All My Trials

 

Breaking wind ground in Aberdeen. Nobody seems to know how to credit this photo of TFG keeping his ears covered, may have originated here. 

While Donald Trump hides in Scotland from the trial for the defamation and battery (under New York's new Adult Survivor Law) of the writer E. Jean Carroll for raping her in a Bergdorf Goodman dressing room in the mid-1990s and then lying about it 20 years later—as it winds toward its close (today Lisa Birnbach, the writer friend Carroll called after the rape, and Jessica Leeds, the woman he assaulted in the first-class section of a flying plane, offered their testimony), I thought it might be fun to do a quick survey of where he stands in his legal situation and, given that there are now a few declared Republican presidential candidates, what effect it might have on the race.

I don't see how there's any possibility he wins this first case. The witness testimony is really compelling, Trump's attorney is nasty and disrespectful, both to plaintiff and to judge (evidently following his client's instructions) and looks like a thug, Trump won't be testifying at all, not that it would help him if he did, and since it's a civil trial the jury's doesn't need to be convinced "beyond a reasonable doubt" but only "by a preponderance of the evidence." On the other hand I imagine he files an appeal immediately, or a whole raft of appeals, indefinitely delaying the actual end of the case, and I'm afraid we won't really feel it's over for months or years.

Tea and Psychopathy

 

Image from The Baffler, September 2019 (covering the tenth anniversary celebrations of Tea Party Patriots Action, an organization founded in 2017)

More "economic anxiety", right at the top of the original Tea Party food chain, in this ill-organized but enthralling piece by Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones:

Jenny Beth Martin happened to hear CNBC contributor Rick Santelli on her car radio. He was ranting from the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange about the administration’s plan to bail out homeowners at risk of foreclosure—or, as he called them, “losers.” “This is America!” he shouted. “How many of you people want to pay for your neighbor’s mortgages [when they have] an extra bathroom and can’t pay their bills?”

Martin was primed for this message. A graduate of the University of Georgia and the daughter of a Methodist minister, she’d been involved in Republican politics for years, volunteering for Sen. Saxby Chambliss (R-Ga.) and later working as a GOP consultant. For about eight years, her husband, Lee, had owned a company that supplied temporary workers to local businesses. The company went belly up in 2007, court records show, and the Martins filed for bankruptcy. In 2009, they were more than $1.4 million in debt. Lee owed the IRS $1 million and more than $172,000 to Georgia’s tax authorities. The Martins eventually lost their home and their twin Lincoln Navigators.

Their own economic calamity did not make the Martins more sympathetic to the victims of the Great Recession. “The contrast hit me hard,” Martin wrote in the 2012 book she co-authored with Mark Meckler (now the interim CEO of Parler), Tea Party Patriots: The Second American Revolution. “While my husband and I cleaned our neighbors’ bathrooms to pay our bills, our taxes were being spent by our government to pay for the mortgages of people who could not, or would not, pay their bills.”

Honey, you don't seem to have been paying your taxes. And that million dollars wasn't income tax (which is generally dischargeable under Chapter 7 bankruptcy), either, unless it was willfully evaded tax (as in repeated failure to pay, or failure to file returns) or fraud (such as hiding bank accounts from IRS). Most likely at least some of it was the payroll tax you should have been paying for your workers in that rent-seeking enterprise in which you extruded cash out of the local economy's desire to get work done without paying benefits.

For the Record: Old, mad, despised postscript

Illustration by Matt Chase via Politico.

We noted Thursday how Trump seemed to be tooling restrictions on international travel with an eye to the Trump Organization's bottom line, rejoicing that the first restrictions might get Americans to book more rooms in the States and exempting countries where he owns resorts (UK and Ireland) from the restrictions on flights from Europe. Occurs to me that his long insistence (overcome last night) on a payroll tax was about quite a bit more money than that:

As an employer of a lot of people, Trump has to match the 6.2% that every one of his employees pays. That's a lot of money he was hoping to deal himself. https://t.co/5PgtbenrEv

— The Tests Are All Perfect (@Yastreblyansky) March 14, 2020

Yep https://t.co/W2Wp6jGpOi pic.twitter.com/hVkLuDXA5u

— The Tests Are All Perfect (@Yastreblyansky) March 14, 2020

So 7.65% in total.

The Trump Doctrine: I Only Care About Big Stuff

Beach at Biarritz, via en.plages.tv.

Everything you assumed was true is going to turn out to be true. Most outlets don't even have time for this one tonight, on top of the Marie Yovanovitch testimony and the Roger Stone verdict, but I just love it. Especially in the summer.

Remember how Trump announced in August at the Group of Seven meeting in Biarritz that he thought next year's summit should be held at the Doral Golf Resort in Miami? And on October 17th it turned out to be true, in a bravura press conference performance by Mick Mulvaney?

So we use the same set of criteria that previous administrations have used.  We started with a list of about a dozen, just on paper.  And we sent an advance team out to actually visit 10 locations in several states.  We visited California, Colorado, Florida, Hawaii, Michigan, North Carolina, Tennessee, and Utah.  Now, we got that list down to just under 10, and the advance team went out to visit those.  And from there, we got down to four finalists that our senior team went out to look at.  They looked at — I think it was one in Hawaii, two in Utah, and then the Mar-a-Lago facility in Florida.

And it became apparent at the end of that process that Doral was, by far and away — far and away — the best physical facility for this meeting.  In fact, I was talking to one of the advance teams when they came back, and I said, “What was it like?”  And they said, “Mick, you’re not going to believe this, but it’s almost like they built this facility to host this type of event.”

Actually, no, according to emails sourced by the Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington and reported in the Washington Post. Starting in late May, by early July the Secret Service had whittled the list down to four sites in Hawaii, California, Utah, and North Carolina, and were preparing to send senior staffers for a final trip, when something happened to make them chop the California and North Carolina sites and add Miami:

Grift for the Mill

Haunted by the story of the Executive Office for Immigration Review, which is where the Justice Department's immigration policy is administered from, and thus the employer of the nation's 400 immigration judges, and sends all its employees a near-daily bloggy compilation of memos and news clippings and the like:

But on Monday, tucked between stories from The Washington Post and a public radio station, the briefing included a summary of and a link to a blog post from what the Southern Poverty Law Center has designated a “Hate Group”: Vdare.com, a frequent platform for white nationalists espousing anti-Semitic and anti-immigration rhetoric.

The Vdare post singles out immigration judges by name, uses their photos and refers to them with an anti-Semitic slur. 

Coming the same week, as Reis Thebault notes at the Washington Post, as Trump scolded American Jews for being "disloyal" when they vote for Democrats and singled out the fanatical Jew-hater Henry Ford for praise, and a growing recognition that the White House may have an anti-Semitism problem. As the president of the judges' union, Ashley Tabbador, explained in a letter to the EOIR director James McHenry, the post was creating a hostile work environment: