village (Biden +2); Morning Consult (Biden +2) and Trafalgar (Trump +3).

Do you remember Joe Flaherty? He died yesterday at age 82, according to this obituary in the Times. I only half remembered his name. But I definitely remembered him, his various characters and even more the show he was part of, Second City TV. Did you watch this show either at the time it aired (1976-1984) or since? I’m not sure how well known it is today. But I watched it as a little kid when it first ran and even today I can remember my uncontrollable bouts of laughter. It was the kind of stuff I’d remember or play back in my head the next day in school and just start giggling in a way I couldn’t control and then get in trouble for disrupting class. Eventually I came up with a list of really sad things I would have on hand to think about if some part of the last episode popped into my mind during class or even worse during a test. Like that funny.