Saturday, November 16, 2024

The Emperor's New Cabinet: Postscript

 

Margaret Rutherford as Miss Jane Marple, via Novel Suspects.

The details of how Matt Gaetz got the attorney general offer have been coming out like the facts in an Agatha Christie puzzle—I mean literally who was heard whispering with whom and where they were sitting on the plane—particularly in a Politico report (I first heard about it from Jay Kuo) citing their reporter Meridith McGraw, and it's stimulating the narrativium for me: I'm pretty sure I know what happened, and it's not at all what you might think, or what Tim Snyder has suggested, but something much more farcical, though perhaps equally chilling.

The background is that Republican operative Susie Wiles, co-chair of the Trump campaign and soon-to-be chief of staff, has been playing adult-in-the-room, keeping the boss on a bit of a leash and trying to keep him sensible, and had furnished him with a nice respectable shortlist of attorney general candidates, but he didn't like them. He wants his Roy Cohn, and the guys on the list seemed to have a different concept of the job; as Marc Caputo reports it, they

looked at AG as if they were applying for a judicial appointment. They talked about their vaunted legal theories and constitutional bullshit....

The Gaetz-for-AG plan came together [Wednesday], just hours before it was announced, Meridith tells us. It was hatched aboard Trump’s airplane en route to Washington, on which Gaetz was a passenger. A Trump official revealed more details to Playbook late last night: BORIS EPSHTEYN played a central role in the development, lobbying Trump to choose Gaetz while incoming White House chief of staff SUSIE WILES was in a different, adjacent room on the plane, apparently unaware.

So the setup is the two thugs, Epshteyn and Gaetz, confabulating, and Gaetz in a state of high anxiety, with the House Ethics Committee report coming out in 48 hours, and you know it's going to be really bad, and one of them comes up with a brilliant idea for a scheme: if they can get Trump to solve his attorney general problem by naming Gaetz, Gaetz will have an excuse for resigning his House seat and stopping the release of the report. They can do it right now, while Wiles isn't looking.

So Epshteyn walks over to where Trump is sitting and starts pitching him to give Gaetz the job: Gaetz wouldn't be giving him constitutional bullshit, he'd be hounding your enemies, sir, just like you wanted. In Caputo's words, he'd "go over there and start cuttin' fuckin' heads." 

And of course Trump loves it—he wouldn't have thought of it himself, but he doesn't care that Gaetz is completely unqualified (he'd already named the equally unqualified Pete Hegseth and Tulsi Gabbard to their important national security positions), and he doesn't care that Gaetz is a coke-snorting child fucker who told former Rep., now Senator Markwayne Mullin he would "crush Viagra and chase it with an energy drink so he could go all night" (though I'm guessing Trump—and Wiles—did not realize how much trouble Gaetz was in with the ethics committee). Gaetz is his kind of guy, a guy who understands his own hopes and aspirations, and once he's made up his mind there's nothing Wiles can do about it.

In other words, the fact that Gaetz is under investigation for sex trafficking is the fundamental reason that he is slated to become attorney general. It's happening because of the investigation and wouldn't have happened otherwise, though none of the characters but him and Epshteyn realize this. 

And I still have hopes the plan may fall through, because they weren't going to able to hide the crucial element, but the main thing I'm wondering about is how pervasive this kind of thing is in Trumpworld; how much it's pure thug behavior, rather than the big political issues we try to focus our minds on, that drives what happens there.


Friday, November 15, 2024

The Emperor's New Cabinet

Artist oddly unnamed. Via Red Cheeks Factory Shop.

So I guess you've heard that Health and Human Services Secretary-Designate Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is planning to devote himself to the crusade against unhealthy snacks, which sounds more like a First Lady gig than a cabinet position, but what do I know? I certainly agree that unhealthy snacks are unhealthy, choosing to go with the science on that as well as on vaccines, in contrast to whatever it is he's doing.

At first I thought it was funny that he appeared to be going with the liberal side on this issue, since we're all down on Doritos and Mountain Dew and up on water and organic granola, but I figured out that he's actually being a conservative in the Wilhoitian sense: he wants freedom for the nice suburban ladies who are the backbone of the anti-vaccine movement, to have their kids die of measles or polio if that's how they need to express themselves, and compulsion for the poor recipients of SNAP benefits, who won't be allowed to buy Doritos or Mountain Dew other than with folding money, even if they live in food deserts where kale isn't available. It's the same old ingroup/outgroup stuff.

Idly wondering, speaking of the cabinet choices, if Trump isn't actually trying to get himself impeached. It wasn't Kennedy's nomination for HHS that led me there but Gaetz's, for attorney general. At first, having a pretty clear idea how much almost everybody in both Houses of Congress hates Gaetz, Republicans even more than Democrats, I figured Trump was just saying "Fuck you" to all of them, and enjoying the opportunity to make them grovel.

Saturday, November 9, 2024

For the Record: You Can't Be Serious~

 

Still from The Manchurian Candidate, 1962.


Special counsel office working to wipe away the charges against Trump before January 20, including the ones about him stealing classified documents from the government, lying about them, refusing to give them back, conspiring to hide them from the FBI, showing them to hotel guests...

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:12 PM

Then on January 20 he gets a new security clearance! Is that wild or what? We can't have a trial to find out whether he's guilty of espionage or not, because that might interfere impermissibly with his ability to perform his official duties. We just have to give him the chance to do it again!

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:19 PM

That's in spite of the fact that we already know perfectly well he did it. I mean the polite thing is to say he's "innocent until proven guilty", but have you looked at the indictment? Have you looked at his sorry excuse for a defense? "Oh I secretly declassified them all!" I don't think so.

— Yastreblyansky (@yastreblyansky.bsky.social) November 8, 2024 at 10:25 PM

Thursday, November 7, 2024

A Government of Lulz, Not Men

 

Halloween costume by Skeleteen.

As we know, when president-elect Trump left the White House in January 2021, he took a lot of stuff that did not belong to him, but to the National Archives and Records Administration, as provided in the Presidential Records Act, according to which all records of a presidential administration are the property of NARA when the administration ends (with a few exceptions for personal stuff), and brought it to his business/home in Palm Beach, where he kept the boxes in various locations, including a storeroom, a bathroom, his own living quarters, and even on a ballroom stage. 

It's not clear how much stuff altogether Trump stole; NARA's first estimate, when they wrote to demand it back in May 2021, was "two dozen boxes". Trump, after eight months of denial and stalling, sent them 15 boxes in January 2022, but it soon became clear to NARA that there was more that he hadn't returned (including famous things like the love letters from Kim Jong Un and the hurricane map he altered with his Sharpie to prove he wasn't bullshitting when he told the nation the storm was heading for Alabama, though that was an obvious forgery and he plainly was bullshitting). Also, in the 15 boxes they got, 100 documents, 700 pages in all, were classified, which got the FBI more seriously involved in the case (it might be case of violating not only the Presidential Records Act, but also the Espionage Act, especially if Trump went around showing them to people, or moved them around to hide them from the FBI, both of which it turned out he definitely did), to the point where they searched the Florida property in August, and found some 11,000 stolen documents in maybe 22 more boxes altogether, including over 100 more classified documents, some with top secret and higher classification. Finally, that November, the attorney general named a special counsel, Jack Smith, to look into the matter of whether the ex-president had violated any laws, and after a seven-month grand jury investigation Smith decided he had, and issued a criminal indictment in June 2023. The indictment didn't mention the tens of thousands of non-classified documents that should have been given to the NARA—LOL, nobody in Washington cares if you steal stuff from a library, apparently—but he was charged, along with a couple of employees, with 37 federal crimes involving the classified documents, illegally retaining them and conspiring to obstruct justice in the government's effort to get its property back from the thief. All this really happened.

Meanwhile, Smith, in parallel with a special committee in the House of Representatives and the district attorney of Atlanta, Georgia, had also been investing Trump's conduct around the same time, after Joe Biden was elected president in November 2020, when Trump worked with a host of confederates to stop Biden's accession to office, with a combination of failed legal moves to cast the election in doubt, outright extortion, fraud, and conspiracy to change or fake the results, and ultimately violence in the riotous invasion of the US Capitol led (or pushed) by Trump-linked paramilitary groups, on January 6 2021. 

All this really happened too, as you know, and led to serious legal consequences for many of the people involved. In the Georgia case, which focused on Trump's efforts to get the state's election authorities to falsify the election results there in his favor (as also, in varying degrees, in Arizona, Michigan, Nevada, New Mexico, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin), it led to racketeering and other charges against Trump and 18 other defendants, among whom Georgia bail bondsman Scott Hall, Justice Department lawyer Kenneth Chesebro, and Trump personal lawyers Sydney Powell and Jenna Ellis have already pleaded guilty. In Washington, the January 6 insurrection has led to charges against more than 1,400 people, among whom at least 629 have pleaded guilty and another 300 or so have been convicted at trial so far (and two defendants, Wikipedia adds, have been acquitted of all charges). A lot of crimes were committed, and Trump was deeply involved in all of them.

But Trump himself has escaped all consequences. Not that he's innocent, or makes any serious claim to be innocent; he often claims, without evidence, that the 900 convicted January 6 defendants are innocent (even though most of them have pleaded guilty) and that those in prison are "political prisoners", but he offers no fact defense at all on his own part. His legal defense is based entirely on strategies of delay, legalist quibbling, judge-shopping (to judges who owe him their jobs, including the three "conservative" Supreme Court justices he nominated, half of an invincible majority if they refuse to recuse themselves, which they always do), intimidation and threats against judges and prosecutors and their families that would mean immediate jail for contempt for any other defendant, and endless appeal, and he's managed to avoid trial up through the 2024 election.

That is, not entirely: he's lost his company's criminal case in New York for bank and tax fraud, and a parallel civil case in which he was ordered to pay $450 million, which is still under appeal, so we can call him an adjudicated fraud, and he's lost E. Jean Carroll's civil case against him for defamation, for another $88 million or so making him additionally an adjudicated rapist, and he's got 34 felony convictions for falsifying business records in hiding Michael Cohen's hush money payments to Stormy Daniels in the 2020 campaign and his reimbursements to Cohen after his inauguration, for which he's to be sentenced on November 26. LOL, nobody cares about that either, and he'll appeal in any event. He'll never pay for that crime, and none of them cost him votes.

Trump was an openly criminal president from the day he took office, as I've been explaining since April 2017 with reference to that illegal hotel lease and the unconstitutional collection of foreign emoluments; and the main reason he's gotten away with it is that nobody is prepared for that, and nobody knows how to deal with it, even after eight years. It's not normal for presidents to break the law or violate the Constitution, and we don't have a mechanism for dealing with it. 

James Comey's and Robert Mueller's efforts to pin down a case against his collaboration with Russian intelligence in the 2016 campaign didn't quite add up to a case, obvious though it was that he'd been doing it (and it does add up to a case since the Senate's investigation was published in 2020, but no prosecutor had the stomach to try it), and while Mueller worked up an excellent case against Trump for obstruction of justice, that couldn't be prosecuted either, and not just because Attorney General Barr chose to join in the obstruction—there's that memo from the Office of Legal Counsel stating that indicting a sitting president would impermissibly interfere with his ability to carry out his duties, and practically everybody insists this has the force of law, even though it obviously doesn't. As Walter Dellinger wrote at Lawfare in 2018, there are six competing memos and briefs on the question, and it's not obvious that they even have a consistent message:

Consider the 1973 OLC memo stating that a sitting president should not be indicted. Far from being authoritative, it was essentially repudiated within months by the Justice Department in the United States’ filing in the Supreme Court in United States v. Nixon...Richard Nixon was so named in the Watergate indictment, and that inclusion was sustained by Judge John Sirica and defended by the United States...

Why would you even want a criminal president to carry on with his duties?

Of course there is supposed to be a specific remedy for that. The idea of the Constitution is that it should be dealt with by impeachment, anyway, but this turns out to be a partisan matter; Trump couldn't be impeached for anything until after the 2018 election gave us a Democratic House to do it, and Speaker Pelosi didn't want it to happen (not that she imagined Trump wasn't a criminal, but she thought it was bad politics), and when they finally managed, first over the smoking-gun evidence of Trump's effort to extort campaign help from the president of Ukraine, then over the January insurrection, the Republican Senate was unable to convict. (They came pretty close in the second case, with a majority of 57 to 43, including seven Republican senators, but they needed 67. Majority Leader Mitch McConnell voted to acquit, although he had said that "there is no question that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of that day...a mob was assaulting the Capitol in his name. These criminals were carrying his banners, hanging his flags, and screaming their loyalty to him.") Then, in the final insult, Chief Justice John Roberts ruled in Trump v. United States that it is unconstitutional to indict a president or ex-president for acts committed while he is acting in his official capacity. We don't know quite how far that extends. 

All these things really happened, but they didn't stop Trump from getting reelected on Tuesday. The price of butter is still kind of high, and on the reality side credit card interest rates are genuinely usurious (if you think Donald Trump is going to do a better job of lowering your credit card interest rate than a Democratic government getting its banking advice from Senator Elizabeth Warren, you deserve to be paying 23%, but I don't. Sweet Jesus.)

One of the most important things about the Jack Smith cases was that trying them would explore how far that insane new immunity rule can really be carried, but we aren't going to find out: the cases are going away, apparently, as well (we don't know about Georgia yet), even though we all know he's guilty of the crimes (including the less ignorant among the Republicans, who think it's funny, the fuckers—LOL, nothing matters), because Trump will be a sitting president (couch potato–in-chief) again before the trial can be held, a criminal president once again, for four more years of supervising his racketeering operation and watching out for his personal interests and funneling government money into his businesses and promoting his family and minions and grifting money out of his supporters for his lawyers and all the impulsiveness and ignorance and venality that characterized his first term endangering our human rights, our economy, our national security, and our planet. 

As I was typing through that last bit President Joe Biden came on the radio, as Kamala Harris did yesterday, for one of the inevitable unity rituals, congratulating Trump and offering his help in the peaceful transfer of power (the rituals Trump refused to participate in, committed as he was to the lie of the stolen election), and urging us all to stay calm and hopeful, because we're American, and I get that, I really do. He's still working, at the last minute, for the restoration of the norms that Trump smashed to pieces. He's showing Trump how to behave, though there's no chance Trump will learn. It has to be done. All the foreign leaders and all the legislators and governors here will try to do the same. They'll be doing it to protect us, because they don't want Trump to do anything crazy out of pique or rage, and they'll be doing it because they really care about the norms.

I really get it, but I was brought up with the slogan that we should have a government of laws, not men. I understand that's never been perfectly true and probably never would be, but I feel in elevating this lawless man and his minions to the highest position a second time, helplessly (we can't do otherwise), after we've learned so much more fully what he is, we are irretrievably losing—throwing in the trash—the aspiration the slogan represents.. 


Wednesday, November 6, 2024

Postmortem Note


Certainly looks like I was completely wrong about the presidential polls, in general, or at least the relation between the polls and what was going to happen. I'm still not convinced the race was ever as close and immobile as they kept portraying it, through all the turmoil from June to now. It's easier to talk about what did happen, which is clear from the NBC exit poll: it was the last-minute undecideds, so beloved of the media, probably the lowest propensity voters of all, who really did decide the election, "breaking" for Trump in the last week, after a period, mainly in September and October, when the main event was Democrats and Democrat leaners allowing themselves to get excited about the freshness and novelty of Harris and Walz, and the departure of Biden made the awfulness of Trump briefly more apparent.

