A FEW THOUGHTS ON SUPREME COURT REPUBLICANS' LATEST CONSTITUTION REWRITE

News reports suggest that the Supreme Court is about to grant Donald Trump a massive amount of immunity from prosecution for acts committed while in office, but probably not absolute immunity. After opening arguments, The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein wrote:

The arguments showed that although the Court’s conservative majority seems likely to reject Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, four of the justices appear predominantly focused on limiting the possibility that future presidents could face such charges for their actions in office, with Chief Justice John Roberts expressing more qualified sympathy with those arguments. Among the GOP-appointed justices, only Amy Coney Barrett appeared concerned about the Court potentially providing a president too much protection from criminal proceedings.

Even the (understandably) alarmist Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate believe that Trump probably won't get everything he's asking for:

The prospect of a criminal trial for a criminal president shocked and appalled five men: Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch suggested that Smith’s entire prosecution is unconstitutional; meanwhile, Roberts sounded eager at times to handle the case just a hair more gracefully: by cutting out its heart by preventing the jury from hearing about “official acts” (which lie at the center of the alleged conspiracy).

I called it in early March:

I think the Court will grant Trump, and all future presidents, "limited" immunity from prosecution for acts committed while in office....

I think the Court will grant partial immunity while greatly reducing Trump's legal jeopardy. The Court doesn't want to give presidents blanket immunity because, obviously, that would also apply to Democratic presidents, and we can't have that. The Court will toss out some of the charges because it can, and because fuck you, liberals, that's why.

And obviously, if a future Republican president's Justice Department wants to prosecute a former Democratic president, the scope of "official acts" will magically narrow, again because fuck you, liberals.

Trump won't get absolute immunity but, as I've been saying on social media today, he'll tell us he did:

If the Supreme Court gives Trump partial immunity, which seems very likely, he'll say he was given "absolute immunity." He'll say this over and over again, often in all caps, the way he used to repeat "no collusion," and at least 45% of the country will believe it's true.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Apr 26, 2024 at 7:03 AM

*****

Remember this charming story from last year?

In 2018, after a teenage gunman murdered 14 students and three faculty members at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Jennifer Birch, fearing for the safety of her own children, decided to join the fight against gun violence.... Birch’s mission, as part of a volunteer force for the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, has been to identify Santa Ana, California, firearm regulations from the 1800s and earlier—all part of an effort to satisfy the Supreme Court’s increasingly preposterous whims about what’s necessary to prove a firearm regulation is constitutional....

In 2022’s Bruen decision, the Supreme Court struck down bans on concealed carry and expanded upon the previous standard for determining the constitutionality of gun regulations, declaring that authorities had to find analogous gun laws that existed prior to 1900. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, found that before that date, concealed carry bans were not part of America’s history and traditions, and they were thus unconstitutional....

Birch is one of about 20 volunteers with Moms Demand Action, part of the gun safety group Everytown, who are scouring archives across the United States for historical firearm regulations.

(The researchers have found many pre-1900 gun laws that greatly resemble modern gun restrictions. Of course, the Supreme Court doesn't care.)

If you were extraordinarily naive, you'd think the Court might apply this "historical tradition" standard to every case. But as Jamelle Bouie notes, presidents were historically understood not to be above the law, but the Republican justices (apart from Amy Coney Barrett) don't want to know that:

In a detailed amicus brief submitted in support of the government in Trump v. United States, 15 leading historians of the early American republic show the extent to which the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution rejected the idea of presidential immunity for crimes committed in office....

“In America the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote in his landmark pamphlet, “Common Sense.” “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” ...

Years later, speaking on the Senate floor, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina — a delegate to the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia — said outright that he and his colleagues did not intend for the president to have any privileges or immunities: “No privilege of this kind was intended for your Executive, nor any except that which I have mentioned for your Legislature.”

What’s more, as the brief explains, ratification of the Constitution rested on the “express” promise that “the new president would be subject to criminal conviction.”

“His person is not so much protected as that of a member of the House of Representatives,” Tench Coxe wrote in one of the first published essays urging ratification of the Constitution, “for he may be proceeded against like any other man in the ordinary course of law.”

James Iredell, one of the first justices of the Supreme Court, told the North Carolina ratifying convention that if the president “commits any misdemeanor in office, he is impeachable, removable from office, and incapacitated to hold any office of honor, trust or profit.” And if he commits any crime, “he is punishable by the laws of his country, and in capital cases may be deprived of his life.”

Yes, you read that correctly. In his argument for the Constitution, one of the earliest appointees to the Supreme Court specified that in a capital case, the president could be tried, convicted and put to death.

Originalism? Textualism? Not this time.

*****

Bouie is cautious about predicting how all this will affect the timing of Trump's election interference case:

... the Supreme Court has directly intervened in the 2024 presidential election in a way that deprives the electorate of critical information or gives it less time to grapple with what might happen in a federal courtroom. And if the trial occurs after an election in which Trump wins a second term and he is convicted, then the court will have teed the nation up for an acute constitutional crisis. A president, for the first time in the nation’s history, might try to pardon himself for his own criminal behavior.

The Republicans on the Court didn't come this far only to allow the possibility of a trial after the election. They want this over and done with. The zealots will take their sweet time writing up their ruling, or, if Roberts writes the ruling, they'll dawdle on their much more zealous partial concurrence. They'll get the case sent back down to the lower courts, and they'll force Jack Smith and his team to pull their case apart and put it back together with the few pieces left to them. The trial won't happen this year, and if it ever happens, it will be a pale echo of what it should have been. The Republicans on the Court want nothing to stand in the way of victory for their party's presidential standard-bearer, obviously, but they also want to minimize any embarrassment to their party even if he loses.

THEY LUST FOR BLOOD, BUT ALSO FOR INTIMIDATION

Adam Serwer thinks Tom Cotton and other Republicans seek bloodshed.

Tom Cotton has never seen a left-wing protest he didn’t want crushed at gunpoint.

On Monday, the Arkansas senator demanded that President Joe Biden send in the National Guard to clear out the student protests at Columbia University against the Israel-Hamas war, which he described as “the nascent pogroms at Columbia.” Last week, Cotton posted on X, “I encourage people who get stuck behind the pro-Hamas mobs blocking traffic: take matters into your own hands. It’s time to put an end to this nonsense.” He later deleted the post and reworded it so that it did not sound quite so explicitly like a demand for aspiring vigilantes to lynch protesters.

This is a long-standing pattern for Cotton.... During the George Floyd protests of 2020, Cotton demanded that the U.S. military be sent in with orders to give “no quarter for insurrectionists, anarchists, rioters, and looters,” insisting unconvincingly in a later New York Times op-ed that he was not conflating peaceful protesters with rioters.

On social media this morning, Atrios posted this garbled take on Republican responses to the current campus unrest:

He's right -- the police can shoot protesters. So why would Cotton and his allies want the National Guard brought in to do something cops could do just as easily?

The point of calls for the deployment of the National Guard or the military, or calls for vigilante jutice against road blockaders, is escalation and intimidation. I'm not saying that these people don't want their enemies harmed. But intimidation all by itself can be immensely satisfying to Republican voters.

