Trump v. United States - what an appropriate case name!

The US Supreme Court has just abrogated the Constitution of the United States, at the request of disgraced felon Donald Trump.

 If America can ever restore the principles of the Constitution, including the central principle that no one is above the law and the co-equality of the three branches of government, among many others, Trump v. United States will come to be viewed as the single worst decision ever rendered by this disgraceful Court. At last, Plessy v. Ferguson and the Dred Scott decision, not to omit the legally fanciful abuse of Bush v. Gore, will no longer occupy the bottom rung of American jurisprudence.

Wake up, America! The coup d'etat that started long ago is almost finished, almost without firing a shot. While its most visible manifestation was January 6, Trump's criminal attempt to overturn the clear result of the 2020 election, with the connivance of nearly all of the Republican Party, is part of their decades-long effort to put fascist reichwing rule beyond the remedy of democracy.

They're almost finished. Can we stop them? Don't count on it.

Why Trump is even close

 

I'd title this: Biden honors D-Day; Trump not invited

The mainstream media - the Washington Post in this example - is completely bending over backward to normalize the neo-fascist Trump. They did this in 2016, too, when it was all Trump outrages all the time. If Trump wins in November, the press will be bending over in a different direction.

There was a time that America bloodied up fascists, instead of coddling them. That day is gone. There are only a scant few 100-year-old D-Day veterans left to witness the horror that American politics has become.

Only fair if we win

The Republican view of elections is that they have to be rubber stamps for Republicans. The purpose of Americans going to the polls is much like the purpose of Russians going to the polls. It's not about the voters choosing their leaders; it's about massaging the egos of autocrats.

The New York Times asked leading Congressional Republicans whether they would accept Trump losing yet another election, and this is what NYT got from them:

Less than six months out from the presidential contest, leading Republicans, including several of Donald J. Trump’s potential running mates, have refused to commit to accepting the results of the election, signaling that the party may again challenge the outcome if its candidate loses.

This is barely news. For forty years, Republicans and their handmaidens in reichwing media have more and more hysterically attacked American elections. 2020 was only the culmination of their persistent sore-loserdom.

Now, they won't commit to accepting the vote of the American people. They don't care about our ctual opinions, only about our obedience and ovine nature.

Here's the thing: Republicans never question their own victories on the same goddamn ballot that Trump loses on.

Yet, the mainstream media, of which the NYT is the ne plus ultra, never follow up their questions about accepting the Presidential results with a question whether they accept the result in their own elections.

In the Trump Tank

The Supreme Court won't actually rule that the President is immune from prosecution. Think what Joe Biden could then do!

But they're all lawyers, so they understand that Trump's defense is completely factually and legally bankrupt. We've all seen and heard the proof, and it's unassailable. He attempted insurrection and the nullification of a legitimate election to retain power, he kept and refused to return national security documents and Presidential records that were in no sense personal documents, he exposed at least some of them to uncleared civilians and foreigners, he falsified business records (as he surely has his entire career), and he sexually assaulted Jean Carroll (not to mention many others, most likely).

The Republican Supremes know that Trump's defense is to run out the clock. Rich people use this defense to wear down prosecution all the time, and that's a fundamental problem for our legal system. It's why, for example, hardly any big corporation admits guilt in a settlement, and why the SEC among many other regulatory agencies almost always settles out of court instead of going to trial. It's also why no one significant ever did time for the manifest criminal financial behavior that led to the Great Recession in the aftermath of the subprime (and other) mortgage crisis.

Aileen Cannon, for all her reputation as being out of her depth in the documents case, cottoned onto Trump's interest and jumped enthusiastically into the tank long before the Republican Supremes. Delay? She's all over that!

What's my evidence?

If resolving a case helps Trump, the Supremes get right on it. They were never going to allow Colorado and other states to exclude Trump from the ballot, and they made that ruling tout suite. So, despite its plain history in the aftermath of the Civil War, they declared Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment not to be self-enforcing. Done and dusted.

On Presidential immunity though, they declined Jack Smith's filing for immediate certiorari. Hey, that gave them time to think up a path through the law that helps Trump. And, guess what, it's more delay!

Of course, Trump's interlocutory appeal for immunity will go nowhere in the law. It's a ridiculous, frivolous claim. The Supremes could have said so in their order declining cert, but that wouldn't help Trump delay and deny justice. Also, Trump's lawyers cannily filed an immunity motion in Cannon's courtroom, which means that eventually there will likely be competing rulings in different Federal Circuits, and only the Supreme Court can resolve those.

And, of course, it's not evidence about the Supreme Court, but it's evidence of the tactics of the Trump legal team: the Fani Willis/Nathan Wade affair. It has no real bearing on the case, but, Fani WTF?! It's a Bill Clinton level inability to stay focused. Eyes on the prize! Someone needs to get to trial before the fall, and you were our best hope. Instead, you couldn't keep your hands off someone who worked for you!

What we need: faster appeals courts, a limit to the number of issues a defendant can raise as interlocutories, and many fewer privileges for the powerful. I'm not holding my breath.

To War with the Pundits We Have

National political pundits rarely have much useful to say. In the heyday of blogging twenty years ago, it seemed to me that blogger amateurs were statistically more likely to be accurate than Cokie Roberts or Ruth Marcus or Tom Friedman or.... Or maybe I just chose well from the frothy, overflowing, mad-dog blogosphere.

Now that corporate mass media has retaken political punditry, it's even more true that the paid pundits are terrible at presenting the least tiny insight. Sure, they know that Joe Biden is old, and it's an easy column to write about that again and again and again. To be sure, Biden gives them plenty of chances to observe his age -- a news hook!

Because Trump floods the zone with Steve Bannon style bullshit, the national punditry hasn't settled on his epithet. May I suggest the Mafia Don of MAGA? Use that in every piece about him like "but he's 81" or "but her emails".

At present, the same punditry that touted Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley a month ago as alternatives to Trump wants to push Haley out of the Republican Primary race with the Mafia Don of MAGA. As ever, pundits fail to understand why anyone besides the Don of MAGA is still in the race. James Pindell of the Boston Globe continues his lame attempts to analyze this political race from any other perspective than a seventh grader's.

All along, the 2024 Republican Presidential Primary has been very simple: DeSantis and Haley have wanted and planned from the very beginning of their well-funded but poorly-voted campaigns to be there to pick up the pieces when the Mafia Don's Teflon finally starts sticking to every bit of ketchup he can fling at a wall.

Campaigns are almost never a sure thing. Shit happens during the campaign, turning obvious winners into unlucky losers or obvious losers into lucky winners. Trump won his first campaign, despite his obvious loserdom. Jimmy Carter came out of nowhere and won. Hillary Clinton lost because of Trump's free media and James Comey's October surprise (as well as a huge dollop of misogyny). John Kerry lost because he was so bad at politics he failed to respond to the dishonest attacks of the Bush/Cheney campaign.

In the immortal words of Risky Business, sometimes you just gotta say what the f*ck. That's what DeSantis and Haley have obviously been doing. Mafia Don is a chaos agent, and sometimes chaos agents face-plant, even when the Republican base is immune to reason and to its own gag reflex.

It might've worked, if only Merrick Garland had appointed Jack Smith in the spring of 2021.

But he's had too many birthdays!

The media is focusing almost exclusively on Joe Biden's superannuation, just like they focused on Hillary Clinton's emails. Reporters like this kind of story. It's simple enough for a tween to understand, and that's about the level of the American electorate. Reporters don't have to learn anything about it that would require effort; they can file in thirty minutes and get home to the fam in time for supper.

America's political media is worse every election, and Democrats like me are really bad at tempering our perennial expectations that they'll learn from the past and do better. Except that they have no desire to do better.

The truth is that everything Trump touches he destroys. That should be the theme of American political journalism. That dipshit failed to make money in casinos, which should be a license to print profits, but oh no, he was too busy gilding his toilet. Now he wants to destroy NATO.

Trump has already touched American democracy, and it's in deep trouble. If he gets his "short-fingered vulgarian" hands on it again, well, we'll all need to develop the skills citizens of fascism have to have to survive.

You call that an insurrection?!

Now the Supremes will rule that Trump can't be excluded from the 2024 Presidential ballot. This has been coming for some time. As I've said before, a Court that's more politically reichwing than even the Court that made an indefensible and extremely poorly reasoned decision to help its political allies in 2000's Bush v. Gore is never going to put Trump into a timeout.

I can only hope the Supremes set a standard for what actually would constitute insurrection that would trigger Section 3 of the 14th Amendment. They probably won't. They'll probably punt to Congress, which will render Section 3 toothless. The reichwing will love this, since they'll know that they can try their christofascist white supremacist mob rule again.

Slow learning media

 So... Trump is going to refuse later contributions from people who give Nikki Haley money. Riiight!

The first rule of evaluating a Trump statement, which the media ought to have figured out long ago is:

Is he bullshitting?

Because he's almost always bullshitting. He has no loyalty at all to the truth, but he's not always lying. Mostly, he's bullshitting, shining on, gaslighting. His bullshit tomorrow will often be just the opposite of his bullshit today. He'll say something like, "Thousands and thousands of Haley contributors have come over to MAGA, believe me."

Naturally, any time he says "believe me", you shouldn't.

Srsly, can you imagine this greedy, venal man refusing to take money from anyone? If George Soros had a stroke, entirely lost his open society principles, and offered money to the Orange Mussolini, you know if you've been paying attention and have half a brain in your head, that Trump would snatch it out of his hand in a New York minute.

After all, he's got a rape victim to pay. You don't think he's going to do that with his own money, do you?

Not really very hard to get under Trump's thin skin

President Biden should call Trump a loser over and over again until Trump says his usual angry, ugly bovine excrement. Then he should call Trump a sore loser. Then he should say that Trump's stolen everything his whole life, that he's a cheat and a crook, and that he's totally a sore loser.

A litany would be good. Stole his daddy's fortune when he had Alzheimer's. Cheated on his taxes for decades. Bankrupted casinos - can you imagine being so incompetent you could lose money with casinos! Cheated dozens of vendors in Atlantic City and dared them to sue him. Defrauded banks and cheated on his taxes some more. I pay mine; he cheats on his. Loves dictators so much he wants to be one. Legally prohibited from operating a charity in NY, because his was a fraud. Had a fraudulent real estate course that he lied to call a university. Buried his ex-wife on his golf course to get a tax advantage. Cheats at golf - and drives his cart onto the green. Pays for sex when his third wife has just delivered his fifth (known) child by three different women; oh, ok, paid a big chunk but later. Found liable for sexual abuse, with many more claims, not to mention his own bragging about it. Close friend of Jeffrey Epstein, who died on Trump's watch. Frequent thief and loose-lipped revealer of classified information. Friend of Putin who invited Putin's help in 2016 and then took it, plus he obstructed investigation of that. Incredibly corrupt, for sale to anyone with the cash to stay in one of his tacky hotels.

I could go on. I wouldn't trust this crook with my wallet and certainly not with my daughter. Even less so with my country, since my daughter would thump Trump.