But the majority of the voters decided Trump's awfulness didn't matter, in the finding of the AP VoteCast, a massive survey of 115,000 voters, and there's an element of incipient fascism in that:

Nearly 6 in 10 said Trump lacked the moral character to be president, a reflection of his criminal convictions, his often inflammatory rhetoric, his sexist remarks and actions and his denial of the 2020 presidential election results that fed into the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection. Slightly fewer than half said Harris did not possess the morality to be president.

Tuesday, November 5, 2024

This Is Not a Prediction

 

Daniel Drezner suggested there had been a perceptible change in the vibe around the presidential election in the last few days, driven perhaps in part by a change in the Harris campaign's rhetoric: after all these weeks of calling themselves the underdog, they've started allowing themselves to look confident: "We are on track to win this very close race," says campaign chair Jen O'Malley Dillon. Harris in her new stump speech says, "Make no mistake: we will win." 

That's a strategic decision, no doubt—there comes a moment when being the underdog stops paying off and you want your voters to start feeling they're on a bandwagon of winners, and this was a logical place to make that transition, but there's more to it than that. There's a fire in Harris's and Walz's rally crowds that's like when they were first introduced to the audience in late July and early August, while Trump's malevolent juggalos (as opposed to the musical Juggalos, who don't seem at all malevolent and have given Harris the nod) are plainly dwindling in these final days, as in the scene in Reading shown at top.

I can't at this point imagine Trump winning, and I mean that literally: I should be able to imagine it, I normally have a pretty decent imagination, but my mind just won't go there. 

Maybe it's one of those self-care moves, a sign of mental health even. I can always start imagining it again tomorrow if I have to. We've been preparing for it for two years at least. But for now, imagining Harris winning is so much easier. I'm not saying she will win, I'm just saying she should. If the world makes sense, you know, which is not an easily defended prior assumption and I'm aware of that. I understand she could lose; I'm just not imagining how it happens, or why, for the time being. 

They're running such a technically good campaign, for one thing. "Flawless" is the word that keeps coming up (googling "Harris campaign flawless" returns 850,000 results). They have raised inconceivably huge amounts of money—I'll go back to protesting against that sooner or later (and Obama for breaking the public financing system in 2008)—and they've spent it with discipline, whereas Trump has had difficulty raising money and spent far too much of it on paying his legal bills (that goes back to a while ago, but he's still doing it). 

Friday, November 1, 2024

Netanyahyu's Other War. III

 

Following the Israeli strike in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza, October 28, 2024. Photo by AFP via Times of Israel.

At a certain point Biden reached a conclusion: that the only way to stop the Gaza war and prevent a wider war all around the Middle East was to get rid of Netanyahu. I don't know when that happened, though an incident reported by Franklin Foer looks to me like a likely candidate, in late 2023, when Biden was entreating Netanyahu to turn over to the Palestinian Authority the tax money that Israel collects in the West Bank to finance the PA's work, such as it is (I'm not going to claim it's a very effective government), but Netanyahu doesn't care about the fact that it's the PA's money: on December 23

Biden called Netanyahu with a long list of concerns, urging him to release tax revenue that Israel owed to the Palestinian Authority, the government in the West Bank, which Netanyahu was always trying to undermine in his quest to prevent the establishment of an autonomous, fully functioning state there.

“You can’t let the PA collapse,” Biden told him. “We’re going to have a West Bank catastrophe to go with the Gaza catastrophe.”

As Netanyahu began to push back, Biden couldn’t contain his pique and barked into the phone, We’re done.

They wouldn’t speak again for almost a month.

That rhymes, in a way, with the story of Biden's worst blowup with Netanyahu, back during his vice presidency. That was about the West Bank too, as remembered by Michael Hirsh in Politico Magazine: