RIGHT-WINGERS THINK ABOUT SPERM A LOT

I found this at Reddit yesterday, under the headline "Pro-Trump Supporters on Twitter Make AI Images of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez Being Pro-Trump and Being Trump’s Wife":

The top image is unsurprising -- Fox News taught right-wingers to hate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, but straight right-wing guys find her desirable, and for them, "desirable" means both pornified and Trumpified. But it's the second image (which has been kicking around since last fall) that's truly creepy. This is pregnancy as conquest, ideologically and racially. If it makes you think of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, or Strom Thurmond and Carrie Butler, congratulations, you've solved the puzzle. Ick.

I'm trying to figure out whether there's a connection between the mindset that produced these images and this:

In one of his most bizarre interviews in recent memory, Donald Trump insisted abortion is “not that big of an issue” [and] claimed Republicans are the “party of fertilization”...

During an interview last week with a local Michigan TV station FOX-2 Detroit, Trump ... called the GOP the “party of fertilization,” apparently trying to make the case that Republicans have fought to ensure women’s access to in vitro fertilization, or IVF. But not only is that false, he lost that point completely in an indecipherable word salad.

On IVF, Trump said:

We're, like, the party of fertilization, because we are for the women. We want to help the women. Because they were going to end fertilization, which is where, what, the IVF, where women go to the clinics and they get help in having a baby, and that’s a good thing, not a bad thing. And we’re for it 100%. They tried to say that -- they weren’t for it. They actually weren’t for it and aren’t for it as much as us, but women see that,” he said.

Trump says this as part of his usual talking point on abortion -- namely that it's now being decided by the states, and that's wonderful and democratic and everybody should be happy (and, by implication, nobody who's pro-choice and happens to live in a state where abortion is banned should blame him). If I understand his monologue, Trump is describing the restoration of legalized IVF in Alabama as proof that the Republican Party is totally on board with IVF (even though just about every opponent of IVF is a Republican), and additionally saying that because Democrats overwhelmingly support abortion rights, they're less in favor of fertilization than Republicans -- because you can't support the right to an abortion for someone who doesn't want a child and also support the right to IVF for someone who does, right?

I think Trump is dumb enough to have put this together all by himself. But I wonder if his use of the word "fertility" was in any way influenced by sperm- and pregnancy-obsessed aides, especially younger male aides who might have chuckled over those AOC images.

A related story I read yesterday was this one:

The Daily Wire announced the launch of a new “men’s lifestyle” company named Responsible Man on May 1, promoting its only current product — a men’s dietary supplement that it says is “designed to help … sharpen brain cognition” and that it suggests will help address what the outlet calls the “increasing health risk” of declining “sperm concentration.”

The Daily Wire's announcement is a trip:

Just like the constant consumption of MSNBC and CNN lacks the truth and reality your mind requires, your modern diet is often deficient in key vitamins and minerals, leaving you weakened and diminished — unable to reach your full potential. Sadly, in recent years, men have faced an increasing health risk as studies have shown that among men worldwide, sperm concentration has fallen drastically over the past 50 years, and the drop is accelerating....

Wokeness is a devastating disease that can affect both the mind and the body. And the woke Left loves to celebrate when it sees men fail. With so much wokeness causing chaos and uncertainty, it’s crucial that you take charge of your mind and body.

And you can start with the Emerson Multivitamin from Responsible Man.

Meanwhile, Charlie Kirk is still arguing that "more young women need to get married at a younger age and start having kids," because they become "depressed, suicidal, anxious, [and] lonely" if they remain single and childless after thirty, after which "they're not going to be able to have kids and that they're not as desirable in the dating market."

Why do YOU think women are less conservative?

Don't miss YWLS 2024 this June 7th-9th in San Antonio, TX for the biggest gathering of conservative women! Register now: https://t.co/vHgFgaF0cm 💗 pic.twitter.com/KGnMDD96SG

— Turning Point USA (@TPUSA) April 22, 2024

I suppose we should be grateful that Republican propagandists aren't advocating harems of babymamas for white men, like Andrew Tate, who says whitre guys should adopt this approach if they're worried about the so-called Great Replacement:

I sometimes think about trying to write a dystopian near-future novel in which the president of the United States is an Andrew Tate figure -- a charismatic misogynist psychopath whose politics are today's Republicanism, but with even more upfront toxic masculinity. I don't think that could really happen -- you'll say we're already there with Donald Trump, but he pretends to be a happily married man. In any case, a diluted form of Tateism is showing up in GOP messaging. And I expect more in the years to come.

WHEN THE NEW YORK TIMES SAYS BIDEN IS OLD, IT DOESN'T REMIND YOU THAT HE'S STILL SHARP

I'm seeing a lot of social-media criticism of Ben Smith's Semafor interview with Joe Kahn, the executive editor of The New York Times. I don't think Kahn is entirely off base when he says this:

... there are people out there in the world who may decide, based on their democratic rights, to elect Donald Trump as president. It is not the job of the news media to prevent that from happening. It’s the job of Biden and the people around Biden to prevent that from happening.

The Times does report on Trump's dangerous second-term agenda fairly often, in pieces like this one:

But it does seem sometimes as if this reporting is walled off from campaign-trail reporting on Trump, and from the kind of "lifestyle" reporting on Trump that regularly appears -- here's Trump using his iPad to DJ at Mar-a-Lago! and that sort of thing. But maybe it's not the job of the Times to connect these dots. Maybe it's up to readers to do that, and up to the Biden camapign and the Democratic Party.

I'd say that the coverage of President Biden in the Times is more dangerous than the coverage of Donald Trump. What do you know about the paper's perspective on Biden? That he's portrayed as really old. Here's a Times story: "Eight Words and a Verbal Slip Put Biden’s Age Back at the Center of 2024." Here's another: "Why the Age Issue Is Hurting Biden So Much More Than Trump." This one includes the following paragraph:

Mr. Biden’s voice has grown softer and raspier, his hair thinner and whiter. He is tall and trim but moves more tentatively than he did as a candidate in 2019 and 2020, often holding his upper body stiff, adding to an impression of frailty. And he has had spills in the public eye: falling off a bicycle, tripping over a sandbag.

Here's another story: "Polling Has Indicated a Majority of Voters Are Concerned About Biden’s Age — Including Democrats."

Now, here's part of an exchange from the Semafor interview:

Ben: Do you think that an alien reading The New York Times would come away thinking Joe Biden is a good president?

Joe: I think you would see a much more favorable view of Biden’s conduct over foreign policy at a difficult time than the polling shows the general public believes. The reporting in detail on his real commitment to national security; his deep involvement on the Ukraine war with Russia; the building or rebuilding of NATO; and then the very, very difficult task of managing Israel and the regional stability connected with the Gaza war … shows a degree of engagement and mastery over some of the details of foreign policy. I believe even an alien would see Biden as much more hands-on in this area....

I also think we’ve done much more — whether it’s the Inflation Reduction Act, whether it’s the infrastructure bill — on the details of the legislation that passed, and the efforts of this administration to actually implement that and get the money out there. So if you were reading The New York Times you would know about that legislation. In the general public, he actually doesn’t get enough credit for the legislation. So I think you’d get a pretty well-rounded, fair portrait of Biden. Of course, you’d also see some coverage about his frailty and his age. But it depends.

So here's a problem with the coverage of Biden in the Times: Yes, the paper depicts his "deep involvement" in issues, his "engagement and mastery," his efforts to get domestic legislation passed and make programs work -- but we're never told about any of this in stories about his age. To hear Kahn tell it, Biden has unquestionably demonstrated ability to do the work he's expected to do as president. So if this is a plain fact, why isn't it presented that way in the many news stories about Biden's age? Why aren't we told in those stories that Biden might walk slowly or stumble over a word or a name, but he's on top of this very difficult job and doing it effectively?

Maybe the Biden campaign can't wait around for good media coverage -- I've argued that Biden's team should shoot documentary footage of Biden engaging with his staff energetically and intelligently in the White House, and release it to demonstrate that Biden's still sharp. But if Biden still has mental clarity, a command of the facts, and an ability to make judgments, the Times needs to report this when it reports on his age. It's not editorializing to do that. It's reporting plain facts in order to give the public the context it needs to make a judgment on whether Biden should continue to govern.

THE "PROFESSIONAL OUTSIDE AGITATORS" DELUSION IS A LOT LIKE TRUMP'S BIG LIE

Eric Adams, the nominally Democratic mayor of New York, believes that "outside agitators" bear a great deal of responsibility for the pro-Gaza protests on colleges campuses in the city. On Fox News (naturally), a deputy commissioner of the city's police department delivered the city's official line on this issue:

NYPD Deputy Commissioner of Public Information Tarik Sheppard to Neil: "We're very confident that we know that these, outside agitators and influences were present and, will continue to be present at these protests." pic.twitter.com/PKwKAdFyu8

— Neil Cavuto (@TeamCavuto) May 2, 2024

CAVUTO: ... You have no doubt that some of what you picked up and saw shows that there are outside agitators involved. How would you know?

DEPUTY COMMISSIONER SHEPPARD: Absolutely. So, some are self-identified on social media. We recognize them from the past and some of the protests they've attended before. But also, when we look at the arrests and we run histories of some of the people we arrested, we see some of them who have participated in some protests, in some of the actions that they've participated in before. And so we're very confident that we know that these outside agitators and influencers were present and will continue to be present at these protests.

So Sheppard can identify some of these "outside agitators and influencers" because they're among the arrestees, right? Gosh darn it, he can't.

SHEPPARD: But make no mistake: They may not be swept up in an arrest. These are professionals. They get a heads-up when we're starting to tac up and get ready to go into these schools, and they may just fly in for a day or two and leave. But their job is --

CAVUTO: So they could be coming from way outside --

"They could be coming from way outside" is a dog whistle to the Fox audience, one that's instantly understood to mean They could be trained terrorists who crossed over Biden's open border so they can destroy America.

SHEPPARD: Many times --

CAVUTO: And they go from protest to protest, or spark one --

SHEPPARD: Absolutely. You'll see them travel around the country. And they have funding. They are funded by private individuals around the world sometimes who --

So that's the Conspiracy So Vast part of this argument. Here's the brainwashing part:

CAVUTO: But how do they get the students involved, then? Do they gun them on, or -- What's their role?

SHEPPARD: Yeah, it's propaganda, it's social media, it's -- the student are already passionate and upset about an issue and now you have a person whispering in your ear that "Hey," you know, "we should take over the building," or something like that. It's -- when young minds are in that state, it's pretty easy to then be influenced by somebody who is a professional at manipulation.

This is so ridiculous that even The New York Times isn't buying it:

One of the people arrested at Columbia University this week was a middle-aged saxophonist who headed up to the campus from his Hell’s Kitchen apartment after learning about the protests on social media.

Another was tending his sidewalk pepper patch a few blocks from the student demonstrations when he learned the police were moving in and, grabbing a metal dog bowl and a spoon to bang against it, rushed to the students’ aid.

A third had been active in other left-leaning protests across the city but also happened to work as a nanny nearby. She went to the university gates on Tuesday and linked arms with other protesters in an unsuccessful attempt to thwart the advancing officers, she said.

... Mayor Eric Adams and other city leaders have accused so-called outside agitators — professional organizers with no ties to the university — of hijacking a peaceful student protest and spurring its participants to adopt ever more aggressive tactics.

... A New York Times review of police records and interviews with dozens of people involved in the protest at Columbia found that a small handful of the nearly three dozen arrestees who lacked ties to the university had also participated in other protests around the country....

But the examination also revealed that far more of the unaffiliated protesters had no such histories. Rather, they said, they arrived at Columbia in response to word of mouth or social media posts to join the demonstration out of some combination of solidarity and curiosity.

There was little evidence to suggest they had helped organize or escalate the protests, and many were arrested without having ever set foot on campus. Typical among them was Matthew Cavalletto, a 52-year-old computer programmer who has lived within a half-mile of Columbia for most of his life. Mr. Cavalletto, the gardener with the dog bowl, was arrested on the street outside Columbia after he stood in the middle of the intersection and refused to budge. He dismissed the notion that any outsiders were pulling the strings.

“I sort of had to laugh because I guess you could think of me as an outside agitator,” Mr. Cavalletto said. “Not that far outside, like six blocks away, but, you know, almost outside.”

Here's a photo of Cavaletto:

He doesn't exactly look like a guy who's living large on globally sourced payments from Big Unrest.

What Sheppard and Cavuto say reminds of the way Donald Trump and others talk about the 2020 election. There couldn't possibly have been 81 million legitimate votes for Joe Biden! It's unimaginable that anyone would prefer Biden to Trump! Professional vote fakers and vote tally manipulators must be responsible!

Similarly, no one would actually want to do what the students are doing now. Professionals must have brainwashed them!

Trump generally argues that some (most?) of Biden's votes in 2020 were fake, but he argued for brainwashing in his speech to donors at Mar-a-Lago yesterday:

“When you are Democrat, you start off essentially at 40 percent because you have civil service, you have the unions and you have welfare,” Mr. Trump said on Saturday. “And don’t underestimate welfare. They get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that — they cheat.”

It's just unimaginable to these people that anyone would freely make a decision to act in a way they wouldn't act. Only bribery explains a vote for a Democrat.

You don't have to be an ignoramus like Trump, Adams, or Sheppard to think this way. Here's the Very Smart public intellectual George Packer explaining in The Atlantic why the students are revolting -- it's because the unrest of 1968 turned colleges into brainwashing factories:

A long, intricate, but essentially unbroken line connects that rejection of the liberal university in 1968 to the orthodoxy on elite campuses today. The students of the ’68 revolt became professors—the German activist Rudi Dutschke called this strategy the “long march through the institutions”—bringing their revisionist thinking back to the universities they’d tried to upend. One leader of the Columbia takeover returned to chair the School of the Arts film program. “The ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote. Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.

The students can't help themselves! These malign instincts have been inculcated in them!

(I was Class of 1980. I'm not sure why this never happened to us.)

There's hardly an inch of daylight between the very smart George Packer and our not-very-bright mayor:

On a local Fox News channel, Adams was asked to provide firm details but instead gave an analogy: “If you have one bad professor educating 30, 40, 50 college students with inappropriate actions, you don’t need 50 bad professors speaking to 50 students.”

He added that “if it’s one, if it’s two, it’s 20, that is what we need to be focusing on”.

It's the evil professors! It's the international cabal of outside agitators! It can't possibly be that the kids have actually thought about the issues involved and arrived at their own conclusions.

JOHN "TULSI" FETTERMAN GOES CONSPIRACY-ADJACENT, WHICH IS INEVITABLE WHEN YOU EMBRACE GOP MESSAGING

What happened to John Fetterman? He's not the only Democrat who continues to be a strong supporter of Israel, although his attacks on the protesters have been unusually relentless, and he's embraced the cockamamie idea of making Mitt Romney the president of Harvard. Fetterman isn't the only Democrat who frets about the border, though he's probably the only one who's said that Democrats are partly to blame for the fact that a tough immigration bill failed to pass this year. (Everyone else knows that Republicans didn't want it to pass because they want to keep running on border fears.)

Fetterman hasn't rejected the Democratic Party -- yet -- but he uses the same language about progressivism that ex-Democrats inevitably use in reference to the party:

Sen. John Fetterman once boasted about being a progressive. Now he doesn’t recognize them anymore.

“It’s not so much that I left the title, the title left me,” said Fetterman, 54, who ... once vowed that “Progressive values” were the heart of his political identity.

Although Fetterman now says, "I really just feel much more comfortable just being a Democrat," it seems only a matter of time before we get a book like this from Fetterman:

Are plutocrats grooming Fetterman to replace the retiring Joe Manchin and Kyrsten Sinema as the roadblocks to liberal change, in the event that President Biden is reelected and Democrats hold the Senate with 50 senators? (You might argue that Fetterman is still a Bernie Sanders-style progressive -- Fetterman endorsed Sanders during the 2016 primaries -- but remember that Sinema used to be a member of the Green Party. People change, especially when fat checks are waved at them.)

Or maybe Fetterman is just trying to be an independent and eclectic thinker, a guy who calls 'em as he sees 'em. That's possible -- but if so, it puts him in the company of some shady characters.

Here's Fetterman giving a thumbs-up to Ron DeSantis:

Pains me deeply to agree with Crash-and-Burn Ron, but I co-sign this.

As a member of @SenateAgDems and as some dude who would never serve that slop to my kids, I stand with our American ranchers and farmers. 🇺🇸 pic.twitter.com/zZLYf8t5lI

— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 2, 2024

Fetterman's follow-up tweet got the response it deserved:

SHINY MACHINE SCARY lmao

[image or embed]

— Comfortably Numb (@ygalanter.bsky.social) May 3, 2024 at 8:56 PM

That was in addition to the community note:

btw, this is the thing that makes lab meat pic.twitter.com/4GZIt4SnNN

— Senator John Fetterman (@SenFettermanPA) May 3, 2024

When Governor DeSantis signed this bill, he didn't just denounce lab-grown meat:

In a nationwide first, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) has outlawed the sale and distribution of lab-grown meat in his state, claiming a ban will prevent “the global elite” from “forcing the world to eat lab-grown meat and insects.”

“Today, Florida is fighting back against the global elite’s plan to force the world to eat meat grown in a petri dish or bugs to achieve their authoritarian goals,” DeSantis said in a statement following the legislation’s signing Wednesday.

Right-wingers are obsessed with the idea that "the global elite" wants to force ordinary citizens to eat insects. This belief is connected to the right-wing idea that the World Economic Forum is all-powerful. And yes, it's true that the WEF has promoted the idea of insect-eating -- here's a 2018 post titled "Good Grub: Why We Might Be Eating Insects Soon," and here are a few follow-ups:

But the WEF can't actually force anyone to eat insects. Some right-wingers know this, but they also know that the rank-and-file Republican voters love to think of themselves as the victims of massive conspiracies concocted by all-powerful supervillains. They believe they'll someday have to eat bugs at gunpoint -- unless they resist.

So far, resistance mostly comes in meme form:

But now the conspiracy theory has been embraced by the governor of the third most populous state in the Union.

If you repeatedly endorse Republican messaging, inevitably you'll be endorsing the crackpottery of crazy conspiratorialists. But maybe John Fetterman is okay with that now.

WILL RUBIO BE TRUMP'S SUBMISSIVE?

As we all know, Donald Trump really thinks he's the Donald Trump of The Apprentice, the brilliant decision-maker who holds the fate of many supplicants in the palm of his undersized hand. He's entertaining himself this weekend with an Apprentice-style cattle call for potential running mates:

At least six contenders for the former president's running mate – Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C.; Sen. J.D. Vance, R-Ohio; Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.; Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-N.Y.; South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem and North Dakota Gov. Doug Bergum – will attend a Republican donor retreat Friday and Saturday in Palm Beach, Florida, in what looks like a series of auditions.

What, no Tulsi Gabbard? No Byron Donalds? No Marjorie Taylor Greene? Or should we tune in this weekend for surprise special guests? (You can't actually tune in -- but if Trump understood the technology better, he would have arranged to have this livestreamed as a pay-per-view special on Truth Social. The rubes would definitely pay to watch that! And The New York Times would be delighted....)

A Bloomberg story says that, "according to people familiar with the deliberations as recently as this week," the real shortlist consists of the four men attending: Vance, Burgum, Scott, and Rubio. But wait -- wouldn't there be a constitutional problem if Trump ran with Rubio?

A couple of days ago, The Bulwark's Marc Caputo addressed this. His conclusion: If Trump decides to pick Rubio, he'd make Rubio solve the problem.

The Twelfth Amendment says that if the president and vice president inhabit the same state when the states’ electors cast their ballots (that’s on December 17 this year), the ticket could lose its Electoral College votes from that state (Florida has 30, 11 percent of the total needed to win the White House)....

“Marco has this residency problem,” is how Trump describes it to others.

(It's constitutional to run a ticket with two candidates from the same state. It's not constitutional for electors from that state to vote for both people on the ticket, even if that ticket wins the state.)

TRUMP IS STRONGLY CONSIDERING Rubio because he’s keenly aware Rubio is fluent in Spanish, is the only Hispanic on his shortlist, and is attractive to the establishment donors his cash-hungry campaign needs.

I think Trump is also considering Rubio because he seems kinda submissive.

But wait -- isn't there a simple solution to the residency problem? Doesn't Trump have residences in multiple states?

Yes, but Trump doesn't think it's up to the alpha male in this relationship to solve the problem, according to Caputo:

Trump could change his residence back to New York (where he’s staying in Trump Tower during his trial) or to New Jersey (where he frequently summers at his golf course in Bedminster). But he doesn’t want to leave Florida. The state has no income tax and is so thoroughly Republican-controlled that he doesn’t have to worry about any local politicians causing trouble for him. Plus: Why should Trump move to accommodate his vice presidential pick? That’s a cuck move, for sure.

Moving residences is for betas and running mates.

So if Caputo is right, Rubio -- a sitting senator from Florida -- might declare himself a resident of another state. Caputo says that this could "force the senator’s resignation," but that wouldn't be legally necessary -- the Constitution says only that a senator, "when elected," must "be an Inhabitant of that State for which he shall be chosen," and Florida law has no additional residency requirement. So Rubio could buy a house in (for example) Texas, declare it his legal residency, and remain a senator from Florida while running for VP. Or, since the Twelfth Amendment says doesn't say how long one of the candidates electors pick would need to have been a resident of another state, Rubio could run with Trump and presumably change his residency to another state only if the Trump-Rubio ticket wins.

There's a precedent for this: the 2000 Republican ticket. Here's a story from July of that year:

Dick Cheney ... traveled to Wyoming today to change his voter registration from Texas, a move that could allow him to overcome a provision in the Constitution that would have prevented him from becoming Bush’s running mate....

Until today, Cheney was a registered voter in Dallas County, Texas and lived in Dallas. Governor Bush lives in Austin.

Bush picked Cheney and that was the last we ever heard of this.

Caputo thinks there would be lawsuits if Trump picked Rubio. He's probably right, but I assume that the Republican-dominated federal courts would want to do nothing to harm the GOP's chances of regaining the presidency (though I suspect that if Democrats try this sometime in the future, the Supreme Court will suddenly discover a previously unnoticed "history and tradition" that makes the Democratic ticket unconstitutional).

Would Trump really want to put himself through all this? Probably not. Maybe he invited Rubio to impress Rubio's donors. Or maybe he just wants to put someone who was perceived as a serious rival eight years ago on a stage and watch him grovel.

UNLEASH JOE BIDEN

I don't know if you've noticed this, but Donald Trump is giving a lot of interviews these days. You probably know about the lengthy Time interview, but yesterday, while his court case was in recess, Trump gave interviews to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as well as to local Fox affiliates in Milwaukee and Detroit.

You can't blame Trump's campaign for pursuing this strategy. It seems clear that President Biden's team doesn't want him to talk to the media very much. Representatives of elite news outlets have comnplained that Biden won't give them interviews, particularly The New York Times, which has launched a vendetta against Biden because of this refusal. Understandably, Trump wants to prove that he's not afraid to talk to the press.