Who's the emblematic modern Republican? A guy walking into a 7-11 or a Walmart or a state park open-carrying an AR-15. Some people who do this actually engage in violence, but most don't. They just want to intimidate. They want to show us who's boss.

Years before Cotton (or Donald Trump) held office, they pasted stickers like this one on their pickup trucks and SUVs:

The vast majority of people who've displayed a sticker like this never harm a liberal. But they want you to know that they'd like to, and they could.

Their anthem is "Try That in a Small Town."

Cuss out a cop, spit in his face
Stomp on the flag and light it up
Yeah, ya think you're tough

Well, try that in a small town
See how far ya make it down the road
Around here, we take care of our own
You cross that line, it won't take long
For you to find out, I recommend you don't
Try that in a small town

Why does Jason Aldean sing, "I recommend you don't / Try that in a small town"? Republicans know that acting like a law unto yourself can get messy. Many of the January 6 insurrectionists are in prison. Kyle Rittenhouse and George Zimmerman were acquitted, but the driver who killed Heather Heyer in Charlottesville received two life sentences. And excessive force by the police and military can end badly for the perpetrators, as Derek Chauvin and (for a while) Lieutenant William Calley learned. America is still a nation of laws, at least some of the time.

But intimidation can provide many of the satisfactions of actual violence without the legal complications. I suspect Kelly Hayes wouldn't agree with my interpretation of these messages, but I think what she says here is relevant:

They want right-wing speech to be protected on campus and people protesting genocide to be ground under. Some people call this hypocrisy, but it's much more sinister than that. These double standards are about HIERARCHY. They're about how the right wants to order the world.

— Puff the Magic Hater (@mskellymhayes.bsky.social) Apr 24, 2024 at 10:33 PM

It's about who gets to do harm and who harm can be visited upon without consequence. That's what they are outlining when they demand "protection" for some and violence against others. They are outlining the world they want, including who should be victimized at will.

— Puff the Magic Hater (@mskellymhayes.bsky.social) Apr 24, 2024 at 10:34 PM

They know we're not there yet. They're not allowed to hunt liberals and progressives at will. The current campus unrest might end without even a single protester death. But they savor the prospect of putting us in our place.

THE MEDIA IS EXALTING TRUMP BY TELLING US HOW MUCH HE'S BEING HUMBLED

In The New York Times a few days ago, Maggie Haberman told us that Donald Trump is being humbled by his experiences in criminal court:

For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little....

The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Mr. Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness, one he rode from a reality-television studio set to the White House.

...the shared sense among many of his advisers is that the process may damage him as much as a guilty verdict.

Now that the trial is underway, Jessica Bennett of the Times tells us the same thing:

... as Trump’s lawyers argued in opening statements, Trump is not merely the former president and presumptive Republican nominee. “He is also a man, he is a husband and a father,” one of them said. “He’s a person, just like you and just like me.” It was an attempt to humanize him — and yet all I could think, in that dreary courtroom, with a sour smell and a broken overhead clock, was that this is going to drive Trump mad.

For the next six weeks, four days a week, seven hours a day, including meals and coffee and bathroom breaks, Trump will be treated like an ordinary New Yorker, forced to sit in a drab 17-story municipal building.

Inside the court, the chairs were uncomfortable. It was so cold that reporters were bundled in heavy coats and scarves. (Trump wasn’t wrong when he complained, “It’s freezing.”) The speckled linoleum floors were drab, the fluorescent lighting was harsh, the rumpled shades were drawn. It was hard to see and hear. The monotony made my eyes droop....

Court let out early Monday, after the judge explained that an alternate juror had a dental emergency. You could just imagine Trump seething at the thought of his time dictated by a root canal.

Last week, Marc Caputo, one of the anti-Trumpers at The Bulwark, tweeted this:

Unable to speak when he wants and lacking a steady stream of Diet Coke, his favorite drink served to him constantly by staff at Mar-a-Lago, a decaffeinated Trump is now on Sleep Watch by the nation’s media in court https://t.co/D2xLMOnr6T

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) April 16, 2024

Today, Caputo writes:

TRUMP HAS MADE NO SECRET of his annoyance at being stuck in court. Forced to sit quietly and deprived of his steady stream of caffeinated Diet Cokes, which at Mar-a-Lago are served to him with regularity by ever-attendant waitstaff, Trump has been caught micronapping at the defense table.

“I’m catching up on my fucking sleep ’cause I’m bored,” he told one source.

If I despised Trump as much as The Bulwark's writers and editors say they do, I wouldn't have included that "catching up on my fucking sleep" quote, which is Trumpworld spin designed to portray the boss exactly the way he wants to be portrayed: as an angry alpha male who's too important for this kind of treatment. But even without the quote, I'm afraid that all this coverage, far from humiliating Trump, actually exalts him.

To make an obvious point, when an ordinary person is on trial, even in a high-profile case, we don't dwell on how uncomfortable the chairs and the building temperature make the defendant feel. We don't even do much of this for famous defendants -- did anyone ever tell us what O.J. Simpson's favorite mid-morning pick-me-up was, and add how noteworthy it was that he was being deprived of it?

Many people go to court and are forced to comply by courtroom rules. (I could add that many more people go to work and are forced to comply with workplace rules.) When the press tells readers that enforcement of courtroom rules is extraordinary in Trump's case, the message is that Trump is extraordinary.

It's probably unreasonable to expect reporters to avoid this kind of coverage, and obviously their audiences want it. But maybe the press needs to remember that what would really make Trump seem no better than an ordinary citizen would be treating him like an ordinary citizen -- in others words, like a person who just has to suck it up and accept the way things are done in court.

THEY'RE NOT HELPING YOU, DONNIE, BECAUSE THEY THINK YOU'RE GOD

Poor Donald Trump -- he wants another January 6 outside the courtroom, but his fans aren't delivering, as The New York Times reports:

Donald J. Trump was evidently not happy with what he saw out the window of his chauffeured S.U.V. as he rode through Lower Manhattan on Monday morning for the beginning of opening arguments in his first criminal trial.

The scene that confronted him as he approached the dingy courthouse at 100 Centre Street was underwhelming. Across the street, at Collect Pond Park, the designated site for protesters during the trial, only a handful of Trump supporters had gathered, and the number would not grow much throughout the morning....

Mr. Trump had tried to gin up something noisier. Shortly after 7 a.m., he posted on his social media website that “America Loving Protesters should be allowed to protest at the front steps of Courthouses” and he followed this lament with a call for his supporters to “GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY!”

Trump has argued that there's a double standard in how pro-Trump protesters are being treated in Downtown Manhattan and how pro-Palestinian protesters are being treated uptown:



I live near Columbia. The area around the campus actually is closed up like a drum, with police all over the place -- and yet there are still demonstrators, on and off campus. The courthouse where Trump is being tried isn't on lockdown, as the Times story tells us:

The area was not, in fact, completely closed down. The courthouse has remained open to the public, including spectators who want to attend the trial, pool cameras in the hallway — and even the sidewalk in front of the courthouse has remained open to pedestrian traffic.

So why isn't Trump getting backup from his fan base?

It could be because "the fever is breaking," but I doubt that. Trump's poll numbers vs. Joe Biden have slipped in recent weeks, but the race is still effectively tied (and given the GOP's Electoral College advantage, that would still mean a Trump victory if the election were held today).

