A FEW MONTHS IN PRISON FOR HUNTER WOULD HAVE BETTER FOR JOE (updated)

This is good news for Hunter Biden and bad news for Joe Biden:

President Biden’s son Hunter has reached a tentative agreement with federal prosecutors to plead guilty to two minor tax crimes and admit to the facts of a gun charge under terms that would likely keep him out of jail, according to court papers filed Tuesday....

The court papers indicate the younger Biden has tentatively agreed to plead guilty to two misdemeanor tax charges of failure to pay in 2017 and 2018. The combined tax liability is roughly $1.2 million over those years, according to people familiar with the matter.... Prosecutors plan to recommend a sentence of probation for those counts, these people said. Biden’s representatives have said he previously paid back the IRS what he owed....

While Biden is pleading guilty to two tax charges, handling the gun charge as a diversion case means he will not technically be pleading guilty to that crime. Diversion is an option typically applied to nonviolent offenders with substance abuse problems.

In all, prosecutors would recommend two years of probation and diversion conditions, these people said. If Biden successfully meets the conditions of the diversion program, the gun charge would be removed from his record at the end of that period, the people familiar with the plea deal said.

It doesn't matter whether this is the kind of deal that would have been given to another person under similar circumstances -- this has the potential to motivate Republican voters the way the Dobbs decision motivates Democratic voters.

And not just Trump supporters -- even Ron DeSantis argues that the the justice system is "weaponized" against Republicans and conservatives. Even Mike Pence thinks January 6 protesters -- who wanted to kill him -- have been treated unfairly compared to the demonstrators who broke the law during anti-racism protests in 2020 (never mind the fact that there were at least 17,000 arrests in the aftermath of those protests, which didn't threaten to overthrow a duly elected government).

To right-wing rage addicts. Hunter Biden deserves jail. So do Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton, Anthony Fauci, and anyone who ever protested George Floyd's murder. Every Black male in Chicago should be locked up, as far as they're concerned. So should every doctor who's performed gender confirmation surgery. Instead, as they see it, people on their side were entrapped (read: caught on video) on January 6. Their people are scrutinized by the FBI for speaking out (read: threatening people) at school board meetings. Their heroes are arrested for self-defense (read: murder) on the streets of Kenosha and in the New York subway.

I now expect Trump acquittals hung juries in Florida and Georgia -- good luck trying to put together juries in these cases that won't include at least one person bent on nullification.

A few months in prison for Hunter Biden wouldn't have truly mollified these people, but their outrage might have been tempered. But this deal will confirm their most paranoid suspicions. They won't get over it quickly.

*****

UPDATE: As I was saying....

Looks like Hunter received a sweetheart deal and is not facing any charges on the massive corruption allegations. If Hunter was not connected to the elite DC class he would have been put in jail a long time ago. pic.twitter.com/tZcZOY1uST

— Ron DeSantis (@RonDeSantis) June 20, 2023

Hunter Biden plea deal called ‘slap on wrist’ after similar tax, gun cases ended with prison terms https://t.co/UlOqTNuD2n pic.twitter.com/dmQpq4FtJ1

— New York Post (@nypost) June 20, 2023

After four years, Hunter Biden is pleading guilty to three total tax & gun charges & will receive no jail time. We no longer have a justice system in this country. Democrats can do whatever they want and receive virtually no punishments, Republicans get draconian punishments.

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) June 20, 2023

THE GOP: SO DESPERATE, SO SOON?

How desperate are the Democrat-haters to prevent a rematch between Joe Biden and Donald Trump, which they, like all Very Smart People, assume Trump will lose? They're so desperate that even Bari Weiss's "journal of ideas," The Free Press, is now featuring an anti-Trump diatribe by William Barr:

There's not a word in here about liberal fascism or cancel culture. If Bari Weiss thinks this is what's necessary right now, seventeen months before the election, to save the world from the unspeakable horror of Democrats and liberals, the Republican Party that she enables every day must be scared shitless.

In the past week, there have been three opinion pieces calling for a Donald Trump pardon: by Marc Thiessen and American Enterprise Institute apparatchik Danielle Pletka in The Washington Post; by National Review's Rich Lowry at Politico; and by Federalist Society hack Chip Muir in The Hill. They advance various pardon scenarios -- before the election, after the election -- but the mesage is the same: Can't we work this out like gentlemen? Do you really have to put our front-runner on trial and demonstrate that he's a criminal? And Republican voters, can you really not see the problem with voting for this front-runner in the primaries?

Republican voters can't see the problem with voting for Trump -- and really, why should they? I see an absurd and probably dishonest example of polling spin in the New York Post:

Biden dispatches all of his potential Republican foes except DeSantis, whom he trails 43% to 44% — well within the margin of error, the DailyMail.com/J.L. Partners survey showed....

Trump lags behind Biden 44% to 46%....

Actually, the poll says that Biden leads DeSantis 44% to 43%. But I'm sure this was merely an unintended error in Rupert Murdoch's paper and not a reflection of Murdoch's loathing of Trump.

So to sum up: DeSantis trails Biden by 1. Trump trails Biden by ... um, 2. The margin of error of is 3.1. Those are effectively identical results.

We're told:

Other polls have shown similar results, with the Florida governor topping Biden by 1.3 percentage points, according to the latest RealClearPolitics aggregate.

Yes but Trump leads Biden by 2.4, according to Real Clear Politics.

Most members of our political class -- Democrats and Republicans - assume Trump will be too damaged to win by November 2024. I don't see it. His trial in Florida on the latest charges probably won't happen until after the election. The same will be true of any future charges. The New York trial is scheduled for March, but the public doesn't seem to care about the charges in that case, and if he's convicted, there are likely to be appeals that stretch at least until Election Day. He's facing another civil trial in January on charges of defaming E. Jean Carroll, but he lost to her earlier this year and his poll numbers didn't decline at all.

I hope all the Very Smart People are right. I hope Trump is the nominee and public revulsion defeats him. But why aren't we seeing that in the polls now? Why is he doing better in the polls now than he ever did in the 2020 or 2016 elections? I know normal people aren't paying attention to presidential politics yet, but how can they not know what he's like?

Trump can win, but the enemies of the Democratic Party are desperate. They're throwing Robert Kennedy Jr. at him (Kennedy's the subject of yet another New York Times feature story.) They're working on a No Labels run by Joe Manchin. A left-wing party that embraces a lot of right-wing talking points teed up Cornel West as a spoiler (although West is now running as a Green instead).

The anti-Democratic forces are terrified. I hope they're right. But I don't buy it yet.

MAYBE WE SHOULD BE ROOTING FOR A DeSANTIS COMEBACK

This New York Times story is just sad:

Ron DeSantis Is Young, Has Little Kids and Wants America to Know It

... Mr. DeSantis would be 46 on Inauguration Day if elected, younger than every president since John F. Kennedy. It’s a fact he doesn’t state explicitly, but his campaign has set out to make sure voters get it.

The Florida governor talks frequently about having the “energy and discipline” needed for the White House, keeping a busy schedule of morning and evening events. He and his wife, Casey DeSantis, often speak about their young children, who are 6, 5 and 3 and have joined their parents on the campaign trail. One of the few candidates with kids still at home, Mr. DeSantis regularly highlights his parental worries about schools and popular culture as he presses his right-wing social agenda.

When he signed the state budget on Thursday, he joked that a tax break on one of parenthood’s most staggering expenses — diapers — had come too late for his family, though not by much.

In 1992, did Bill Clinton have to remind people that he was young? Of course not -- he was young and it was obvious. The same for Barack Obama in 2008. By contrast, Ron DeSantis is 44 and doesn't look or act a day over 65.

We knew Clinton liked Elvis and Fleetwood Mac. We knew Obama liked Motown and hip-hop. We knew they'd both gotten high in their youth. Maybe DeSantis could make himself seem more youthful by worrying less about reminding people that he has young children and acting more like a human being who has experienced ordinary human pleasures.

Other than railing against “wokeness,” Mr. DeSantis scarcely mentions cultural influences like television shows, movies, music or social media.... He doesn’t talk much about his love of golf or discuss his hobbies. His references to parenthood are often prompted by his wife.

That fist-pump dance Donald Trump does is horrible, but it makes him seem younger than DeSantis.

I don't believe this "Look at me! I'm young!" approach will work for DeSantis, even in the primaries -- but maybe we should be hoping that Trump drops out of the race and DeSantis wins the nomination as the GOP's clear second choice. I say that because this issue isn't going away:

... the landmark Supreme Court decision one year ago overturning Roe v. Wade is putting abortion opponents increasingly at odds with public opinion and creating political perils for candidates on their side.

In a new USA TODAY/Suffolk University poll, one in four Americans say state efforts that have followed to impose strict limits on abortion access have made them more supportive of abortion rights....

By almost 2-1, 58%-30%, those surveyed opposed the decision to overturn Roe v. Wade....

By 53%-39%, they supported a federal law ensuring access to abortion.

"When 80% of Democrats and 53% of independents want Congress to pass a law ensuring nationwide access to abortion, you get the picture here," said David Paleologos, director of Suffolk University's Political Research Center. "Among women in the all-important independent-voter demographic, 63% support a national law. Even 23% of Republican men and women support it."

Trump is trying to sidestep responsibility for what his Supreme Court picks helped unleash with the Dobbs decision. He's claiming credit for Dobbs, but he's also talking up rape and incest exceptions, while DeSantis boasts about his state's six-week abortion ban. In a general election campaign, Trump will try to rebrand himself as an abortion moderate, and I think some voters will fall for it. DeSantis won't -- his instincts always tell him he mustn't make any enemies on the right.

Also, I think DeSantis's allergy to ordinary human enjoyment of life reinforces the (obviously correct) perception that he's an angry, moralizing prig who wants to police private lives. Trump's justices eliminated a national right to abortion, but Trump doesn't seem like a guy who thinks abortion is bad. It makes no logical sense, but I think it would be much easier to run againt DeSantis on this issue.

I know the conventional wisdom is that Trump would be the easiest GOP candidate to beat, but I wonder. Even if you agree with DeSantis, he's like bad-tasting medicine. I think with Nate Cohn and Digby are right: For people who agree with Trump even some of the time, he makes politics seem like fun. I think that makes him harder to fight -- on abortion and many other issues. If he doesn't lose many general-election voters as a result of his legal troubles -- and he might not, especially if he gets no jail time in Manhattan and hasn't gone to trial yet in Florida or any future case -- he could be a lot harder to beat for that reason.

SOME ELOQUENCE MIGHT HELP

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore wonders why so many Americans continue to believe that President Biden is doing a bad job:

... you could argue that life has been getting better in the USA overall, as Washington Monthly’s Bill Scher did recently....

Actually, notes Scher, the “inflation rate for May is down to 4 percent, less than half of the June 2022 peak.” Illegal border crossings “have dropped by 70 percent in the last few weeks, according to the Department of Homeland Security, after Biden implemented a new border-management policy.”

And as for crime, Scher writes:

"Murder is down about 12 percent year-to-date in more than 90 cities that have released data for 2023, compared with data as of the same date in 2022,” according to crime data analyst Jeff Asher, writing in The Atlantic.... That follows a 4 percent drop in homicides in 2022 from the prior year, according to the Council on Criminal Justice analysis of data from 35 cities. ...

Another set of promising data comes from the Violent Crime Survey by the Major Cities Chiefs Association, which looked at data from 70 cities. During the first quarter of 2023, homicides, rapes, and robberies dropped about 8 percent from the first quarter of 2022.

Kilgore makes an obvious point:

Most Americans do not follow monthly inflation, crime, or border-crossing statistics. They experience inflation through more expensive bills, less abundant grocery purchases, and delayed big-ticket investments; crime through if-it-bleeds-it-leads local news broadcasts and major events like mass shootings; immigration through vivid images of people in migrant camps or the frequency with which they hear foreign languages spoken in their own communities.

Eventually, they might feel the improvement. But in the meantime:

Clearly Team Biden needs to do a better job of getting the recent good news out to members of his own party and persuadable independents.

... pushing back when Biden haters pretend the country is going straight to hell is probably a good idea for Democrats. A swing voter might hear them.

Under these circumstances, I wish we had a president who was a good public speaker. Or a vice president.

In their first terms, Barack Obama and Bill Clinton struggled in the polls, but at this point in their terms, their numbers were ahead of Biden's now. I think their ability to speak well reassured at least some wary voters that they were strong and trustworthy, and that put a floor under their poll numbers.

Smart people reject the notion that speeches or statements by a president can make a difference. I accept the idea that, in a specific political battle, even a great speech won't make a difference. But over the course of an administration, I think many voters respond to eloquence and connect it with competence. You can win a second term if you're not eloquent -- George W. Bush did -- but it's harder. And when Bush poll numbers fell in his second term, they never recovered.

Eloquence is probably too much to ask of Joe Biden, who was never a great speaker and has become more likely to stumble verbally as he ages. But he did a good job on this year's State of the Union address. He must have regarded that as an important moment and put more effort into it. I wish he'd do that more often. I wish someone he trusted could persuade him that his not-very-serious approach to public speaking is hurting him now.

And with all due respect to Vice President Harris, I wish she could be persuaded to take seriously some of the criticism that's directed at her -- not because she's doing a bad job, but because the perception that she's doing a bad job spreads to people who aren't even paying attention, just because it's conventional wisdom. People think she's a bad VP because they hear that other people think she's a bad VP. Or maybe they hear that her every utterance is "word salad," and maybe someone directs their attention to a cherry-picked video clip or two with hard-to-follow sentences full of corporate-speak, and they believe she must be incompetent if she sounds like that when she talks.

Is it sexist or racist to suggest that Harris could use some help in this area? I don't think so. Roger Ailes taught communication skills to two white males, Richard Nixon and George H.W. Bush, who went on to win presidential elections. Bush also got help on his convention speech from -- don't laugh -- the most effective political speechwriter of the era, Peggy Noonan. She wrote lines for Bush that are wince-inducing now, but were plain, direct, and widely quoted at the time: "a thousand points of light," "a kinder, gentler nation," "I'm a quiet man, but I hear the quiet people others don't." Surely there's a Democratic speechwriter who can earn Harris's trust and bring directness and vividness to her speeches.

On the subject of extemporaneous remarks, I think about this anecdote from a 2004 New York Times Magazine story about Al Franken:

... when [Howard] Dean seemed the inevitable [Democratic presidential] nominee before a single primary vote had been cast, Franken was troubled that John Kerry was being written off. "I liked Dean, but I also think Kerry is just a really smart, capable man," he told me. "I'd noticed that he was very good in a small gathering, so I thought, What if I invite some opinion makers over to hear him?" On Dec. 4, an impressive collection of the media elite and assorted other notables -- Hendrik Hertzberg of The New Yorker, Frank Rich of The New York Times, Howard Fineman and Jonathan Alter of Newsweek, Jim Kelly of Time, Jeff Greenfield of CNN, Eric Alterman of The Nation, Richard Cohen of The Washington Post, Jacob Weisberg of Slate and others, including, as éminence grise, Arthur Schlesinger Jr. -- responded to his call and had a little powwow with Kerry at the Upper West Side apartment of Franken and his wife, Franni.

"The whole thing was odd, I would say, because people didn't know why they were there," Kelly said. "But I think the idea was to put John Kerry into the belly of the beast. It may have been the actual beginning of the new approach he took -- 'I'm going to stay in this room and take every question you throw at me.'" Alterman grilled Kerry on his vote on Iraq, and he gave a long, tortured answer. Then he was asked about it a second time. "By the third go-round, the answer was getting shorter and more relevant," Kelly said....

The next time Franken saw Kerry was at the rally in Nashua, seven weeks later. Things had changed significantly; Kerry was considered a new and improved candidate and now looked almost unbeatable.

(Emphasis added.)

Here's a white male politician who learned to hone his answers. No one would say that Kerry became a great speaker, but he recognized that there was room for improvement, and he made himself better. He almost went on to win that election.

I think if Harris could accept that there's no shame in improving your skills even at this level of politics, she could change the way she's perceived, which might give swing voters more confidence in Harris herself, and the Biden-Harris ticket. That would be a good thing.

THE CULT WILL REMAIN INTACT

If only Peggy Noonan were right about this:

It is said Mr. Trump’s base never wavers and always rallies, and historically this has been true. When he’s accused of being a trickster in business they don’t care—it’s extraneous to presidential leadership. They don’t care if he’s an abusive predator of women—again, extraneous, old news. But endangering our national security, including our nuclear secrets? That is another matter.

This won’t solidify his position with hard-line supporters. Deep down they know “What about Hillary?” doesn’t answer the questions: “Why would Trump do this? Why would he put America in danger? Who did he show those papers to?”

As to soft Trump supporters, the charges do nothing to keep them in his camp. They reinforce the arguments of former Trump Republicans now backing other candidates: He was our guy but in the end he’s all danger and loss.

Actually, when Trump is "accused of being a trickster in business," his base does care -- it makes them admire him more. Remember 2016, when Hillary Clinton pointed out that Trump had paid no federal income tax for several years, and his response was "That makes me smart"? The fans agree with him that the whole world is crooked, deal-making is necessary trickery, and Trump generously and selflessly offers to apply his mastery of this dark art on behalf of America. What a patriot!

And none of them believe he's "an abusive predator of women." They don't believe that sexual violence is the result of violent tendencies -- they assume it's a response to a lack of sexual opportunity, something they know hasn't been Trump's problem. He was surrounded by babes! He has a hot wife! He wouldn't need to do that! That's what they think.

And no, they don't realize "deep down" that Trump endangered America by taking those documents. The myth of Trump is not just that he was a good president -- it's that he was an unusually patriotic president. They've fully accepted the myth that he was a rich guy living a very nice life who chose to sacrifice that life of ease because he loves America. (They can't even conceive of the possibility that he ran for president because of ego.) Of course a selfless patriot like that wouldn't harm America, deliberately or recklessly!

(Sooner or later, a rightwing commentator will proclaim that Trump's retention and display of those documents was actually a very clever ruse to entrap the enemies of America ... somehow. You wait. Someone will make that argument soon.)

Noonan might be right about "soft Trump supporters," but I suspect that what they'll think isn't "in the end he’s all danger and loss" so much as "His enemies hate him so much that we should probably pick someone they won't try so hard to beat." I've run across that sentiment in interviews with Trump supporters. The problem is, for every soft supporter who feels this way, there are a hundred supporters who like him more the more he makes the rest of us angry.

So Noonan's headline -- "The Indictment Can Only Hurt Trump" -- is probably wrong. In all likelihood, the only thing that can hurt Trump (apart from a preelection prison sentence) would be massive voter turnout on behalf of his opponent. Let's get to work on that.

HERE COMES SOME MORE "PARTY OF THE WORKING CLASS" BULLSHIT

Yesterday, The Wall Street Journal attempted (again!) to persuade us that the Republican Party has really broken up with the plutocracy:

Once considered natural political allies, the Republican Party and big business are drifting apart. One sign of their estrangement: GOP lawmakers are weaning themselves off money from corporate political-action committees.

Republicans are now less dependent on corporate and industry PACs than at any time in the past three decades, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis based on data from the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics. Instead, they are turning to smaller donations from millions of individuals who tend to be wary of big-businesses priorities such as free trade.

Does this report have any data to back up the assertion that the "millions of individuals" who are giving Republicans smaller donations are, in fact, "wary of big-businesses priorities"? Nope. This is simply asserted without evidence.

There are numbers to back up the claim that corporate giving to Republicans is down:

House Speaker Kevin McCarthy has lived through the cycle....

More than 40% of the money given to his re-election campaign [in 2016] came from business PACs....

By 2022 ... the corporate-money pipeline was dwindling, accounting for less than 3% of his campaign funds.

What the Journal won't tell you is that the percentage of his campaign cash that came from large-dollar individual donations increased, from 16.92% in the 2016 cycle to 35.83% in the 2022 cycle.

If the GOP is wary of business at all, it's not because the party is suddenly championing the economic interests of the powerless against the powerful. It's because of "wokeness."

Conservatives say the fault for the breakup lies with CEOs who increasingly meddle in politics by taking progressive stances on divisive social issues....

These days, McCarthy is using his position to castigate Wall Street for taking progressive political stands....

The Republican Party’s “shifting sentiment away from corporate America is a result of their increasing activism that alienates Republicans and their constituents,” said Matt Sparks, an adviser to McCarthy and his former deputy chief of staff....

In Texas, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott and the GOP-run state house banned the state from doing business with BlackRock, JPMorgan Chase and several other banks after accusing them of boycotting investments in the oil industry in favor of renewable-fuel companies. In January, Texas banned Citigroup from the state’s municipal-bond business after the state attorney general said the bank discriminates against gun manufacturers.

You get the picture.

There's a claim that Republicans are becoming liberalism-curious:

Some [Republicans] are taking up causes once associated with old-school Democrats, advancing bills that give more power to the federal government to raise wages for blue-collar workers and lower drug costs for consumers.

But this report from The New Republic makes clear that the 2023 Republican Party is the same old Republican Party:

... the Republican Study Committee (of which some three-quarters of House Republicans are members) just released its desired 2024 budget, in which the party seeks to, you guessed it, cut Social Security and Medicare....

The proposed budget would effectively make cuts to Social Security by increasing the retirement age for future retirees. The document seeks to assure people that there would only be “modest adjustments” but does not list what Republicans think the new retirement age should be.

On Medicare, Republicans propose requiring disabled Americans to wait longer before getting benefits and turning Medicare into a “premium support” system, a long-floated Republican idea that essentially turns the government program into a voucher scheme. Such a scheme would remove the guarantee for seniors to have affordable access to Medicare.

Republicans also call for “pro-growth tax reform” (read: cutting taxes for the wealthy and corporations); “work requirements” (imposing more requirements on poor people trying to attain social services); and “regulatory reforms that increase economic growth” (encouraging the sort of deregulation that welcomes crashing financial institutions, corporate-poisoned rivers, and more than 1,000 train derailments a year).

As far as taxes go, the party wants to make permanent the individual provisions of Trump’s tax cut bill, which gave a roughly $49,000 annual tax cut to the top 1 percent and only $500 to those in the bottom 60 percent. In doing so, they’d add nearly $2.5 trillion to the deficit over 10 years, according to the Congressional Budget Office. The party also wants to eliminate the estate tax, which only impacts those who inherit assets worth at least $13 million.

It's like Paul Ryan never left.

Attacks on corporate "wokeism" are no more a sign of an overall GOP disillusionment with Big Business than Vladimir Putin's attacks on certain oligarchs are a sign that he's anti-business. If you're in business and you cross Putin, he'll have you poisoned or jailed, but he's fine with businessmen who don't challenge him, and he's categorically in favor of business. The same is true for Republicans. They want to score victories in the War on Woke because anti-wokeism appeals to voters, unlike their real agenda. But they're still corporatists at heart -- if "heart" is the right word.

JIM GERAGHTY IS SHOCKED TO DISCOVER THAT RON DeSANTIS IS NOT A CHILL MODERATE

Ron DeSantis announced last month that he's running for president, after which -- I hope you're sitting down for this -- he proceeded to adopt extremely right-wing positions on a number of issues. Who could have possibly seen that coming? Certainly not National Review's Jim Geraghty:

In the last few days, Ron DeSantis has pledged to appoint Supreme Court justices who will “do better” than Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and Amy Coney Barrett and pledged to change the name of Fort Liberty back to Fort Bragg.... Your mileage may vary, but that strikes me as a strange selection of battles to fight....

Trump’s choices for the Supreme Court are, among conservatives, probably the least vulnerable part of his record as president....

There’s also something odd about the decision by DeSantis ... to pledge to re-rename the former Fort Bragg, now Fort Liberty, back to Fort Bragg....

Is a President DeSantis really going to expend some of his limited political capital in 2025 or 2026 in a fight with Congress to take down signs that say “Fort Liberty” and put back the signs that say “Fort Bragg”? Does DeSantis really want to go to the mattresses for Braxton Bragg, “the most hated man of the Confederacy,” who, it turns out, was a pretty lousy general?

Poor Geraghty. This completely unexpected development happened a few months after he reassured readers of The Washington Post that DeSantis is a super-chill middle-of-the-road guy:

If Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis runs for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination ... plenty of Americans across the partisan divide would have good reason to root for him to win the nomination.

... DeSantis would represent a return to normality.

... The governor certainly doesn’t shy from a scrap, but he fights for policies, not to prosecute vendettas.

... Independents and centrists might find themselves disappointed or irked with a President DeSantis. But they’d be irked within normal parameters, not fearing that he’d burn the country down in a fit of rage because he thinks someone wasn’t being fair to him.

Robert Iger of Disney, your thoughts?

DeSantis, for all his pugnaciousness, colors inside the lines, operating within the traditionally defined powers of his office and the constitutional framework of government.

Um, no. Here's something we learned yesterday:

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis has been working for months on plans to tear down and rebuild both the Department of Justice and the FBI....

The governor has privately told advisors that he will hire and fire plenty of federal personnel [and] reorganize entire agencies....

But his ambitions go beyond bureaucratic restructuring. He wants to physically remove large swathes of the DOJ from the District of Columbia, including FBI headquarters....

He vowed in that call to order “some of the problematic components of the DOJ” be uprooted, reorganized, and then promptly “shipped to other parts of the country.”

As we learned last month, DeSantis wants to wield maximal executive power as president. Among other things, he enthusiastically advocates the politicization of the Justice Department:

... DeSantis’ opening message to Republican voters is that he would bring [a] methodical precision to the White House in ways that past executives – Trump included – failed to.

“Presidents have not been willing to wield Article Two power to discipline the bureaucracy,” DeSantis said. “I’ll come in and on day one we’ll be spitting nails.”

... He would dispel with the longstanding tradition that government institutions like the US Department of Justice operate independently from the president....

“Republican presidents have accepted the canard that the DOJ and FBI are quote, independent,” DeSantis said. “They are not independent agencies. They are part of the executive branch. They answer to the elected President of the United States.”

One of his plans appears to be the criminalization of corporate diversity efforts, as Breitbart reported yesterday:

On Monday’s “Hugh Hewitt Show,” ... DeSantis stated, “[W]e’re also going to refocus functions of things like federal law enforcement.... So, for example, like the Civil Rights Division, our Civil Rights Division in Justice will do all discrimination. Yes, of course, you don’t discriminate against a racial minority, but you also have to look at corporate America, government, academia, how they are wielding things like DEI in a discriminatory manner against other people. And so, we will say no tolerance for discrimination of all kinds, regardless of whether you’re in the majority or the minority.”

And Jim Geraghty assured us that DeSantis was such a mellow guy! Who knew?

TUCKER CARLSON'S DUMBER-THAN-USUAL ARGUMENT: TRUMP WAS CHARGED WITH FELONIES BECAUSE HE'S A MAN OF PEACE

On Twitter last night, Tucker Carlson responded to the arraignment of Donald Trump with a paranoid theory that's even more credulity-straining than most of Carlson's other public pronouncements. According to Carlson, Trump was targeted for arrest and lifelong incarceration seven years ago, when he said the most unsayable thing: that no weapons of mass destruction were found in Iraq.

Ep. 3 America's principles are at stake pic.twitter.com/eJNSUVvvqY

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) June 13, 2023

About the arraignment, Carlson said:

These were the first steps in a process that is designed to put Donald Trump behind bars for the rest of his life.

Cable news carried every moment of it live. "It's unprecedented!" they told us with what looked like shock. But they weren't shocked. They knew this was coming. Everyone who's paid attention knew it was. What just happened was always going to happen.

It's been inevitable since February 16, 2016.

... seven and a half years later, we can point to the precise moment that permanent Washington decided to send Donald Trump to prison. Here it is. It's from the Republican candidates' debate in Greenville, South Carolina:

[TRUMP:] "We should have never been in Iraq; we have destabilized the Middle East. They lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction. There were none and they knew there were none. There were no weapons of mass destruction."

... Can he say that? Well, he said it anyway, and by saying that, he sealed his fate. That was the one thing you were not allowed to say because it implicated too many people on both sides, which on this topic is really just one side.

No, really, that's the theory. Forget the fact that Barack Obama ran for the 2008 Democratic presidential nomination and won in large part because he said he'd always opposed the Iraq War. Forget the fact that Obama won reelection in 2012, and is not in prison now. Forget the fact that Trump said he'd withdraw the last troops from Afghanistan and nearly won the Electral College a second time, while President Biden made good on Trump's promise, for which every Carlson fans hates him. Yup, Carlson wants you to believe that Trump called out the WMD lie in 2016 and "permanent Washington" responded with a vow to imprison him for that reason and that reason alone.

"Permanent Washington" declared Trump Public Enemy #1, Carlson says, yet Trump somehow thwarted the best efforts of the most powerful people on the planet by winning the presidency. Trump was impeached in 2019, but these incredibly powerful people who hated him more than anyone on earth somehow couldn't arrange a conviction in the Senate. Then, in his 2021 impeachment, once again they somehow couldn't arrange a conviction, which would have made it unlawful for him to seek the presidency a third time -- even though they agree that he's extraordinarily threatentening to them. Jailing him for life is the only solution! (Which is why Establishmentarian Nikki Haley is talking about pardoning him if he's convicted, which would free him to run for president in 2028.)

This has 435,000 likers on Twitter, in case you're wondering whether anyone could actually fall for it.

Perhaps you've already figured out why Moscow's favorite American political commentator chose this particular take on the Trump indictment. If you don't understand, Carlson essentially spells it out:

Have you seen [America]? ... How are things looking? Well, they should look great -- the federal government spent six and a half trillion dollars last year. That's more than any government has ever spent ever. So at the very least you would expect pristine public roads. Oh, no. That's not what you see when you drive around this country. There are potholes and Jersey barriers everywhere. Looks like Tegucigalpa before the Chinese decided to rebuild the infrastructure of Honduras. We don't have China buying our roads, so they're falling apart.

You'd think the people you would pass on your road trip would look happy and prosperous; again, this is a very rich country. But a lot of them don't. Quite a few appear to be strung out on drugs. You see them shuffling by shuttered storefronts in small towns. And you wonder as you see all of this: Where did all the money go? It's certainly not here?

Well, it's in Washington. It's in Fairfax and Loudoun counties, and in leafy, perfectly manicured Northwest D.C. And, of course, a huge chunk of it went to Ukraine, to Zelenskyy and his friends. Not because you voted for that -- you didn't vote to give it to them. You never would. But because Joe Biden and his many allies, from Chuck Schumer to Mitch McConnell to Paul Ryan and every single news anchor on all of television, all of them believe that Ukraine -- its borders, its future, its infrastructure -- are all more important than the town that you live in.

They sincerely think that, and it's obvious everyone in power thinks that -- except for Donald Trump.

Whatever else you say about him, Trump is the one guy with an actual shot of becoming president who dissents from Washington's long-standing pointless war agenda. And for that, that one fact, they are trying to take Trump out before you can vote for him. And that should upset you more than anything that's happened in American politics in your lifetime.

It's pro-Putin horseshoe-ism. I'm sure it will be eagerly retransmitted on Russian state television. And it's nuts.

The political establishment might not love Trump, but much of it fears him strictly because he's seen as the least electable Republican. A large portion of the Establishment would vastly prefer a second Trump term to the reelection of Joe Biden. That's the clear intent of the Establishmentarians of No Labels, who think Trump would lose to Biden one-on-one and believe he'll need a little help from a candidate meant to split the Democratic vote.

But Carlson fans presumably believe what's in this monologue. Maybe they take it "seriously but not literally." I think they believe it literally. And that's insane.

TRUMP'S CAMPAIGN HAS BECOME A PERSECUTION FANTASY CAMP

Yesterday I told you that some figures on the right were warning supporters of Donald Trump not to show up at the Miami courthouse where his arraignment is scheduled to take place. According to the warnings, a demonstration for Trump could turn into another January 6, which, to the right, means entrapment by the evil FBI and Deep State -- persecution for crimes of violence that are actually the work of Black Lives Matter and Antifa activists in disguise.

Trump might be the most narcissistic person alive, but he's done a better job at making Republican voters feel engaged in his presidential campaign than his nearest rival, Ron DeSantis. Immediately after Trump's most recent indictment, he pinned a message to the top of his Truth Social feed: “THEY’RE NOT COMING AFTER ME, THEY’RE COMING AFTER YOU—I’M JUST STANDING IN THEIR WAY!” He said this in his first speech after the recent indictment. He also said it in March when his New York indictment was imminent. He said it when he was president:

pic.twitter.com/DutxclyZw9

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 19, 2019

There's no way someone as self-involved as Trump would think of saying this on his own. Someone must have fed him the line years ago. But it works, for reasons I'm sure Trump doesn't understand.

Part of the evil genius of Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media is personalization of the news. I don't mean in a realistic way -- I mean in a delusional way. The message of Fox and the rest of the right-wing media is THEY'RE COMING FOR YOU! In April of last year, The New York Times published an analysis of hundreds of Tucker Carlson broadcasts and noted that his go-to message was that "they" want to do bad things to "you."

To the right, the arrests and convictions that followed January 6 are proof of concept. People aren't being arrested and convicted because they're actually guilty of crimes -- they're being arrested and convicted because they're out to get you. This particular message didn't come from Trump -- it came from the right-wing misinformation machine, and Trump eventually picked it up. The misinformation machine (which includes many Republican members of Congress) offers other examples of them being out to get you, including the alleged Justice Department targeting of right-wingers for speaking out at school board meetings. (The Justice Department was actually concerned about violent threats in response to school issues.) Trump has barely focused on this, but the rest of the right is obsessed with this and other alleged examples of "weaponization of government."

This all has the effect of making ordinary voters feel as if they're just like Trump -- the evil Regime is targeting them just the way it's targeting him. The regime is targeting him because it fears them. They're fighting alongside their manly hero! And the Deep State fears them just as much!

Ron DeSantis doesn't give voters anything like this sence of vicarious persecution. In the DeSantis narrative, the good people of America are victimized by evil wokeism, but the solution is for the people to sit back and passively watch as Ron DeSantis clinically excises woke from American life. If you're on the right, that seems swell, which is why he's in second place in the polls -- but where's the fun? Or, more accurately, where's the delicious grievance? Where's the sense that you're fighting alongside a superhero?

In the Trump narrative, there's a first-person-shooter fantasy: You are the target of the most evil forces in the world, and you get to shoot at them. In the DeSantis narrative, he does all the killing, and he insists that he's already done most of the work, at least in Florida, so there's nothing participatory about what he's doing. The Trump narrative plus the Fox narrative encourages voters to believe that they're just like the heroic billionaire who takes incoming for Freedom.

No wonder Trump is beating DeSantis by more than two to one. For right-wing voters, the persecution fantasy is fun.

IF THERE'S NO VIOLENCE AT TRUMP'S ARRAIGNMENT TOMORROW, THANK THE LAW ENFORCEMENT RESPONSE TO JANUARY 6 (updated)

A Vice story that ran last Friday has a lot of people worried about violence when Donald Trump is arraigned in Miami tomorrow:

... former President Donald Trump’s far-right supporters have threatened civil war after news broke Thursday that the former president was indicted for allegedly taking classified documents from the White House without permission.

“We need to start killing these traitorous fuckstains,” wrote one Trump supporter on The Donald, a rabidly pro-Trump message board that played a key role in planning the January 6 attack on the Capitol. Another user added: “It's not gonna stop until bodies start stacking up. We are not civilly represented anymore and they'll come for us next. Some of us, they already have.”

And a follow-up today:

“MAGA will make Waco look like a tea party,” a user with the screen name 1776take2 wrote about the planned protest on the pro-Trump messaging board known as The Donald.... “I used to laugh when my mom said that she was afraid if she registered Republican she may be arrested one day. I’m not laughing any more. Just buying more ammo.”

Kari Lake talks about mass gun violence. Multiple rallies are said to be in the works, one of them reportedly being organized by the Proud Boys.

But there might not be violence -- perhaps because of MAGA paranoia.

Here's an open letter from some January 6 prisoners, published this morning at Gateway Pundit:

To all Patriots intending to show support for President Trump on Tuesday at the Florida Federal Courthouse

My name is Jon Mellis and I’m a J6er sitting in the DC Jail with many other J6ers. We love you.

We appreciate your support of President Trump. Thank you for showing up for him.

Please do NOT let any violence happen while you show your support and patriotism to the greatest President in American history.

We all know too well that government operatives may be involved. Antifa and BLM agitators will try to attack you, egg you on, and even infiltrate your crowd to cause problems.

DO NOT allow violence to occur.

Be your brothers’ keeper and be your sisters’ keeper by de-escalating any possible altercations.

We J6ers know too well that ANY and ALL violence will be blamed on Trump supporters no matter who initiates it.

God bless you all. Take care of each other and don’t give the Left what they want. Show the Christian love we know you have and be safe. We J6ers stand with you. We love you.

Strength and Honor,
Jon Mellis and the J6ers in the DC Jail

I think these are widespread beliefs in MAGA World: that the violence on January 6 was the work of "Antifa and BLM agitators" (and/or FBI provocateurs), and that the punishment for any unlawful conduct will always be disproportionately harsh if the guilty parties are right-wing. My guess is that this message is going out through multiple channels.

If fear of experiencing the same very unfair treatment the insurrectionists have experienced inspires the Trumpers to behave tomorrow, or to stay away from the courthouse altogether, I won't complain. They think they ought to be allowed to terrorize their enemies without consequence until they get what they want. The January 6 arrests and sentences might just be an effective deterrent.

*****

UPDATE: Here's Congressman Clay Higgins (R.-La.) sending the same message as Mellis, in a press release issued yesterday.

My fellow conservatives, the DOJ/FBI doesn’t expect to imprison Trump, they expect to imprison you. They want J6 again, in Miami and in your city and in mine. They want MAGA conservatives to react to this perimeter probe and in doing so, set yourselves up for targeted persecution and further entrapment. They want to intercept a busload of conservatives en route to protest and create conflicts during the stop. They are hoping to provoke conservative Americans. Don’t fall for the trap. Maintain your family. Live your life. Live free and pay close attention and make your voice heard, yes... but don’t become an incarcerated pawn in the agenda driven DOJ/FBI strategy to oppress conservatives across America.

President Trump can take care of himself in court, he knows we’ve got his back. The DOJ knows they’ve got nothing on him. They’re doing this because they want you to let your anger overwhelm your strategic judgment and they expect you to step willingly into their trap. Don’t do it. Be aware and be prepared for anything, know your bridges as we say... but maintain your calm. Rock steady calm.

The paranoia is widespread.

*****

AND... From an ex-Newsmax host:

You’re a moron if you show up at the courthouse in Miami tomorrow.

Your presence will do nothing but put you in a hot water. It’ll change nothing except your life for the worse.

And if you’re so stupid you learned nothing from J6, you deserve everything you get.

— John Cardillo (@johncardillo) June 13, 2023

THE STOCHASTIC TERROR LADY IS PROBABLY THE GOP'S 2028 FRONT-RUNNER

I know a lot of people believe that the Republican Party will revert to "normal" once Donald Trump leaves politics, but I suspect that this is the party's 2028 presidential favorite:

In Georgia, at the Republican state convention, Kari Lake, who refused to concede the Arizona election for governor in 2022 and who is an ardent defender of [Donald] Trump, emphasized that many of Mr. Trump’s supporters owned guns.

“I have a message tonight for Merrick Garland and Jack Smith and Joe Biden — and the guys back there in the fake news media, you should listen up as well, this one is for you,” Ms. Lake said. “If you want to get to President Trump, you are going to have go through me, and you are going to have to go through 75 million Americans just like me. And I’m going to tell you, most of us are card-carrying members of the N.R.A.”

The crowd cheered.

Ms. Lake added: “That’s not a threat, that’s a public service announcement.”

That's horrifying to decent people -- which is why it's catnip to Republican voters.

The conventional wisdom is that Ron DeSantis will lose the nomination in 2024 and then be first in line for it four years later, but I think Trump will rough DeSantis up so badly that Stochastic Terror Evita will be outpolling him by this point in 2027. DeSantis tells voters he's stripping liberals, LGBTers, and other enemies of conservatism of their civil rights through legal means. That's swell, but Lake is saying: Forget trying to pass laws. Just shoot the bastards. She's suggesting that the real counter-revolution will be participatory, which probably sounds like much more fun to non-college-educated rage addicts in the GOP base than DeSantis's coup-by-bureaucrats.

Please note that Lake didn't just make an appearance at the Georgia Republican convention -- she was the keynote speaker. On the surface, that seems crazy: She's from out of state, she lost her 2022 race, and Georgia is supposed to be one Republican-dominated state where Trumpist madness was kept at bay. Governor Brian Kemp and Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger may have resisted Trump's efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in their state and then easily prevailed in the 2022 primary and general election, but the rage endures. Kemp and Raffensperger both skipped the convention. Lake and Trump attended.

The people who put together "Justice for All," a recording of January 6 prisoners singing the national anthem accompanied by a Donald Trump speech, have now interwoven Kari Lake and a country-rock band called the Truth Bombers in an anti-Biden song called "81 Million Votes, My Ass."



The song is currently at #21 on the iTunes Top 100 and, bizarrely, #1 on the iTunes Top 100 Alternative Songs chart. (I'm not sure who still uses iTunes, but it might be the generation that votes heavily in Republican primaries.)

Maybe that doesn't seem terribly impressive, but hey, no one's asking Tim Scott, or even Ron DeSantis, to make a godawful fist-pumping right-wing protest record.

Lake, of course, lost her race for governor in 2022, and she might lose a Senate race in 2024. But Trump is blamed for GOP electoral losses in 2018, 2020, 2021 (the Georgia Senate runoffs), and 2022, and he's the GOP's presidential front-runner now. It's been said that Democrats embrace "superstar losers" like Stacey Abrams and Beto O'Rourke. I think Lake could be the GOP's top superstar loser -- and besides, even if she fails again next year, most of the party will insist that she really won. So I think it'll be her race to lose.

IF YOU'RE NOT A TRUMP DEBUNKER, YOU'RE A TRUMP ENABLER

Peter Baker of The New York Times believes that the federal indictment of Donald Trump could lead to a national crisis in which believers in the rule of law could be helpless to defend themselves.

History’s first federal indictment against a former president poses one of the gravest challenges to democracy the country has ever faced. It represents either a validation of the rule-of-law principle that even the most powerful face accountability for their actions or the moment when a vast swath of the public becomes convinced that the system has been irredeemably corrupted by partisanship.

Mr. Trump, his allies and even some of his Republican rivals have embarked on a strategy to encourage the latter view, arguing that law enforcement has been hijacked by President Biden and the Democrats to take out his strongest opponent for re-election next year.

Baker acknowledges that special counsel Jack Smith took a "by-the-book approach" and "laid out a damning series of facts" in the Trump indictment. He also acknowledges that "Few if any of" Trump's defenders "bothered to wait to read the indictment before backing Mr. Trump’s all-caps assertion that it was merely part of the 'GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME.'" But, he laments, the facts of the case might not matter:

In the public arena ... it may be a one-sided fight. Mr. Trump and his allies can scream as loudly as they can that the system is unfair, but prosecutors are bound by rules limiting how much they can say in response. To the extent that Democrats defend prosecutors, it may only buttress the point Mr. Trump is trying to make to the audience he is trying to reach.

But what about the media, Peter? Doesn't the media have a role to play in all of this?

During Trump's presidency, the media was chastised for an unwillingness to take the side of the truth when dealing with a president who was a habitual liar. Eventually, some parts of the media abandoned their reluctance to call a presidential lie a lie. But Trump had considerable success in selling his lies to the public because others in the media treated the lies with the respect they thought was due to uttterances of a president.

If the media won't debunk the arguments of ex-president Trump now, then the media is making this mistake again.

We all enjoy criticizing CNN, but give the recently deposed Chris Licht credit for this: he never fired fact-checker Daniel Dale. Yesterday morning, Dale debunked "Seven of Trump’s False or Unsupported Claims on the Documents Investigation," among them:

Trump has repeatedly claimed that the Presidential Records Act, a 1978 law, says he was supposed to hold negotiations with the National Archives and Records Administration about the return of official documents after his presidency.

... Trump’s claim is false. The Presidential Records Act says that, the moment a president leaves office, NARA gets custody and control of all presidential records from his administration. Nothing in the law says there should be a negotiation between a former president and NARA over a former president’s return of presidential documents – much less that there should have been a monthslong battle after NARA first contacted Trump’s team in 2021 to try to get some of the records that had not been handed over at the end of his presidency.

The key sentence from the Presidential Records Act is unequivocal: “Upon the conclusion of a President’s term of office, or if a President serves consecutive terms upon the conclusion of the last term, the Archivist of the United States shall assume responsibility for the custody, control, and preservation of, and access to, the Presidential records of that President.”

It's not just Trump. A Wall Street Journal editorial lies about the Presidential Records Act:

... it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.

Every honest news organization needs to rebut these lies and other dishonest statements by Trump and his enablers. These debunkings need to be given a place of prominence in the news organizations' coverage. Partisan Republican voters won't listen, but people in the middle might.

Dale also debunks claims that previous presidents retained millions of documents; that the federal government could have had Trump's documents back just for the asking; that Trump had already declassified the documwnts; and so on. In a separate fact-check, Dale makes clear that Joe Biden didn't unlawfully move "1850 boxes" of documents to the University of Delaware, as Trump repeatedly insists. (The documents in question were senatorial papers, which aren't subject to the same restrictions as presidential and vice presidential papers, and are deemed by law to be the property of the former senators.)

In order to keep the base angry, Trump and his defenders will just keep lying. The media needs to debunk these lies vigorously and tirelessly, and make the rebuttals as visible as possible. Otherwise, the press is failing to do its job.

TRUMP'S INDICTMENT AND "IDEAS THAT ARE LYING AROUND" (updated)

In 1982, the libertarian economist Milton Friedman wrote this:

Only a crisis — actual or perceived — produces real change. When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around. That, I believe, is our basic function: to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes the politically inevitable.

Last month, Cory Doctorow explained how this approach helped shift the country to the right:

Friedman had one project: to roll back the widespread postwar prosperity produced by wildly popular programs like the New Deal and the Great Society....

Friedman’s paymasters ... demanded a theory of change that explained how the gains of working people could be stripped away....

Friedman had a tried-and-true answer to these skeptical queries: someday, there will come a crisis. When the crisis comes, people will look for answers. The answers they choose will be those “ideas lying around” that have been promoted by the status quo’s loudest critics.

The "ideas that were lying around" began to be useful during the energy crises of the 1970s.

... to people reeling in crisis, Friedman insisted that the missing oil was somehow the product of unionization, pollution controls, women’s lib, and the civil rights movement. Though this was transparent nonsense, akin to blaming witches for a crop failure, the crisis was so dislocating, and Friedman’s ideas had been lying around for so long, that they moved swiftly to the center.

The result: the neoliberalism of the Jimmy Carter era, followed by the drastic changes that started in Ronald Reagan's presidency, from which the American middle class still hasn't recovered.

In the present era, Republicans and the right-wing media have routinized the practice of ensuring that there are ideas "lying around." Right now, as news breaks of his impending indictment, Donald Trump is trying to use one particular idea that he and fellow Republicans have had "lying around" for a while.

The idea is: We must stop the weaponization of government.

This is a much bigger idea than I, Donald Trump, the world's most innocent man, am the victim of a witch hunt. This idea encompasses the zombie lie that the Biden Justice Department targeted right-wing parents as "domestic terrorists" if they spoke up at school board meetings (DoJ was concerned only about threats of violence), as well as the notion that January 6 prisoners are suffering politcal persecution (while alleged FBI provocateurs who were at the Capitol remain free), and the belief that DoJ has gone easy on Hillary Clinton and "the Biden crime family."

The "weaponization of government" idea hasn't spread beyond the right, but it has the potential to drive base turnout even if Trump is convicted or drops out of the race, which is why so many Trump rivals, including Ron DeSantis, are invoking the weaponization narrative. DeSantis on Twitter:

We have for years witnessed an uneven application of the law depending upon political affiliation.

Why so zealous in pursuing Trump yet so passive about Hillary or Hunter?

Republicans want "weaponization" to be what the Dobbs decision has been to Democrats -- an outrage that drives turnout. One difference, of course, is that the Dobbs decision actually was an outrage. The "weaponization" idea is nonsense, but it can be useful to the GOP even if Trump is forced out of the race. The next Republican president can use it to genuinely politicize the Justice Department, as Ron DeSantis has promised to do. There isn't much limit to what a GOP president could do under those circumstances, especially with a rubber-stamp Congress and Supreme Court.

Republicans have invented a crisis of weaponization. Trump is using the idea to win the 2024 primaries, and he and his rivals are using it to try to win the general election. We have to turn out to ensure they don't succeed.

*****

UPDATE: In The New York Times, Luke Broadwater misreads the GOP reaction to Trump's indictment.

Top House Republicans intensified their attacks on President Biden and the Justice Department on Friday after the federal indictment of former President Donald J. Trump, suggesting falsely that Mr. Biden, not a grand jury made up of American citizens, had charged him with crimes as part of a political vendetta.

It was the latest instance of top-ranking Republicans in Congress closing ranks behind the former president and helping to spread unfounded accusations against the government.

... House Republican leaders have closely aligned themselves with Mr. Trump for years, and are under more intense pressure than ever from their right flank to defend him....

House Republicans may feel they're under pressure to defend Trump, but they're echoing this talking point because they expect it to help them win elections next year. Kevin McCarthy agreed to the formation of a committee on weaponization because he knows that stirring up outrage increases voter loyalty within his party. It's not hard to understand.

BUT WE'RE THE EXTREMISTS, RIGHT?

Here in New York City, we're in the third day of godawful air quality as a result of wildfires in Canada. Here's a photo I took out my apartment window yesterday:

That might not have been precisely when the city's air quality index topped out at 868 -- any reading over 100 is dangerous -- but I'm guessing it was approximately then. (We're just under 200 now. Yippie!)

Tim Dickinson and Miles Klee of Rolling Stone note that right-wing crazies have many theories about all this:

Stew Peters is a far-right media host and conspiracy monger, infamous for his unhinged film claiming Covid-19 is caused by synthetic snake venom. Peters used his Telegram account on June 5 to blame the wildfires on government weaponry.

“Watch ALL of SE Quebec catch on fire at the EXACT SAME TIME,” Peters wrote, linking to a viral TikTok video of satellite imagery. “Statistically impossible to happen by accident,” Peters claimed without evidence. “Clearly our governments are targeting us with Directed Energy Weapons (DEWs).”

Peters produced the 2022 "documentary" Died Suddenly, which argued that we're experiencing a mass die-off caused by COVID vaccines; the film had nearly 20 million views as of January 2023 and made him a hero on the right. So he's not just a crank -- he's an influencer.

Then there's this theory:

A variety of conspiracy theorists see the fires as part of a plot to limit freedom anew, now that the restrictions of the Covid pandemic have been largely eliminated....

“As many of us have noticed from the start, many of the covid zealots also push climate crisis shit,” a redditor wrote Wednesday on r/CoronavirusCirclejerk, criticizing people who recommended masking up until the air has cleared. A member of r/conspiracy was more explicit: “Wildfires are the new Covid,” they declared. “Stay indoors, wear a mask, fear pushed by the news, it will only be two weeks... Is anyone else felling [sic] déjà vu?” Commenters agreed, saying, “Climate lockdowns are coming” and “the hype is starting, NYC mayor just recommended masks lmao.”

Those are just random people on Reddit. But on Fox, Jeanine Pirro complained that "Democrats are pumping up climate hysteria and bringing back, you guessed it, mask insanity." Her colleague Jesse Watters followed up:

“Covid: stay home, wear a mask. Smoke bomb: stay home, wear a mask. Elections: stay home, wear a mask. Nuke strike: stay home, wear a mask,” he mocked. “The government is prepared for anything.”

One more:

Urban planners trying to improve quality of life with “15-minute city” designs — reducing car use by ensuring people are just 15 minutes’ walking or biking distance to anything they might need — have been bedeviled by conspiracy theorists who claim they want to imprison people in tiny residential districts. Now it appears that a few of those alarmists are drawing baseless connections between the concept and the Canadian fires....

On Truth Social, David “Nino” Rodriguez, a former heavyweight boxer at one point ranked among the top in the world, amplified similar claims to 33,000 followers. “The fires in Canada are being used for nothing more than to displace families, ruin homes and migrate people into 15-minute cities,” he warned.

So "they" are trying to force people to migrate to 15-minute cities by ... um, ruining the air quality of America's prime example of a 15-minute city, New York. Got it.

We'll see whether Rodriguez mentions this theory on YouTube, where he has more than a quarter million followers, and not for boxing content:

This is the right. These are people who vote for Republicans. And yet, as Mark Mellman notes in an op-ed for The Hill, Americans regard the two major parties as equally extreme, when they're not reaching the conclusion that Democrats are more extreme:

... a Votecast survey, conducted by University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center in conjunction with the 2022 election, asked whether each party was “too tolerant of extremist groups.” Fifty-three percent found Republicans too tolerant of extremists and an identical 53 percent said the same of Democrats.

In response to another question, 47 percent said Republicans need more moderate candidates while 49 percent expressed the same desire for Democrats....

A second set of evidence comes from a survey we conducted among Latino voters in Nevada before the 2022 election together with our colleagues at Castillo and Associates....

More Nevada Latinos ... believed Democrats were too liberal than that Republicans were too conservative. Again, that’s among a segment we consider part of the Democratic base.

... a recent Franklin & Marshall poll ... asked Pennsylvania voters which party was more mainstream (which party “expresses views that are CLOSEST to the views of most Americans”) on seven issues.

Democrats were more mainstream on three — abortion, Social Security/Medicare and elections. Republicans won out on four topics — immigration, gun control, government spending and policing and public safety.

The infuriating item in that list is "gun control." Most Americans want reasonable restrictions on guns. The Republican Party is unmovable in its opposition to these restrictions. Yet it's seen as closer to the mainstream on this issue.

I'm thinking about this as we're learning about the death of Pat Robertson, who used to tell us that gay people caused 9/11 and feminism leads to witchcraft and child murder. America moved to the right in the 1980s, but one limit on the right's growth was the fact that much of America saw religious conservatives as priggish, authoritarian weirdos. Even people who didn't follow politics closely linked the GOP to these narrow-minded prudes (who were also often money-grubbers and sex hypocrites).

I wish it were more widely understood today that Republicanism is rife with extremist freakishness of all varieties. It's not just Marjorie Taylor Greene. The party won't magically become "normal" if Tim Scott or Chris Christie somehow wins the presidential nomination. I wish Republicans had a reputation -- outside liberal circles -- as whackjobs who want to rewrite America's laws to conform to their own paranoia. We're not doing enough to "other" the right. We need to do more.

JONATHAN SWAN, YOUNG FOGEY

Jonathan Swan, who's usually better than this, begins his story about Mike Pence's presidential campaign launch this way:

Mike Pence is the most conservative candidate competing for the presidency. The former vice president wants abortion banned from the point of conception. He’s the only major candidate calling for cuts to Social Security and Medicare. And he has the most hawkish foreign policy, especially on confronting Russia.

Swan making the argument that no one else in the race is as conservative as Pence reminds me of baby boomers who say there isn't any good music these days. What those boomers mean is that there's no modern music that fits their definition of "good music," a definition that became fixed in their heads decades ago. Swan is doing the same thing with "conservative" -- which is weird because Swan is only 37 years old. He's nostalgically defining "conservatism" as "Reagan conservatism" even though he was born during Ronald Reagan's second term.

Are school library book bans, the rerouting of immigrants to liberal cities, and attacks on critical race theory and LGBT people somehow not conservative? In that case, I guess Pence is more conservative than Ron DeSantis. Is it not conservative to suggest that trans high school athletes are responsible for a rise in suicide among teenage girls, as Nikki Haley just did? Is it not conservative to want to send U.S. troops into Mexico to combat drug cartels, as Donald Trump and Vivek Ramaswamy have proposed?

Swan writes:

Being the most conservative used to matter in Republican presidential primaries.

Not anymore.

The president Mr. Pence served under, Donald J. Trump, transformed the G.O.P. electorate.... Mr. Pence has not really changed all that much since he was governor of Indiana less than a decade ago, but his party has. It’s the same Mike Pence but a different G.O.P., and it’s a different G.O.P. because of his former boss.

It's also a different GOP because the right is entrepreneurial, rewarding anyone who finds a clever new way to own the libs. Trump did change the party, but Trump isn't the reason right-wingers are obsessed with CRT, trans youth, Bud Light and Target -- people like Christopher Rufo and Chaya Raichik and Matt Walsh make moral panics like this happen, using the megaphones and money of Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk, and a hundred behind-the-scenes billionaire check-writers, none of them named Trump.

I know what Swan means. But conservatism isn't an ancient text -- it's a living, festering, mutating virus. Pence just hasn't evolved with it.

FOX COMMENTERS THINK A DEAD BLACK MOTHER MEANS STAND YOUR GROUND IS WORKING JUST FINE IN FLORIDA

A confrontation between Florida neighbors led to a fatal shooting on Friday. Fox News has a fairly straightforward report:

A Florida mother was shot and killed through a front door by her neighbor over the weekend in what authorities are calling a "neighborhood feud" that involved the victim’s children.

... The woman, later identified Ajike "AJ" Shantrell Owens, was rushed to a hospital, where she died, FOX35 Orlando reported.

The neighbor, who has not been publicly identified, has not been arrested or charged with a crime, claiming that the shooting was in self-defense under Florida’s "Stand Your Ground" law, authorities said.

... [Marion County sheriff Billy] Woods said the shooting appeared to happen after an encounter between the neighbor and Owens’ children.

Owens confronted the neighbor after her children told her that the neighbor threw an object toward the children, hitting one of them, Woods said.

The ensuing encounter between Owens and the neighbor was "aggressive," according to Woods, and may have involved banging on doors and verbal threats. Woods said these claims are still under investigation.

The neighbor then fired multiple shots through the front door, striking Owens.

Owens was Black. The Fox story doesn't mention this, but other news outlets have noted that the shooter is white.

While some of the commenters who have responded to the Fox story wish it could have been resolved without violence, quite a few of them think this all worked out exactly as it should have -- what the shooter did was a reasonable and proportional response. Oh, and the dead mother and her kids were ... well, you know:

Hey kids, stay out of the neighbor's yard. Don't let me tell you again! You got it! Problem solved!!

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she received the Ashley Babbitt treatment for trespassing, don't trespass and don't die, wow that was easy.

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The four children’s fathers were not available for comment.

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You never know what they are capable of. Always error on the side of safety and preservation of your life.

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Come to my house kicking and beating on a door trying to harm me... WELL she got what she wanted is all I can say. you can not go to someone's HOME and try to threaten them. There is no legal justification for the one that got shot to be over in someone else's yard kicking and screaming threats toward that homeowner. Maybe she should have watched her kids and kept them out of out peoples yard OR not been so violent toward others.. Kids gonna grow up just ..........

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I'm sure her little honor roll kids were little angels.

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... The person who got shot was the violent vicious mother of the heathens living next door. The shooter was being victimized and fearful of her life.

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prison not needed in this case, the violent one dead!...thankfully she won't be spawning anymore welfare tickets

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I’m a retired combat vet. Someone pounding on my front door screaming that are going to harm me gets shot. I won’t wait or hesitate to blow a hole the size of a baseball thru it. Don’t bring violence or threat of violence to my world and I’ll let you live.

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Everyone knows how these people behave; no impulse control, exhibit extreme aggression with threats of violence. Lets not pretend Ajike was behaving like an adult.

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There are lots more of these people we need to divest our society of.

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Sounds like the Mom did not control her bad children and because they did not obey or were not told to behave by the Mom they got their mother killed.

As I've noted, a few people think the shooting was an overreaction, like this commenter:

I am 100% for protecting yourself. However, if the woman did not have a weapon in her hand than the shooter should have just shut the door and called the police. You can't just shoot someone and say your standing your ground when no one has entered your home.

But others respond:

Stand your ground laws apply everywhere in the state, not just if someone enters your home. If I'm walking down the street and someone starts acting aggressively towards me and making verbal threats, stand your ground law applies.

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If there was a screen door opened (it does not say) that is breaking and entering in Florida. It does not matter where the screen door is located, it is breaking and entering.

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if I told someone to leave my property and they refused and show violent tendencies i don't think i'd wait for the police...and why does a weapon need to be in hand? she could have easily had one concealed....so next time you want to scream and shout at being cut-off or some other slight, approach cautiously and courteously, anyone could be packing these days

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They DO NOT have to be entering the house to be considered a threat. Being on her property and not leaving... and acting aggressively is good enough to justify taking the shot.

As far as these commenters are considered, a citizen-administered death penalty is the appropriate sentence for any level of perceived or imagined threat, especially when the person causing the discomfort is one of "these people." We knew that, I guess, but we need to be reminded every so often in case we find ourselves thinking they might share our moral values.