The tone of Trump's interviews reminds me of the name of a popular subreddit at Reddit: Confidently Incorrect. For instance, in Trump's Detroit interview, he offers a conspiratorial interpretation of a fake Venezuela crime statistic:

The former President said current President Joe Biden is allowing criminals into the country, particularly from Venezuela.

"One stat before we go. Venezuela was very crime-ridden. They announced the other day 72% reduction in crime in the last year. You know why? They moved all their criminals from Venezuela right into the good old USA. And Biden let them do it. It's a disgrace," Trump said....

We promised to check on those claims – and WUFT, a public TV station in central Florida, checked Trump's similar claims earlier in April, saying they were down 67%. WUFT partnered with Politifact to check on his claims and found them to be false.

Politifact notes that while Venezuela has seen a recent drop in crime, it's much smaller than Trump claims. Venezuela also continues to have a higher crime rate than other countries in the region. (Remember Steve M.'s Law: Not everything Trump says is a lie, but any Trump utterance that includes a number is a lie.) But Trump will just keep saying this. He sounds sure of himself, and most of the time low-information voters will never learn about the fact check.

I know what you're thinking: Everything Trump says is self-evidently awful, ridiculous, or both. To you, I'm sure it is. It is to me, too. But he's not doing this to appeal to us. He's doing this to appeal to swing voters. And if they don't know much about the subjects he's talking about -- if, in other words, they know about as much as he does -- all they'll see is a confident guy who can talk at length about the issues, making the case that he'd be a great president and that Joe Biden is a lousy one. His sense of certainty might be enough to persuade them. (Remember what Bill Clinton said after he left office: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right.")

Now, here's an AP headline about President Biden:

Biden Keeps Quiet as Gaza Protesters and Police Clash on College Campuses

Biden spoke on the subject today, and the headline has changed ("Biden Says ‘Order Must Prevail’ During Campus Protests Over the War in Gaza"). But we're still told that Biden didn't address the issue for quite a while:

[Biden's] remarks, occurring shortly before he left the White House for a trip to North Carolina, came after days of silence about the protests....

Biden’s last previous public comment on the protests came more than a week ago....

And Trump has picked up on this. Here's what he said to Jason Calvi of Fox's Milwaukee affiliate about the possibility of Gaza protests at the parties' conventions this summer:

Calvi: You'll be here in Milwaukee. Are you worried about protests? We've seen these protests at campuses across the country. Are you worried that they're going to target Republicans, as well, in Milwaukee?

Trump: No, I don't see it. I do see a problem in Chicago for the Democrats, because they've handled things very poorly in so many different ways, and they have a person that doesn't even speak to the public. I don't know, has he came out and spoken yet? I don't think he's spoken about what's going on with the colleges and universities. So, I think you're going to have a little bit of a problem in Chicago. Maybe a big problem. I think here is going to be good.

I don't agree with everything Biden said today about the Gaza protests, but I think he should be doing this every day: addressing the most important stories in the country, speaking out, making news. The public needs to see him engaging with what's happening in the country and the world every day.

But his handlers don't want that. They're afraid of gaffes. Well, a few weeks ago Biden incorrectly said that his uncle, a World War II pilot, might have been eaten by cannibals after being shot down over Papua New Guinea. But that story is mostly forgotten already. It's been overtaken by events.

Even the much more alarming things Trump has said recently -- like his assertion in the Time interview that he won't intervene if anti-abortion states monitor pregnancies or jail those who seek abortions -- aren't dominating the news conversation, because other stories are seen as more important. So Trump just carries on talking. Biden should talk a lot more too.

TRUMP ON ABORTION (AND COVID): THE STRONGMAN PASSES THE BUCK

Is Donald Trump a strong leader? A majority of Americans believe he is. In a March survey from Gallup, 57% of respondents said that Trump "is a strong and decisive leader." That number included 58% of independents and even 18% of Democrats. In an Economist/YouGov survey conducted in January, 55% of respondents said that Trump is a "very strong" or "somewhat strong" leader, including 53% of independents and 23% of Democrats.

Belief in Trump's strength as a leader is so pervasive that it survived even the extraordinary amount of buck-passing he did during the biggest crisis of his final year in office, the COVID pandemic. Trump was a blame-shifter right from the start, telling a reporter who asked him about the lack of available tests, "I don't take responsibility at all." When governors sought medical supplies from the federal government, Trump told them, “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves.” He blamed China. He blamed past presidents, especially Barack Obama.

Trump, the strong leader, likes to shift blame whenever he believes that no good outcome is possible for him. He's blame-shifting on abortion, which he once supported openly and now opposes only because his voter base does. He deeply resents any implication that he might bear some responsibility for the future of abortion rights in America, even as he takes credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who got rid of Roe v. Wade. If you don't like what's about to happen, don't come whining to him! It's not his fault -- and it won't be his fault in a second term, as he insisted to Time magazine's Eric Cortellessa in a newly published interview. Over and over again he said it would be a state matter:

You came out this week and said that abortion should be left to the states and you said you won't sign a federal ban. So just to be clear: Will you veto any bill that imposes any federal restrictions on abortions?

Trump: You don’t need a federal ban. We just got out of the federal. You know, if you go back on Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade was all about—it wasn't about abortion so much as bringing it back to the states. So the states would negotiate deals. Florida is going to be different from Georgia and Georgia is going to be different from other places....

People want to know whether you would veto a bill, if it came to your desk, that would impose any federal restrictions. This is really important to a lot of voters.

Trump: But you have to remember this: There will never be that chance because it won't happen. You're never going to have 60 [Republican] votes [in the Senate]. You're not going to have it for many, many years, whether it be Democrat or Republican. Right now, it’s essentially 50-50. I think we have a chance to pick up a couple, but a couple means we're at 51 or 52. We have a long way to go. So it's not gonna happen, because you won't have that. Okay. But with all of that being said, it's all about the states, it's about state rights. States’ rights. States are going to make their own determination.

So just to be clear, then: You won't commit to vetoing the bill if there's federal restrictions—federal abortion restrictions?

Trump : I won't have to commit to it because it’ll never—number one, it’ll never happen. Number two, it’s about states’ rights. You don't want to go back into the federal government. This was all about getting out of the federal government. And this was done, Eric, because of—this was done, this issue, has been simplified greatly over the last one week. This is about and was originally about getting out of the federal government. The last thing you want to do is go back into the federal government. And the states are just working their way through it....

... Your allies in the Republican Study Committee, which makes up about 80% of the GOP caucus, have included the Life of Conception act in their 2025 budget proposal. The measure would grant full legal rights to embryos. Is that your position as well?

Trump: Say it again. What?

The Life at Conception Act would grant full legal rights to embryos, included in their 2025 budget proposal. Is that your position?

Trump: I'm leaving everything up to the states. The states are going to be different. Some will say yes. Some will say no. Texas is different than Ohio.

Would you veto that bill?

Trump: I don't have to do anything about vetoes, because we now have it back in the states.

Donald Trump is viscerally pro-choice, no matter what he tells the rubes now, because having abortion available as a backup during his days as a self-promoting cocksman was a matter of self-preservation. (Self-preservation is the closest thing Trump has to a core value.) He worries that abortion might defeat him in 2024 the way many people believe COVID defeated him in 2020. So he's insisting that the potential bad outcomes are other people's fault.

The exchange that's causing him the most trouble today is this one:

Let’s say there’s a 15-week ban.... Do you think states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion after the ban?

Trump: I think they might do that. Again, you'll have to speak to the individual states....

States will decide if they're comfortable or not—

Trump: Yeah the states—

Prosecuting women for getting abortions after the ban. But are you comfortable with it?

Trump: The states are going to say. It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It's totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.

As in the case of COVID, Trump might succeed in persuading people that bad outcomes aren't his fault, but because he's the most narcissistic person who's ever lived, he can't even bring himself to express concern about bad outcomes.* Hundreds of thousands of Americans die from COVID? Women are monitored by the state so they can't get abortions, or are thrown in jail if they try to obtain one? Trump can't make himself say he feels anyone's pain, because the only pain he can feel is the pain of being blamed for something that he's told us repeatedly is someone else's fault.

That's leadership, Trump style!


* Much less say that, as the president of the United States, he'd work to eliminate or minimize those bad outcomes.

THE GAZA PROTESTS MIGHT NEUTRALIZE JANUARY 6 AS A CAMPAIGN ISSUE

This happened overnight at Columbia University:

Dozens of protesters seized Hamilton Hall in the early hours of Tuesday morning, moving metal gates to barricade the doors, blocking entrances with wooden tables and chairs, and zip-tying doors shut.

Protestors carrying barricades entered Hamilton through the leftmost door of the building at approximately 12:30 a.m. Shortly after, a protester broke the window of the rightmost door of Hamilton as dozens more formed a human barricade directly outside the Hamilton doors. Within minutes, protesters sealed Hamilton while hundreds more flooded in front of the building.

News consumers will see broken windows a lot in the next day or two -- and possibly for much longer than that:

#NOW Glass doors into Hamilton Hall inside Columbia were smashed up, protesters stormed in occupying the building, barricading doors with metal gates, blocking entrances with wooden tables and chairs, and zip-tying doors shut.pic.twitter.com/dXxErABRWL

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) April 30, 2024

Does this remind you of anything?



The story of January 6 is contested. Republicans want you to see it the way Tucker Carlson did:



Only Republican zealots think January 6 was peaceful. But it will be harder to make the case that January 6 was intolerably violent when pro-Gaza demonstrators are doing things we associate with January 6 insurrectionists.

HAMILTON HALL HAS BEEN OCCUPIED @Columbia pic.twitter.com/xPWFdeEOX9

— Jessica Schwalb (@jessicaschwalb7) April 30, 2024

Republicans have been doing this kind of compare-and-contrast for years, of course. They've argued that the protests held in the wake of George Floyd's murder were riots led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa terrorists. In their own media, they cherry-pick the worst visuals, and contrast them with the most placid clips of January 6.

Obviously, that's persuasive to Republican voters and less persuasive to everyone else. But bad footage of the Floyd protests exists, and it undoubtedly has some impact on how middle-of-the-road voters see that time period, and January 6 in particular.



An argument that isn't made often enough is this: On some level it doesn't matter whether other protests were more violent than January 6, because January 6 was about overturning the results of a democratic election. As bad as the violence may have become in the worst of the George Floyd protests, those protesters seized temporary control of the streets -- they didn't attempt to seize ongoing control of the government in defiance of the will of voters. It may be bad to smash store windows or overturn police cars, but elections are fundamental to our system of government. The correct way to measure the seriousness of what happened is not the degree of violence, but the danger inherent in the potential outcome.

But we rarely hear that, so the protests are judged based on how unruly they look. And the campus protests are looking worse.

RIGHT-WING MEN HATE THE GAZA PROTESTS BECAUSE OF THEIR FRUSTRATED LIBIDOS

Kat Abughazaleh catches Jesse Watters of Fox News telling fellow panelists on The Five that the Gaza protests on campus are happening because female students don't have boyfriends:

JESSE WATTERS: Females -- I think I can speak for the women at the table -- are generally nurturing people. And when their professors are giving them better grades for their social activism, they're trying to appeal to their teachers, and they've been told they're oppressed as women, and they identify with the Palestinians, and they're trying to hug them and nurture them.

Because they're single, they're not nurturing their boyfriends. Their boyfriends have been described as toxic. So they're trying to nurture other people.

This is the language of the manosphere (demeaningly referring to women as "females," accusing them of misandry), with a slightly varied message (young women aren't having massive amounts of indiscriminate sex with tall, handsome "Chads," they're channeling that energy into activism instead). This is directed not at sexually frustrated young men, like most manosphere media content, but rather at the older men who are a large part of Fox's audience. Presumably some of these men are also sexually frustrated, but even the ones who aren't are likely to envy the protesters' youth and presumed sexual vigor -- and they're likely to be the kind of men who expect every woman to be flirty and smiley, especially toward men like themselves, rather than serious about a cause.

If you think this is just one isolated sexist riff, I refer you to NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway's weekend appearance on Bill Maher's show, which was lovingly written up in the New York Post:

NYU professor Scott Galloway said that college campuses were increasingly becoming reminiscent of Nazi Germany — and attributed the reason partly to young people not having enough sex.

“We need to enjoy sex,” Galloway offered to some initial confusion during an appearance on “Real Time” with Bill Maher Friday.

“I think part of the problem is young people aren’t having enough sex so they go on the hunt for fake threats and the most popular threat through history is [antisemitism].”

Galloway loves this argument. Here he is on CNN:

One reason for the rampant campus Israel protests, says NYU Professor Scott Galloway, is that "Protesting is the new sex....You get a dopa hit from gathering together in fighting off a perceived enemy [and] I think they're on the hunt for what I'd call a fake mortal enemy."

How sexually obsessed is Professor Galloway? Very sexaully obsessed:

If you think that sounds bad, trust me, the reality is worse:

Scott Galloway (⁦@profgalloway⁩) has a new show on Bloomberg’s ⁦@Quicktake⁩ streaming service and … this deleted video gives some … insight into what to expect? pic.twitter.com/IsUyFwend1

— Katie Robertson (@katie_robertson) July 2, 2021

This professor's obsession with young people's sex lives reminds me of T Bone Burnett's 1983 spoken-word song "The Sixties," particularly the second verse, about a frustrated man:

... after a while, he started hearing about free love
And he felt left out
And he tortured his imagination dreaming of pot parties
With those suntanned girls in halter tops with their cutoffs slit up to their belt loops
Then he saw a picture in Playboy of Ursula Andress on the arm of some hippie and that did it
He began his rebellion late
And now he's got a designer camper
And one time he even got to sleep in it with one of those girls in the cutoffs
But it made me feel awful
'Cause he had to pay her fifty dollars
And it was twenty for anybody else

I'll close with this guy, a troll who was posting briefly at Bluesky until he was banned:

In the master narrative of the manosphere, college-age women have indiscriminate sex with alpha males until time catches up with them at the advanced age of 30, or even 25, at which point they're shriveled-up old crones no man would be interested in -- childless, unattached, alone with their cats, full of antidepressants, and miserable. That's the narrative this troll seems to be invoking. Watters and Galloway rewrite the narraative, but this is it in its pure form. None of these guys seem capable of imagining that anyone could engage in protest because they believe in the cause.

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA CAN'T EVEN COVER KRISTI NOEM'S DOG MURDER CORRECTLY

On Friday, The Guardian's Martin Pengelly reported that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem -- a top contender for the job of Donald Trump's running mate -- confesses to murdering a dog and a goat in her forthcoming memoir, No Turning Back. Noem says she shot the 14-month-old dog to death after it attacked a neighbor's chickens, and also killed a goat owned by her family that was, in her telling "nasty and mean" as well as foul-smelling.

According to the media, reaction to the story was swift -- and bipartisan. Politico's headline is "Dems, GOP Bash Kristi Noem for Shooting Her Dog." The headline at Salon is "'Cruel and Insane': Republicans Condemn Kristi Noem's Dog-Killing Revelation." The Daily Beast headline is "Republicans Pile On as Kristi Noem Cripples Her Shot at Being Trump’s VP."

Obviously, this story isn't about a major issue facing the country. But we're being told that the Republican response has bee similar to the Democratic response when, in fact, most of Noem's GOP critics are actually anti-Trump Republicans (or former Republicans), as the Daily Beast story makes clear:

Alyssa Farrah Griffith, the Trump administration’s former director of strategic communications, wrote that she was “horrified” by the story, in a post on X. “A 14-month old dog is still a puppy & can be trained. A large part of bad behavior in dogs is not having proper training from the humans responsible for them.”

... Sarah Matthews, a former Trump aide posted on X, saying she was shocked that Noem had told on herself in such an outrageous way.

Griffith and Matthews broke with Trump years ago, cooperated with the House January 6 committee, and continue to be Trump critics.

Meghan McCain also jumped on the South Dakota governor’s atrocious anecdote. “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc.—but not from killing a dog,” McCain wrote.

McCain has been a Trump critic since Trump verbally attacked her father in 2015.

Salon's story surfaces the same names, as well as this one:

Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson kept it simple, tweeting “Good morning to all you who didn’t shoot your puppy in the face.”

The only Noem critic named in these stories who isn't a professional anti-Trumper is Laura Loomer:

Even top Trump ally Laura Loomer was disgusted by this level of cruelty, tweeting, "She can't be VP now."

(People close to Trump have urged him to keep his distance from Loomer, so she's undoubtedly envious of Noem's status as a potential VP candidate.)

The only Republican in relatively good standing who addressed this did so obliquely, as Politico reports:

Florida governor and former Trump rival for the Republican presidential nomination Ron DeSantis pitched in with a call to action — and a dig at the southern border crisis.

“Essentia is a lab/shepherd mix who was rescued from the southern border, where the border crisis affects everyone — even our canine friends,” DeSantis tweeted. “Please consider giving Essentia a great home by adopting her from Big Dog Ranch Rescue.”

Contrast this with the responses by Democrats:

“Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz wrote on X.... Alongside it was a picture of Walz feeding his dog a treat.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy also responded with pictures of their beloved pets....