One possible reason is that the January 6 prosecutions have persuaded many in MAGA Nation that they'll be arrested and thrown into the "gulag" if they protest on Trump's behalf, even peacefully. When Trump knew his first indictment was imminent and called for protests, quite a few of his supporters said they didn't want to protest, out of fear that they'd fall into a "trap."

In addition, I think many people on the right, especially those who live outside the Northeast, are terrified of New York City, which they've been told is a crime-ridden dystopian hellhole. They wouldn't dare enter the city without their guns, and they know they'd be in legal jeopardy if they packed heat here the way they do when they go to the local 7-11 to pick up some eggs.

But I think there's one more reason for the lack of pro-Trump protesters: They don't think they need to help him because he's so powerful.

This is Trump as right-wingers see him:

While he's in the courtroom, this fake courtroom sketch is wish fulfillment for quite a few people on the right:

you may not like it, but this is what making america great again looks like pic.twitter.com/7y1fCNj4f7

— Freckled Liberty 🔥 (@FreckledLiberty) April 19, 2024

And even the idea that Trump might go to prison generates fantasies of his ultimate triumph:

Democrats think prison will stop trump but after he wins and pardons himself you'll have THIS to deal with pic.twitter.com/iEZaxVvddw

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) September 3, 2023

If this is how you see Trump, why would you think he'd ever need your help?

Even the fans who aren't deluded by these "studly Trump" memes are likely to believe that they'll simply vote for him in November and all their troubles will be over. This is a delusion that isn't limited to the right -- in retrospect, it appears that many Barack Obama voters disengaged from politics after he won the 2008 election, on the assumption that he had everything under control. What's odd is that this might be happening on the right while Trump is a private citizen.

You know who doesn't think a studly hero will save them? The pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses. Politicians in both parties disagree with them, so they're trying to make change happen all by themselves. The Trumpers think they can just kick back and let Don do it.

APPARENTLY IT WOULDN'T BE A PROBLEM IF THE ANTI-SEMITES AROUND COLUMBIA WERE REPUBLICANS THREATENING DEMOCRATS

The New York Times has assigned young reporters to cover the protests around Columbia University right now, so this story is much more nuanced than it would be if the usual middle-aged Times hacks were involved:

Days after Columbia University’s president testified before Congress, the atmosphere on campus remained fraught on Sunday, shaken by pro-Palestinian protests that have drawn the attention of the police and the concern of some Jewish students.

Over the weekend, the student-led demonstrations on campus also attracted separate, more agitated protests by demonstrators who seemed to be unaffiliated with the university just outside Columbia’s gated campus in Upper Manhattan....

Some of those protests took a dark turn on Saturday evening, leading to the harassment of some Jewish students who were targeted with antisemitic vitriol. The verbal attacks left some of the 5,000 Jewish students at Columbia fearful for their safety....

But Jewish students who are supporting the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus said they felt solidarity, not a sense of danger, even as they denounced the acts of antisemitism.

“There’s so many young Jewish people who are like a vital part” of the protests, said Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student at Columbia who is part of a student coalition calling on Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel.

And in a statement, that group said, “We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us” and added that the group’s members “firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry.”

This has become a major story, so I imagine some older Times reporters will bigfoot their way onto the Columbia beat, and the coverage will become more one-sided in its denunciations of Israel's critics.

There does seem to be some nasty and violent rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) on the periphery of campus, as this report from Columbia Spectator notes:

Pro-Israel counterprotesters stood on the Sundial on Saturday evening waving Israeli and U.S. flags and playing Israeli and Jewish music and the U.S. national anthem from a loudspeaker. In front of the Sundial, an individual held a sign reading “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets” with an arrow pointing at the protesters. Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas....

On Broadway near the 116th Street subway station, protesters chanted, “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” according to a video posted by Students Supporting Israel President Eden Yadegar....

Parker De Dekér, CC ’27, told Spectator that on Wednesday night, when he was walking by Lerner Hall wearing a yarmulke, someone sitting at the tables outside of Lerner shouted, “You keep on testifying, you fucking Jew.” When he exited campus, he removed his yarmulke....

De Dekér continued that as he was helping a friend move his luggage through Lerner Hall on Thursday evening while wearing a yarmulke, one individual said, “We are so happy that you Zionists are finally leaving campus,” and another said, “You wouldn’t have to leave if you weren’t a supporter of genocide.”

On Friday afternoon, De Dekér said that while leaving campus and getting into an Uber, an individual on Amsterdam Avenue shouted an antisemitic slur at him, telling him to “Keep on walking.” De Dekér has since decided to leave campus for the time being and is staying with a friend outside of New York state.

The directly menacing language addressed to people like De Dekér is a clear threat. But some of the fantasy scenarios of violent retribution sound like the sort of thing Republicans get away with all the time in this culture. As Amanda Marcotte notes, here's Marjorie Taylor Greene wishing America would use antiaircraft weapons on unarmed migrants crossing America's Southern border:

Israel has some of the best unmanned defense systems in the world.

I’ve previously voted to fund space lasers for Israel’s defense.

America needs to take our national security seriously and deserves the same type of defense for our border that Israel has and proudly uses. pic.twitter.com/oDeDqTXvQQ

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 18, 2024

And then there's Tom Cotton:

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., appeared to encourage people to murder anti-war protesters. If protesters stop traffic, he tweeted, "take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way." This echoes not just many years of far-right rhetoric applauding vehicular homicide, but the 2017 murder of anti-racism protester Heather Heyer at the hands of a white supremacist. Cotton tried to clean up his statement by later claiming he just meant dragging protesters out of the way, which is still assault.

And Kari Lake:

... failed gubernatorial candidate and current Republican candidate for the Arizona Senate seat Kari Lake recently told a crowd, "We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case." ...

This is hardly the first time Lake has made joking-but-not-really threats of violence. Last June, she told a crowd she had a "message tonight for Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, and Joe Biden" and went on to warn: "Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That's not a threat, that's a public service announcement."

The right has been like this for decades, with few consequences. Remember this from 1994?

Just days after [Senator Jesse] Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard."

Mr. Helms said soldiers disliked President Clinton because he had avoided service during the Vietnam War, supported homosexuals in the military and had reduced military spending.

And then there was Ann Coulter, who told an interviewer in 2002, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” And, of course, there was Ted Nugent:

In 2007, he said the following during a concert: "Obama, he's a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun. Hey Hillary [Clinton], you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch."

The people in and around Columbia who are genuinely anti-Semitic and menacing just need to pick their targets better. If they'd learn to direct their threats at Democrats, and at institutions perceived as part of the Great Liberal Conspiracy, they could say whatever they want.

WE'RE PREMATURELY DECLARING VICTORY OVER TRUMP AGAIN

For the thousandth time, we've begun to think we've really got Trump this time! David Frum writes:

For nine years, Trump has dominated the Republican Party.... Enough of the Republican base supported him. Everybody else either fell in line, retired from politics, or quit the party.

... Trump won almost every fight that mattered....

On aid to Ukraine, Trump got his way for 16 months. When Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, they approved four separate aid requests for Ukraine, totaling $74 billion. As soon as Trump’s party took control of the House, in January 2023, the aid stopped. Every Republican officeholder understood: Those who wished to show loyalty to Trump must side against Ukraine....

[But now] Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine....

He has deflated to the point where he could no longer thwart Ukraine aid in Congress. Ukraine won, Trump lost. That may be a repeating pattern in the year ahead.

Reading this, you might imagine that the entire House GOP delegation has been afraid to support Ukraine aid until this week, out of an unwillingness to risk Trump's wrath. But in July 2023, a majority of House Republicans voted to reject bills proposed by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene that would have blocked military aid to Ukraine. Two months later, a majority of House Republicans voted to retain Ukraine aid in a Pentagon appropriations bill. For quite a while, Republicans linked Ukraine aid to the passage of an immigration bill, and so the aid never passed, but it was perfectly acceptable to be a Republican in Congress and express support for Ukraine aid -- it's not like believing that Trump should have been convicted in one of his impeachment trials, which is a red line Republicans have crossed only at their peril. It's a big deal that Speaker Mike Johnson allowed a vote on the Ukraine aid bill, but support was there. Not every Republican is a Putin bootlicker yet.

Trump opponents increasingly seem to believe that President Biden has this election won -- at the betting site PredictIt, Biden leads Trump 54%-44%, after a rapid improvement in his fortunes over the past few months:

And this Maggie Haberman piece in The New York Times conveys the impression that Trump simply can't be Trump anymore now that his New York criminal trial has begun:

For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little....

The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Mr. Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness, one he rode from a reality-television studio set to the White House.

...the shared sense among many of his advisers is that the process may damage him as much as a guilty verdict. The process, they believe, is its own punishment.

Trump's superfans, of course, think he's Jesus, so a process they regard as persecution will only confirm them in that belief. Will swing voters peel away as Trump is accused of wrongdoing every day, and is trapped in a courtroom rather than out attacking enemies? Maybe, but I'm not sure that's how this works when you're dealing with a criminal who has a big persona. Think of Trump as an organized crime figure -- a Mafia don or a Latin American druglord. Do guys like that really seem diminshed by the process of being on trial? They look diminished when they're convicted and jailed, but until then, they look like people who are important enough to be tried in a courtroom full of reporters. Trump in an orange jumpsuit would seem diminished. Right now, he seems like a dangerous animal in a cage -- restrained, but still a threat.

Sure, this might really be the beginning of the end for Trump. On the other hand, we've been promised the beginning of the end so many times over the past nine years that we ought to be skeptical. I'll start to believe the Trump era is ending when Biden leads in most polls by at least 5 points, enough to overcome the GOP's built-in Electoral College advantage. We're not there yet. We're not really close.

WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? (GETTING REELECTED!)

Benjamin Netanyahu's war strategy is well on its way to achieving its primary goal: preserving the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu. The Jerusalem Post reports:

In two recent surveys, the Likud Party and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have received the highest levels of support since the Oct. 7 massacre. In the first [poll], conducted by Maariv, ... Likud now holds 21 seats, a peak since the [war] began on October 7....

The survey also highlights a tightening race for Prime Minister, with Benny Gantz receiving 42% of the support compared to Benjamin Netanyahu's 37%. The gap between the two has significantly narrowed, with Gantz's lead shrinking from 12% to just 5% over the past week.

According to the Maariv survey, the National Union Party leads with 31 seats....

In a separate but mandated survey by Direct Polls published on Channel 14 this week, a shift in public sentiment shows Gantz's National Union declining sharply, from over 40 seats to just 22. Meanwhile, Likud would garner 26 seats if elections were held today.... Additionally, the coalition parties would have 58 seats versus 52 for the opposition, including 10 seats shared between Ra'am and Hadash-Ta'al.

Let me be cynical: Electorally, it's good to be a leader in wartime, and, at least up to a point, it's better to be a leader in a prolonged war than a brief war that can be described as a success. George H.W. Bush drove the Iraqis from Kuwait, declared victory -- and lost his reelection bid. George W. Bush got mired in Afghanistan and Iraq, never captured or killed Osama bin Laden -- and became the only Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in the past 36 years.

Years-long quagmires are bad for politicians -- ask LBJ -- but Bibi is probably at or close to the sweet spot right now. He has two main goals -- saving his own ass and getting Donald Trump elected -- and there's a decent chance he'll achieve both. Everything else is secondary for him.

COULD TRUMP LOSE THE ELECTION BY TRYING TO IMPRESS HIS DEAD FATHER?

In The New York Times, Nate Cohn writes:

Was Trump Benefiting From Being Out of the News?

Donald J. Trump appears to be a stronger candidate than he was four years ago, polling suggests, and not just because a notable number of voters look back on his presidency as a time of relative peace and prosperity.

It’s also because his political liabilities, like his penchant to offend and his legal woes, don’t dominate the news the way they once did.

In the last New York Times/Siena College poll, only 38 percent of voters said they’d been offended by Mr. Trump “recently,” even as more than 70 percent said they had been offended by him at some point....

Similarly, many voters seem to be tuning out his myriad legal challenges. A majority of voters said they thought he had committed federal crimes, but only 27 percent of registered voters in the last Times/Siena poll said they were paying “a lot of attention” to the news about the legal cases against him....

It seems plausible that the lack of attention paid to Mr. Trump contributed to his early strength in the polling....

The Times/Siena poll offers some evidence to support this idea. Mr. Biden has a 95-3 lead among Biden 2020 voters who say they’ve been offended recently by Mr. Trump, while Mr. Trump wins 19 percent of those who say they’ve been offended by him before, but not recently.

Similarly, Mr. Biden leads, 93-5, among Biden ’20 voters paying attention to Mr. Trump’s legal problems, while he gets 78 percent among those who aren’t paying very close attention or less.

If Cohn is right, then Trump will inevitably be hurt by his first criminal trial, because it will lead to a great deal of media coverage portraying Trump in a bad light, regardless of the outcome. Right?

I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. Trump survived his civil trials with strong poll numbers, largely because those trials were rarely the top story in America, or even the top story locally here in New York. A past and possible future president of the United States was charged with rape, defamation, and financial chicanery, and the media mostly yawned.

The media might get bored with his criminal trial as well -- already I can see it slipping from its prominent spot on news organizations' front pages, in favor of Israel's attack on Iran and probably, soon, the new Taylor Swift album. But maybe Trump will keep our eyes focused on him, even if it's to his detriment. He's already showing signs of being an insolent defendant:

It's likely that insolence will hurt Trump's chances for an acquittal, but he can't not do this -- his father drilled into him the notion that the worst possible sin for a man is to be "weak," and he's still trying to please Dad, who's been dead for decades. There's a real possibility that Trump will be even more insolent and obnoxious than he was in his civil trials.

On some level, you can't blame him. This is what impresses his biggest fans. Apart from the fact that the system is clearly afraid to punish him, even when he's clearly violating direct orders from judges, there's the fact that Trump has probably rallied the entire GOP to himself by being a defiant asshole whining about persecution.

But if his antics are worse than before, he might alienate general-election voters who haven't thought about how much of an asshole he is in the past couple of years. Maybe, instead of being a quiet, polite defendant, he'll hurt his poll numbers with obnoxiousness, just because he's desperate to impress Dad.

