The Backchannel

I wanted to share a few thoughts on the ongoing crisis and mess in Israel-Palestine and also on America’s elite college campuses.

First, a thought on the campus situation and this question of whether these protests are tainted by anti-Semitism. I know most about the situation at Columbia, which certainly isn’t to say I’m an expert on it. To me it seems clear that non-students operating on the periphery of the campus have been responsible for the most egregious comments or incidents that almost no one would deny are anti-Semitic. There’s been some of that from students on campus, usually in heated instances when visibly Jewish students are in the proximity of protesters.

There were so many things that happened yesterday in the Supreme Court’s hearing on presidential immunity that it’s hard to know where to start. But one part that captured it for me was Sam Alito’s line of argument that presidential immunity might be necessary to make it possible for presidents to leave office voluntarily, or that not having some broad grant of immunity would make refusal to leave office more likely. Here’s one of the quotes: “If an incumbent who loses a very close, hotly contested election knows that a real possibility after leaving office is not that the president is gonna be able to go off to a peaceful retirement, but that the president may be criminally prosecuted by a bitter political opponent, will that not lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy? And we can look around the world and find countries where we have seen this process, where the loser gets thrown in jail.”

For most of this election season so far, FiveThirtyEight hasn’t surfaced its own presidential race average. Compiling these averages in a sophisticated and honest way is actually kind of complicated. (They explain their methodology here.) We used to play in this space with PollTracker. So I know from experience. For me it’s not that I put so much weight on the specific number. It’s just a simpler way of visualizing the trend over time.

Well, now they’ve finally rolled theirs out. So I don’t have to be so reliant on RealClearPolitics, which has both a clumsy methodology and goes to comical length to add or not add polls to juice their favored candidate. All that said, the absolute averages as of today as remarkably similar. Trump up .4% on FiveThirtyEight and .3% on RCP. This reminds us of some of the ironies and … how can I say it, melancholy and ennui of complexity. The FiveThirtyEight model is HUGELY complex and sophisticated. It factors in all sorts of different variables. It incorporates findings from individual states into the national averages and vice versa. And yet for all this statistical leg work the averages as of this moment are essentially identical.

I routinely tell people not to look at every single poll but to focus on trends over time. That is, if you want to look at them at all. We’ll go into Election Day with the polls tight and the outcome still uncertain. I can say this because I actually watch them very, very closely … like unhealthily closely. It’s characterological. I don’t advise it for anyone else. But if you must, it’s okay, and I can relate.

This morning there’s a new batch of swing-state polls from Bloomberg/Morning Consult showing Trump ahead in all but one of those states and growing his lead versus the last of these polls a month ago. That’s not great at all. But as usual I would not invest too much weight in a single poll. These numbers are not in sync with other recent swing-state polls, though actually we have pretty few quality swing-state polls recently. But the overall trend over the last six or seven weeks still seems like what we’ve discussed in the last several posts on this topic. After several months of being behind by a small but real amount (2-4 percentage points), Biden has moved into roughly a tie.

Sometimes a story catches fire and just a really straightforward look at the fine print shows there’s really nothing to it. One of the recent examples has to do with Sen. John Fetterman and the increasingly vocal complaints that he’s gone rogue from his progressive roots and is likely to one day become or is possibly already on his way to becoming the next Joe Manchin or Kyrsten Sinema. There’s actually a whole conversation on social media about how we’ll soon see him coming out against getting rid of or abolishing the filibuster.

Like David, I’m still not clear that we have a satisfying explanation of just why the last week on Capitol Hill happened. For the moment I’m just glad it happened. Ukraine will now get a major infusion of military aid which should at least stabilize the Ukrainian war effort. But even if we don’t really know why Mike Johnson did what he did, there are some other takeaways worth noting.

I’ve been having an ongoing exchange with a TPM Reader and friend about the simple question: Why is Mike Johnson doing this? Like YOLO Johnson, sure. But why? He’s been kind of dragging along for six months and yeah, it’s kind of embarrassing, but it’s always been embarrassing. Why the “Let’s Be Legends” vibe now?

My friend asked if I thought it might be some sudden shift in the intelligence about the situation in Ukraine. Maybe, I said. But that didn’t seem right to me. Far more likely it was that the parliamentary dynamics simply hit a breaking point, perhaps spurred on by the sudden pressure to move Israel aid. If you’ve got one foot on the dock and another on the ship and the ship starts to pull off you have to make a choice. Stay or go. Equivocate and you fall in the water.

But this article from Politico suggests that new intelligence actually did play a key role.

I don’t pretend to even understand the moving parts of how this is supposed to work. But almost out of the blue Speaker Mike Johnson has decided to go all-in on an aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. As this started to come into view over the last two or three days, I’ve had a number of TPM Readers write in to say, why is this happening? What’s the catch? Or, why is he walking the plank like this? What is he sacrificing his Speakership for? And I don’t have a really good answer.

Now that we’re getting a view of the dynamics of Donald Trump on trial — not indicted, not awaiting trial, not the first of this or that, but actually on trial — with the requirement to be there and, well, be on trial, it’s worth revisiting where we may be this fall. As we know, SCOTUS decided to do Donald Trump a massive solid by first refusing to take up Trump’s immunity appeal without it first being heard by the DC circuit court. Then they really piled on the favors by agreeing to take up the case in full after the circuit court emphatically shot it down. SCOTUS oral arguments are next Thursday and realistically we may not get a decision until June or July. That puts the beginning of the trial in late summer at the earliest and quite possibly into September.

Set aside for the moment that the appeal itself is baseless and out of sync with American law, and that few think there’s any chance of Trump actually getting any relief even from this Supreme Court. It’s been treated as a scandal that the Court has taken upon itself to delay the trial anyway from four to six months. It very much is a scandal and not one that can be explained by any sort of apolitical weddedness to procedure or practice. But sometimes getting what you want may not be all it’s cracked up to be.

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.