With your support, we’ve managed to get to the 40% milestone on our way toward our goal in this year’s TPM Journalism Fund drive. We’re now at $202,575, which is great for five days. Still a very long way to go. But we’re encouraged by the response so far. (Really, it’s hard to convey how much of a relief, a show of support, a validation and above all a big, big assist on our collective work that is.) We’ve got an overflow of news, which is kind of inconsiderate of the ex-President. But we’ll do our best to drive and news at the same time. If you’d like to support our efforts in this critical drive, just click right here.

It’s a funny thing pointing to Bill Barr as an authority on anything. But it’s worth watching this interview with Barr about the Trump indictments on Fox News.

A few of you wrote in in response to my post on the sheer “normalness,” the “mundaneness” of the prosecution of Donald Trump. You took me to task, arguing that this is all far from normal. It’s a crisis, in fact. Nothing about Trump’s time on the political stage is normal.

I think we are speaking past each other.

From TPM Reader JS …

I’m getting so enraged by all of these headlines in the NYT and WaPo that claim this is “bad for Biden” or a “test for the rule of law.’ No.

I sort of held my tongue through most of the revelations and hijinks yesterday. I will share some thoughts later on the particulars of the indictment. (You can do no better than reading Josh Kovensky’s global wrap-up here.) But for now I wanted to share one thought.

That is the sheer ordinariness of the whole story. That may seem like an odd thing to say: ex-President facing multiple federal felony indictments for the first time ever, the bizarre details of this antic clown’s Florida Villa-cum-Hotel stuffed with banker’s boxes of classified documents, the bathroom chandelier, the power glitz jammed together with gaudy dime store aesthetic. But we grant Trump too much by lavishing, wearying too much in the purported weightiness of the moment. It’s very normal. Yes, powerful people get away with a lot. But if you commit crimes repeatedly and brazenly you’re very likely to get charged with one or more crimes, particularly if you’re in the public spotlight.