On the other hand, the press might decide that Trump's behavior is just dog-bites-man and barely cover it. That's more or less what happened in the civil trials. Trump was quite obnoxious and did things that would have led to jail time for most other people, yet it was never as big a story as, say, university professors testifying in Congress about anti-Israel protests. But if we're lucky, his endless quest to be the toughest guy in the room will be his downfall.

WILL CHICAGO 2024 BE LIKE CHICAGO 1968?

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore notes that Democrats will hold their convention in Chicago this year, at a time when left-wingers are angry at the party about its involvement in a war. So will 2024 be like 1968? Kilgore says no -- but I think there's somewhat more risk than he's willing to acknowledge. Here are some of the reasons he's not worried:

Gaza isn’t Vietnam.

... There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year....

Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement.

Yes, but when I watch how people in America talk about crime, or economic conditions, I question whether it's appropriate to use objective measures to compare the past and the present, given the fact that so many Americans base their response on vibes. Crime is down, inflation is cooling, jobs are plentiful, yet Americans talk as if we have murder rates comparable to the crack years and an economic struggles comparable to 1970s double-digit inflation.

Gaza protests clearly aren't as widespread as Vietnam protests in the 1960s. But I bet the issue will draw huge crowds to Chicago. (One way I'm certain that 2024 will be like 1968 is that there's likely to be much more anger at the Democratic convention than at the Republican convention, even though the Republican nominee in both years was more hawkish than the Democrat.)

Brandon Johnson isn’t Richard Daley.

Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley ... was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.

Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson ... is a Black progressive and labor activist.... While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.

But in 2024, Johnson is more likely to be attacked for failing to be repressive than for being repressive. Footage of any violence or property damage will be endlessly looped on Fox News -- and probably on CNN and the legacy networks.

(On the other hand, the modern police tactic is to bottle up such demonstrations and keep them far from their targets. That's not great for free speech, but it might keep these demos from getting out of hand.)

The whole world (probably) won’t be watching.

The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks.... Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.

Yes, but what will "the optics of the various media outlets covering" the convention be like? Fox will be looking for chaos instigated by young pro-Palestinian protestors, many of them from elite colleges, whom it will characterize, accurately or not, as anti-Semititic -- but so will The New York Times, if its current news judgment is any indication:

I don't think there'll be as much chaos in the streets of Chicago this year as there were in 1968. I think modern crowd control tactics will limit the chaos. I think many people tune out politics altogether these days and won't notice any news from the convention. But while history probably won't repeat in Chicago, it might rhyme a little.

IF TRUMP HAD REALLY MADE IT IN MANHATTAN, HE'D BE JUST AS INSUFFERABLE

In a New York Times op-ed, Elizabeth Spiers gives us the conventional wisdom about Donald Trump's relationship with New York City, where -- fittingly, as Spiers sees it -- Trump's criminal trial is taking place:

It feels uniquely appropriate that Mr. Trump will have to endure the scrutiny on his old home turf.... He rose to fame here, but was never truly accepted by the old money elites he admired. The rich and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic. His inability to succeed in New York in quite the way he wanted to drove much of the damage he did to the country as a whole, and arguably his entire political career.

... Mr. Trump couldn’t make it here — at least not the way he craved — despite being born here and being one of the few people who could afford it.

So it’s easy to understand why he bashes his hometown as a crime-ridden hellscape, and why the Oval Office appealed. Washington offered him political power but also something he may have wanted even more: the respect New York denied him.

Spiers doesn't have much respect for Trump, and doesn't suggest that Trump deserved more respect than he got from New Yorkers. But the obvious impliction of this argument is that if New York had somehow been nicer to Trump, if the real swells had invited him to more parties and if Spy magazine hadn't called him a "short-fingered vulgarian," he might not have sought the presidency as a fascist-wannabe.

I don't buy it, because I've watched the career of Trump's doppelganger, Rupert Murdoch.

Murdoch was also the son of a wealthy, successful man. Keith Murdoch was a major figure in Australian media, just as Fred Trump was a major figure in outer-borough real estate. Donald Trump pursued deals in Manhattan; Rupert Murdoch attended university in England, where, as this sympathetic piece argues, he was mistreated by British snobs:

As a brash Australian arriving in the 1950s at Oxford – the university that was then still the British political elite’s finishing school and a custodian of the English class system – Murdoch was always going to be seen as an arriviste or parvenu.

It must have rankled that despite his intellect, confidence and wealth, there would so often have been a side sneer at this upstart colonial – the “cataclysmic chauffeur from the Outback”, as the Oxford student newspaper called the car-owning undergraduate.

So when he took control of the News of the World, The Sun and later The Times, he turned them into battering rams against the self-satisfied smugness of the English establishment elite.

The day he walked into The Sun’s offices, the paper ran a leader column stating the mission that has defined him for decades: “We are not going to bow to the establishment in any of its privileged enclaves. Ever.”

Murdoch won, in a way that Trump didn't. Murdoch became the dominant figure in the British media, and then became the most politically influential media mogul in America. He had the power to tip elections on three continents. He owned a major movie studio, and on television he gave us The Simpsons and The X-Files. He became staggeringly wealthy.

But he never stopped feeling resentful. Last year, when he resigned as chairman of News Corporation, he wrote this in a memo to employees:

Elites have open contempt for those who are not members of their rarefied class. Most of the media is in cahoots with those elites, peddling political narratives rather than pursuing the truth.

Trump could win the presidency again, terminate all his legal cases, remake America in his own image, and become a Putin-level kleptocrat and he'd still be angry and resentful.

Spiers thinks the New York trial will diminish Trump in the eyes of his admirers:

There is some relief for New Yorkers who are witnessing the prospect of his comeuppance, though. The rest of the country is seeing a side of Mr. Trump that New York City residents have always been familiar with: the guy who’s angry that he hasn’t been accepted in the elite circles he admires and is outraged that others have.

But that's what his admirers like about him. They find his resentment of "elitists" relatable. They feel mistreated by the people he says are mistreating him. This trial may damage him in the eyes of middle-of-the-road voters who've been supporting him in this election without actually admiring him, but it won't hurt him in the eyes of his superfans. A guilty verdict will be proof of what they already believe: that elitists hate them and hate him, and being hated this way is a mark of virtue.

JUST ANOTHER REMINDER THAT THE PARTY OF REAGAN AND THE PARTY OF TRUMP ARE THE SAME PARTY

Many commentators and politicians -- mostly but not exclusively on the right -- tell us with great sorrow that the Republican Party has suffered a takeover by forces hostile to its true purpose. What once was the noble "party of Reagan" is now, alas, the "party of Trump," an entity that would repulse the Gipper and his allies.

A story in The Guardian reminds us that that's a lot of malarkey:

Two powerful conservative non-profits have donated millions of dollars to a number of pro-Trump groups led by key far-right allies Stephen Miller, Charlie Kirk and others that have promoted election denialism, extremist anti-immigrant policies and legal challenges to bolster the Maga movement.

Based in Wisconsin, the Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation and the Bradley Impact Fund in 2022 separately doled out six- and seven-figure checks to groups such as Miller’s America First Legal and Kirk’s Turning Point USA, and other Trump-friendly bastions such as the Heritage Foundation and Michael Flynn’s America’s Future....

The biggest checks in 2022 were written to Trump-allied groups by the dark-money Bradley Impact Fund: America First Legal received about $27.1m, Turning Point USA roped in close to $8m, and the Conservative Partnership Institute pulled in $712,310. America’s Future also received $500,000.

Meanwhile, the Bradley Foundation ponied up $425,000 to the Heritage Foundation, which has worked with many other pro-Trump groups to assemble a 1,000-page plan for a new Trump presidency with an authoritarian agenda to expand executive-branch powers and curb key agencies such as the US justice department.

The Bradley groups seem to combine the worst of both the old and new GOP:

The Bradley foundation’s board includes the well-known rightwinger Art Pope, a North Carolina multi-millionaire who used to chair its board and is also a director of the Bradley Impact Fund. Pope has deep ties to other conservative bastions such as the Koch-backed Americans for Prosperity, where he has been a board member too.

The board of the Bradley Foundation also boasts the rightwing lawyer and Trump ally Cleta Mitchell, a senior legal fellow at the Conservative Partnership Institute.

Mitchell founded CPI’s self-styled “election integrity network” in 2021 after participating with Trump on his 2 January call to the Georgia secretary of state Brad Raffensperger, who Trump beseeched to “find” 11,780 votes to help overturn Joe Biden’s win in the state.

The Bradley Foundation was once known for its ties to foreign-policy neoconservatives such as Irving and Bill Kristol. It has honored Reaganites such as Ed Meese and Ed Feulner. And it was deeply involved in the mainstream right in the post-Reagan era, funding The American Spectator's attacks on the Clintons during Bill Clinton's presidency, bankrolling Charles Murray's work on The Bell Curve, and underwriting union-buster Scott Walker's rise to power in Wisconsin. As the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel noted in 2011,

The list of major recipients reads like an all-star roster of conservative think tanks: millions of dollars directed to well-known groups such as the Hudson Institute, the Heritage Foundation, the American Enterprise Institute, the Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, and the Federalist Society - all trying to put their stamp on three branches of government.

Millions more have gone to just about every major conservative publication, including such magazines as Reason, Crisis, First Things, National Affairs and FrontPage Magazine.

And now Bradley is giving to the likes of Mike Flynn, an Alex Jones fan and Christian nationalist whose ReAwaken America group preaches Holocaust denialism and QAnon theories, as well as Charlie Kirk, Cleta Mitchell, and other right-wingers whose fringe ideas, we're told, would never have been tolerated in Reagan's day.

But one of the biggest money sources is the same. It's all the same party.

I WISH WE LIVED IN A SOCIETY WHERE STORMY DANIELS COULD TRULY HUMILIATE DONALD TRUMP

The only Donald Trump criminal trial that's likely to take place this year starts today in New York. Trump is charged with falsifying business records in order to cover up an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. Amanda Marcotte thinks that testimony from Daniels will be "devastating" for Trump, largely because, as Daniels told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes in 2018, their sexual encounter was not fully consensual and was miserable for her:

Stormy Daniels: And I was like, "Ugh, here we go." (LAUGH) And I just felt like maybe — (LAUGH) it was sort of — I had it coming for making a bad decision for going to someone's room alone and I just heard the voice in my head, "well, you put yourself in a bad situation and bad things happen, so you deserve this."

Anderson Cooper: And you had sex with him.

Stormy Daniels: Yes.

Anderson Cooper: You were 27, he was 60. Were you physically attracted to him?

Stormy Daniels: No.

Anderson Cooper: Not at all?

Stormy Daniels: No.

Anderson Cooper: Did you want to have sex with him?

Stormy Daniels: No. But I didn't — I didn't say no. I'm not a victim.

Marcotte believes that women do more damage to Trump's reputation than men do:

While plenty of men ... have spoken out about their negative experiences with Trump, women have generally been the most compelling witnesses against him. Former journalist E. Jean Carroll testified in two civil trials about how Trump sexually assaulted her and then defamed her. Juries found her persuasive enough to award her nearly $90 million. Former White House aide Cassidy Hutchinson wasn't sexually abused by Trump ... but became the most striking witness in the Jan. 6 hearings during the previous Congress. Her accounts of Trump as a petulant child who throws ketchup and flails impotently at Secret Service agents rang true in a way that was difficult for even the most delusional MAGA heads to deny.

Really? Carroll won both her cases -- I think Trump will lose the Daniels case as well -- but Trump doesn't have a lot of admirers in Manhattan. Hutchinson's allegations were also persuasive to Trump haters. But in the country at large, the proceedings in which these two women participated coincided with strong poll numbers for Trump, and his easy triumph in the Republican primaries followed. Trump still appears to have a slight lead in general election polls. If he's slipping at all now, it's probably because he's more visible than he's been for the past few years. He's the most damaging witness against himself, not his female (or male) critics.

Marcotte thinks the specifics of Daniels's story will make the Trump myth harder to believe:

Trump's conduct with women makes clear that he's both a bully and a coward, who victimizes vulnerable people in situations where they have no real way to fight back. It also undermines his lifelong effort to portray himself as an irresistible Lothario and sexual dynamo. The ladies don't swoon over Donald Trump. They spend every minute wondering when it will be safe to wriggle free from his stubby fingers.

To people who are paying attention and are willing to accept what the evidence says, all this is obvious, and has been obvious for years. To most other people, the legend of Trump's studliness prevails, just as the legend of his business prowess prevails in the minds of many Americans despite overwhelming evidence of his ineptitude as a CEO. Too many people want to believe that charismatic figures are as special as they tell us they are -- think of the Elon Musk cult -- so they deny what's right in front of them. Also, Trump must be special because who among us has ever been in a position to browbeat a porn star into sex in the first place, all while married to a fashion model wife?

Trump will probably lose the case, and maybe the trial and verdict will damage his polling. But many voters will continue to believe that he's a ladies' man who "doesn't need to" be a predator. Or they'll believe that everyone does it, or at least every male in power -- look at how Biden massages people's shoulders! Look at Jeffrey Epstein's guests! Trump might make this trial into a politically damaging event for himself if he continues on his usual course of attacking the process and the participants. But in a society that's still sexist, I don't think an adult film actress's words will bring down a potential president.

NOW, AS ALWAYS, REPUBLICANS HAVE ONLY ONE ENEMY: DEMOCRATS

The Biden's administration has responded to the Iranian drone attack on Israel by offering effective defensive support, accompanied by a message to Benjamin Netanyahu that he won't get U.S. help if he goes on offense and launches a counterattack on Iran.

Fox News, if it were a news organization, would update this headline:

The Iranian attack is no longer "impending." It happened, and Israel rebuffed it with U.S. assistance, despite the doubts expressed here. But Fox is leaving the headline as is, because Murdoch pere et fils believe that any time you can plausibly attack Democrats, you should, and you shouldn't update an attack-on-Democrats story or headline just because it's no longer consistent with the facts. Leave it up for as long as possible, in order to elicit the maximum hatred of Democrats. If anyone questions why the editors you've hired didn't order an update, the way they would in an actual news organization, you can say they just didn't get around to it. (No one will question this decision except me.)

The Fox story is mostly a series of attacks on President Biden, whom Republicans hate more than they hate the Iranians or any other foreign adversary.

Lawmakers reacted after Iran launched drones from its own territory toward Israel late Saturday, calling for the White House to "stand firm" and "stop coddling Iran." ...

"I will continue to engage with the White House to insist upon a proper response," [Speaker of the House Mike Johnson] said. "The Biden Administration’s undermining of Israel and appeasement of Iran have contributed to these terrible developments." ...

Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas, member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, condemned the Iran attack on Israel, while placing the blame on the Biden administration.

"Iran has encircled Israel and has been attacking our Israeli allies from almost every front for months. They have launched attacks from Syria, Iraq, Yemen, the West Bank, Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, and of course the Hamas-controlled Gaza Strip. Now they have escalated by launching attacks directly from Iranian territory," Cruz said in a statement. "These attacks are enabled and financed by deliberate policy choices made by Joe Biden and Biden officials, who have allowed roughly $100 billion to flow to Iran since 2021. Americans and Israelis have been made catastrophically more vulnerable by these policies."

Iran's drone strikes show us President Biden's approach with Iran and the Middle East is backwards. Now as we risk entering WWIII, the U.S. must stand by Israel's commitment to democracy. The president must stand firm, and stop coddling Iran immediately.

— Rep. Nancy Mace (@RepNancyMace) April 13, 2024

Fight the real enemy!

It's an inexact analogy, but can you imagine if Democrats had responded to 9/11 this way, by immediately attacking President Bush? (Though I've always assumed that this is how Republicans would have responded if 9/11 had happened on Al Gore's watch. I assume Gore would have been impeached over 9/11. At the very least, he'd have been attacked starting within days of 9/11 if he expressed any hesitation about attacking Iraq rather than just Al Qaeda.)

Who else is blaming America first right now? This guy:

Giuliani: Reagan Would Have Hit Iran Before the First Missile Got to Israel

Saturday on Newsmax2, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani argued the correct response to Iran’s attack on Israel would have been to hit Iran at the earliest stages of the strike as possible.

Giuliani argued that was what former President Ronald Reagan would have done if he were facing similar circumstances.

“I really do think we’re missing an opportunity, a historic opportunity here — if we had a president like my old boss in the White House,” he said. “Every time [when] I was mayor and I had to make a difficult decision, I would say, ‘What would Ronald Reagan do?’ I know what Ronald Reagan would do right now. He would have hit Iran before their first missile got to Israel. And he would have taken out every nuclear facility he could. He would have been trying to look for an opportunity to do that for years.”

Yeah, that approach couldn't possibly have adverse consequences, could it, you old drunk? And hey, remember when a Marine barracks was bombed in Beirut and Reagan withdrew all U.S. troops from Lebanon?

But describing everything bad that happens in the world as Biden's fault...

Russia attacked Ukraine under Biden.

Hamas attacked Israel under Biden.

Israel attacked Palestine under Biden.

Iran is attacking Israel under Biden.

But there are no “mean tweets.” pic.twitter.com/df0wJkBsYL

— I Meme Therefore I Am 🇺🇸 (@ImMeme0) April 13, 2024

... might be an effective strategy for Republicans:

Having a 24/7 "Biden bad!" media firehose is paying benefits.

BIDEN WON'T REALLY BE TIED WITH TRUMP UNTIL HE'S LEADING BY 5, BECAUSE THE ELECTORAL COLLEGE SUCKS

The 2024 presidential election now looks like a tie. According to the Real Clear Polling average, Donald Trump's lead had been cut to 0.2% in a two-candidate race. And today Joe Biden gets good news from the polling unit of The New York Times:

President Biden has nearly erased Donald J. Trump’s early polling advantage, amid signs that the Democratic base has begun to coalesce behind the president despite lingering doubts about the direction of the country, the economy and his age, according to a new survey by The New York Times and Siena College.

Mr. Biden and Mr. Trump are now virtually tied, with Mr. Trump holding a 46 percent to 45 percent edge. That is an improvement for Mr. Biden from late February, when Mr. Trump had a sturdier 48 percent to 43 percent lead just before he became the presumptive Republican nominee.

Oliver Willis has a point:

Maybe Trump will continue to sink his own candidacy. Maybe the Biden campaign's attacks on Trump, particularly on reproductive rights, are working and will continue to work.

But even though the race is effectively tied, it isn't really tied. Trump is still winning. I'll regard the race as tied only when Biden has a persistent 5-point lead. The reason is simple: the Electoral College.

We know that Biden won the popular vote in the 2020 election by 7 million votes -- 7,059,526, to be precise. (All 2020 election data comes from Wikipedia's 2020 election page.) But that entire victory margin was in just two states: Biden won California by a margin of 5,104,121 votes and New York by a margin of 1,992,889 votes. That's a total of 7,097,010 votes.

To put it another way, Biden won California by 29.16% and New York by 23.13%. But those huge margins were wasted. Biden would have won California's 55 electoral votes and New York's 29 electoral votes even if he'd won the states by much smaller margins.

In fact, Biden won five states by margins of more than a million votes: California, New York, Illinois (20 electoral votes, 16.99% victory margin), Massachusetts (11 electoral votes, 33.46% victory margin), and Maryland (10 electoral votes, 33.21% victory margin). By contrast, Donald Trump didn't win any states by more than a million votes. The most populous, electoral-vote-rich states he won were Texas (38 electoral votes, 5.58% victory margin), Florida (29 electoral votes, 3.36% victory margin), and Ohio (18 electral votes, 8.03% victory margin).

What this means, for the purposes of the Electoral College, is that Trump's votes were distributed much more efficiently than Biden's. Trump could add these three large states to the many smaller states in the middle of the country, the South, and the Mountain West and nearly win the Electoral College despite losing the popular vote by four and a half points. (Trump would have needed a little over 40,000 votes in Georgia, Arizona, and Wisconsin to score a 269-269 tie in the Electoral College, which would have been resolved in Trump's favor in the House of Representatives, because each state's delegation would have cast one vote, and 26 state delegations were majority Republican.)

If Biden is tied in the polls, that means he's approximately 4 or 5 points weaker nationwide than he was in 2020, at least for now. It suggests that he'll struggle to win the swing states that gave him his Electoral College victory in 2020. Swing-state polling suggests he's struggling in states such as Arizona and Georgia. If Biden could beat Trump in one of Trump's Big Three states, it could decide the election, but polling in Texas, Florida, and Ohio suggests that they are, if anything, somewhat more Republican now than they were four years ago -- not as Republican as California, New York, Illinois, Massachusetts, and Maryland are Democratic, but Republican enough to suggest that they're safe Trump states.

I don't think Donald Trump's Electoral College win in 2016 was a black swan event. I think 2020 suggests that Republicans can routinely win the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, if they lose it by 4 points or less. In 2020, Biden needed to be four and a half points stronger than Trump to eke out an Electoral College win in the swing states. I think the same will be true this year and in years to come, unless Democrats can finally find a way to flip Texas, or can regain the ability to win Florida or Ohio.

So, yes, Biden needs a significant popular-vote lead in order to be tied in the polls. Maybe he'll get there. But he's not there yet.

IMPERFECT MESSENGERS? WELL, YES AND NO.

On social media, many people are criticizing this New York Times story:

I don't think the critics are reading past the headline, although even from the headline I could see where the story was going. It's not judging the rightness or wrongness of Donald Trump's and Joe Biden's approaches to the issue of abortion and finding a false equivalence. It's merely saying that people with strong Democratic leanings tend to be passionately pro-choice, while Biden, over the course of his career, hasn't been, and that people with strong Republican leanings tend to be passionately anti-abortion, while Trump used to support abortion rights and is now hedging on anti-abortion rhetoric, even though he's the guy who killed Roe.

In the summer of 2019, as a crowded Democratic primary was picking up speed, Joe Biden was on the defensive, pummeled by abortion-rights groups and his opponents for his support of the Hyde Amendment, a measure that prohibits the use of federal funds for most abortions.

He reversed his position, but the episode underlined his wobbly standing in the eyes of abortion-rights activists as he faced off in 2020 against Donald Trump, who became a hero of the anti-abortion movement by using his presidency to appoint Supreme Court justices who appeared likely to overturn Roe v. Wade.

Now, in 2024, the tables have turned.

This week, it was Trump angering abortion opponents as he sought to wash his hands of the matter and leave it to the states....

Trump’s allies on the religious right ... were deeply disappointed with what they see as a flip-flop. Their alliance with Trump had always been uneasy — Trump called himself “pro-choice” in the late 1990s, but by 2011 had reversed his position entirely, calling himself “pro-life.” He won over evangelical support during his 2016 presidential race by promising to appoint anti-abortion judges.

The story isn't really about the issue of reproductive rights. It's about the two candidates and where they've previously stood on the issue, which is not where party stalwarts wish they'd stood. The story is fine for what it is.

But if there's a problem with the story, it's that it overestimates Republican dissatisfaction with Trump's abortion posturing. I don't think Amanda Marcotte and David French agree on much, but they agree on this: Republicans are fine with what Trump is saying.

Marcotte writes:

But most telling is the muted response on the Christian right. The anti-abortion group SBA List said they were "disappointed," but promised to "work tirelessly" to elect Trump in 2024 and that "he will get there" on a national ban. Alliance Defending Freedom, which argued the Dobbs case before the Supreme Court that ended Roe, completely ignored Trump's statement. Americans United For Life, Family Research Council, the Heritage Foundation, Turning Point USA: All loudmouthed fundamentalist groups, all angrily anti-abortion, and all responded with either silence, or in some cases, eager support to Trump's video. Penny Nance of Concerned Women for America, a longstanding anti-feminist group, seemed confident Trump will stick by the forced childbirth cause.

French writes:

And how did the pro-life establishment respond? With mild criticism, but also with immediate support. As Politico reported this week, “Susan B. Anthony Pro-Life America, Students for Life, the Faith and Freedom Coalition, the Family Research Council, National Right to Life and CatholicVote reiterated their commitment Monday morning to electing Trump.”

Charlie Kirk, the founder of Turning Point USA, one of the largest right-wing student and faith outreach organizations in the country, immediately posted his support, calling the statement “masterful” and said that the pro-life leaders he’d talked to were “very happy.”

To French, this is a sign that the movement is waffling on absolute opposition to abortion; to Marcotte, it's a sign that Trump is a liar who intends to ban abortion the first chance he gets. Either way, the movement seems content with Trump as a messenger.

My belief is that Trump, as a former young and middle-aged fuckboy, is still instinctively pro-choice. But he's also viscerally Republican now, as well as entirely self-serving, so he'll say whatever he thinks will get turn out enough Republican and Republican-leaning voters to get him elected. On abortion, he thinks he's a better political strategist than the Republicans who ran as no-exceptions abortion opponents in 2022, and we know he always likes feeling smarter than people who have more experience or knowledge than he does.

I don't think he'll prioritize banning abortion if he's elected -- but I also don't think he'll try to stop anyone who has a plan to do it. I think he'd sign a federal abortion ban into law. More likely, he'll sign any executive orders drafted for him that curtail or ban abortion, and he'll appoint whomever he's told to appoint to the federal bench -- and all of the recommended appointees will be anti-abortion zealots.

So he's a perfectly acceptable messenger for the GOP on abortion. As for Biden, he's doing fine for our side, despite any concerns I expressed on Tuesday. Maybe he's putting aside his concerns about abortion because he knows it's what he needs to do to beat Trump, but it's fine. He's stepping up.

INFREQUENT VOTERS PREFER TRUMP -- COULD WE DISSUADE THEM?

Democrats have been doing well in off-year elections, but Dan Hopkins, a political science professor at Penn, says that might not carry over to the presidential election:

Between Feb. 20 and March 18, 2024, Gall Sigler and I oversaw a survey, fielded by NORC, of 2,462 English- and Spanish-speaking adults living in the U.S.

... when we broke out respondents by their voting history, we found dramatic differences in whom they support for president in 2024. President Joe Biden performed much better among frequent voters, while Trump had a large lead among people who haven't voted recently. Specifically, among respondents who voted in the 2018, 2020 and 2022 general elections, Biden outpaced Trump 50 percent to 39 percent. But among respondents who were old enough to vote but voted in none of those three elections, Trump crushed Biden 44 percent to 26 percent.

... these results are a cautionary tale for those who would extrapolate Democrats' strong performance in 2022 or recent special elections ahead to this November. The 2024 election will almost certainly have turnout far higher than those races.

This is why I'm still pessimistic about November. Sure, President Biden is slowly gaining on Donald Trump, and now trails Trump by only 0.2% in the Real Clear Polling average. But turnout is always higher in presidential elections than in midterms or special elections, so it really might be Republicans who are being underestimated in this race. And I suspect that Hopkins and Sigler would also have found a Trump skew among voters who stayed home in 2018 and 2022 but did vote in 2020 -- based on the hero worship we see, Trump is undoubtedly the only politician some Americans care enough to vote for. This wasn't enough to get him elected last time, but Biden's victory in the Electoral College came down to a few very close states.

Democrats may need to give very infrequent voters a reason to stay home if they won't vote for Biden. If I were running the Biden campaign, I'd be ordering up ads that are montages of Trump presidential utterances and headlines, edited in a way that's as visually and sonically abrasive as possible. The goal would be to remind voters who have begun to believe that the Trump years were actually pretty good that the Trump years were, in fact, an exhausting shitshow.

I'm imagining ads that work on a visceral level, not on a policy level -- not Trump appointed the justices who overturned the Roe decision or Trump said nice things about Nazis but, rather, Trump was an obnoxious, headache-inducing troll every day for four years. Ads like this could include praise for Nazis, for instance, but they should emphasize Trump's blowhard nature, and the climate of national outrage it inspired. They should be seek to be a visual and auditory representation of how it felt every day to have Trump as president.

I think ads like these could work on even habitual voters, if they're among Trump's "soft" supporters -- the non-cultists who nevertheless prefer him to Biden. For many Americans, a nostalgic haze now surrounds the Trump presidency, or at least the first three years of it. Prices were lower! There were no wars in Ukraine and Gaza! And so on. It's possible that Trump will dispel that haze every time he opens his mouth. But I think Democrats should give him a push. He's wrong on policy, but he's also obnoxious. We might need to remind voters just how it felt to have him in office.