“ACT NOW!” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) wrote on X alongside an infomercial-style video in memoriam for Cricket. ”For just $.10 a day you can help us save a puppy from Kristi Noem.”

And, as Salon notes, Noem had aat least one high-profile defender on the right:

“The Daily Wire” commentator Michael Knowles took to Twitter to share his unpopular opinion.

“This story makes me like and respect her more,” the CPAC speaker said.

This is a trivial story, but once again the press is giving the GOP credit for beliefs its core membership doesn't really share.

*****

So why did Noem put the animal-murder stories in her book? New York magazine's Margaret Hartmann has theories:

Theory No. 1: Kristi Noem is an incredibly bad politician.

This is actually the reason Noem provides in the book. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she writes....

Theory No. 2: Kristi Noem is trying to impress Trump, and he hates dogs.

... Julie Alderman Boudreau, presidential-research director for American Bridge 21st Century, offered this explanation:

Theory No. 3: Kristi Noem wants off Trump’s VP shortlist.

Is Noem’s tale an intentional act of self-sabotage? That’s the theory put forth by Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin:

Theory No. 2 has some merit -- if Trump likes an inner-circle aspirant, he's fond of saying that the person is "a killer" -- but beyond that, I think the answer is simple. Noem was trying to send a favorite Republican message: I'm from a rural red state, and I've done things no soy-eating big-city liberal would ever do. This works if you're a Republican woman. Remember how we were told in 2008 that Sarah Palin knew how to field-dress a moose?

But a dog is not a moose. People love dogs. Noem miscalculated.

I expected Noem to say that she wishes the libs would get as upset about killing "the babies" as they do about killing dogs. But she knows Trump wants to downplay his party's abortion absolutism, at least until November, so she can't even play that card. She's cooked.

THEY FUCK AROUND, WE FIND OUT

The Republican-controlled Supreme Court is about to give U.S. presidents, or at least Republican U.S. presidents, a massive amount of leeway to commit crimes while in office. In The New Republic, Brynn Tannehill says that the Republican justices will someday regret what they're doing:

The conservatives on the Supreme Court have ... exposed their hubris, willful ignorance, and foolishness to the entire world in stark terms, and it will cost them and the nation dearly in the long run. They somehow presume that if Trump is elected and goes full dictator, that the power of the court, and their reputation, will save them. The truth is, Trump’s relationships with everyone he meets are completely transactional. If the court ever stops being useful to him, he will terminate it with prejudice if he thinks he can get away with it, and this court is doing everything it can to make him think he can get away with it.

... When Trump is president again, he is likely to believe that he has the option of “removing” any member of the Supreme Court who defies him. As long as the court doesn’t rule against him, they’re fine. From the justices’ perspective, they either end up neutered lap dogs of a despot, who do whatever they’re told out of fear, or they defy him and end up somewhere ... unpleasant (at best). Taking a dirt nap at worst. After all, if Trump can rub out a political opponent, can’t he do the same to an uncooperative jurist?

Or, alternately, the Court will be neutered by Democrats, according to Tannehill:

If Democrats nearly universally see the court as a corrupt rubber stamp for an autocrat, what happens if Republicans push too far on an issue? Like, say, an effective 50-state ban on abortion from the moment of conception with no real exceptions, which is almost certainly coming despite Republican claims to the contrary. Well, when the court upholds this, or implements it, it becomes highly likely that blue state governments tell the court, and the administration, to go f--- yourself.

But the bet being made by the Court's Republicans, and Republicans in general, is exactly the opposite of this. They're assuming that they'll never be at cross purposes with Trump or any other Republican president, at least not in a way that's serious enough to expose them to risk. And they assume -- probably correctly -- that Democrats are too institutionalist to defy the federal government in a way that threatens the Court's power.

Right-wingers routinely use power in ways that seem reckless, and likely to cause profound damage to America. Whenever they do, they seem to ask themselves a simple question: Is this likely to cause harm to anyone we care about? When they conclude that the answer is no, they just go ahead and do what they please.

A tax system that's significantly less progressive than the one we had in the pre-Reagan era, resulting in the kind of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age? Conservatives made a bet that there wouldn't be riots in the streets, and that even if inequality revived the labor movement, the workers wouldn't be at the capitalists' homes and factories with brickbats and torches, ready to kill, or burn it all down. So far, that's been a good bet.

A massive campaign to prevent a transition from fossil fuels, even as the planet burns? Elite conservatives gambled that the planet wouldn't become too unlivable, and that they'd always be able to retreat to the spots on the globe that remained pleasant. That's still working out for them.

A ban on abortions? Right-wing elitists know that the women and girls in their families will always be able to jet off to places where they can receive reproductive health services discreetly. A firearm free-for-all? The elite schools right-wingers' children attend don't seem to have a lot of mass shooters. Handing over the GOP's messaging to conspiracy-mongering propagandists? Right-wing elitists didn't suffer much harm as a result of rumors that Bill Clinton was a murderer and a drug dealer, or rumors that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born gay communist, so how much of a problem could it be for them if the voters of their party believe the crazy talk of QAnon, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump?

You might argue that Republicans bet wrong on handing the Supreme Court over to abortion-banners. But the Dobbs decision merely put a limit on the number of House seats the GOP was able to win in 2022 -- the party still took control of the House from Democrats. Republicans still control most of the purple-state legislatures they carefully gerrymandered over the last decade or so. And the former president who made Dobbs possible still has an excellent chance of becoming president again.

So the bets are paying off. The bet that Trump wouldn't disturb right-wing elitists' comfort and leisure, and would in fact make life even cushier for them, paid off from 2017 to 2021. Elitists on the right are once again betting that while Trump might destroy democracy and the rule of law, the suffering will fall on other people, and they'll be fine.

I suppose someday they'll bet wrong, but Republican elitists are assuming that day hasn't arrived. And you can't blame them.

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.