Month: February 2020

Greg Sargent’s analysis of Elizabeth Warren’s unique place in the primary is very insightful. An excerpt:

“I’d like to talk about who we’re running against: a billionaire who calls women fat broads and horse-faced lesbians,” Warren said, right at the outset. “No, I’m not talking about Donald Trump. I’m talking about Mayor Bloomberg.”

“Democrats are not going to win if we have a nominee who has a history of hiding his tax returns, of harassing women and of supporting racist policies like redlining and stop-and-frisk,” Warren continued, adding: “Democrats take a huge risk if we just substitute one arrogant billionaire for another.”

That, of course, is an indictment not just of Bloomberg (who has his own history of demeaning women) but also of Trump: The president is a disgusting misogynist and a racist in his own right, and he’s engaged in nonstop corrupt self-dealing, facilitated by concealed tax returns — and a corrupted system.

Similarly, in another big exchange, Warren cornered Bloomberg by pressing him to release female employees from nondisclosure agreements. But Warren linked this back to the other arrogant billionaire, insisting Democrats can’t beat Trump with a nominee “who has who knows how many nondisclosure agreements” hidden away somewhere.

The argument isn’t just that a misogynist billionaire can’t beat Trump. It’s that a misogynist billionaire who conceals misconduct through clever gaming of the system can’t beat Trump.

This is what that adds up to:

The through line here is an indictment of elite corruption — that is, of elites acting with impunity.’

Her focus on Bloomberg’s history of covering up sexual discrimination and misconduct and his own sexist language shows that she’s not just talking about economics. She also talked at length about the challenges people of color face in our system. It’s an indictment of this powerfully corrupt system that disadvantages people for any number of reasons.

I personally find her holistic focus on corruption at all levels and around all the various ways in which our society is unequal to be persuasive. She’s the only one who correctly sees all this as a complex mixture of politics, culture and economics. This is why her scathing attacks on Trump’s disdain for the rule of law and Bloomberg’s elite impunity hit so sharply. They go beyond money.

She interested in abuse of power, writ large, on every dimension.

When she said before that she is the Democratic unity candidate this is what she was getting at. She just needed to demonstrate what she meant by that. I think she did that last night. Whether enough people care remains to be seen.

Update: lol

Like Lenin said, the capitalists will always happily sell the left the rope it will use to hang them.

— Richard Yeselson (@yeselson) February 20, 2020

Howie Klein posted this today at Down With Tyranny:

I never thought I’d live to be 72. The thought of it actually shocks me– and it’s a really good feeling. Look forward to it– especially if we haveMedicare-for-All headed our way.

I’ve been getting a ton of well-wishes, especially on Facebook. Instead of sending a card or anything, can you consider contributing to any congressional candidate dedicated to passing Medicare-for-All? Personally, I would surely have died without Medicare.

You can find 33 Medicare-for-All candidates by clicking the thermometer on the right, both Senate candidates and House candidates. Even if you just want to give one dollar to one candidate… it would be a mitzvah.

I know we’re all thinking about the presidential race right now, but unless we get some good solid progressives into Congress, we’re not going to get the fundamental, transformative change we need. Even if we elect a great president like Bernie or Elizabeth (or a Bernie-Elizabeth ticket), we’re going to need more members like Ro Khanna and Pramila Jayapal and Ted Lieu, AOC, Ayanna Pressley, Andy Levin and Jamie Raskin to pass the kind of progressive agenda the status quo establishment is going to fight ever step of the way to keep from being enacted.

Click on the thermometer to wish Howie a happy birthday. It’s for a good cause!

This guy …

President Donald Trump is expected to install Richard Grenell, his current Ambassador to Germany, as his next Acting Director of National Intelligence, according to The New York Times. Grenell is known as a bombastic Trump loyalist who has not been well received in Berlin.

The DNI is a Cabinet-level official who sits at the very top of the entire Intelligence Community, serving as the head of the 17 federal agencies that comprise it. They also serve as the President’s chief advisor on national security, and produce the top-secret President’s Daily Brief (PDB).

Federal law states quite clearly, “Any individual nominated for appointment as Director of National Intelligence shall have extensive national security expertise.”

He does not have that experience. He is a Fox News personality and twitter troll who inexplicably got confirmed to be the Ambassador to Germany and everybody just shrugged as they do when Trump does something ridiculous.

However, Trump is just appointing him to be”acting” which I guess means none of the rules apply. I’m just surprised he didn’t put Jared “I don’t qualify for a security clearance” Kushner in that job too.

Obviously, Grenell is being brought in to root out Deep State actors who have not pledged personal fealty to Dear Leader. I can’t think another reason you’d hire this particular person for that particular job:

Here’s one dispatch from his early days in Germany:

According to a recent Breitbart article, Grenell is a “big fan” of Austrian chancellor Sebastian Kurz, the boyish face of the his country’s far right government notable for banning headscarves for kids and otherwise making immigrants feel deeply, sometimes dangerously unwanted.  Grenell appears to see Kurz as a representative for the “conservatives around Europe” that he, the ambassador, would like to “empower.”

That sounded to a lot of people like Grenell playing advance man for a Bannonesque populist assault on the European political order.  So now Berlin would like Grenell to explain what exactly he was talking about. “We asked the U.S. side for clarification,” a foreign ministry spokesperson said Monday morning. The Daily Beast did the same thing. A U.S. embassy spokesperson told us “the quotes are genuine“ and Grenell “stands by the interview.”

Indeed, the medium was part of the message. Breitbart used to be Steve Bannon’s baby, and the interview was published as the former Trump campaign manager and advisor has been touring the Continent touting his ideas for destroying the European Union.  Chris Tomlinson, the young reporter who interviewed Grenell, is a self-described “beer nerd” whose most consistent beat appears to be cheering for the the selfie-stick-clutching right-wing extremists who once wanted to block rescue missions on the Mediterranean and more recently have taken to patrolling the Alps to hunt down refugees.

It is bad form for a diplomat to act like a spokesperson for any foreign political movement. In the U.S. Nicholas Burns, who was under secretary of state for political affairs in the George W. Bush administration, pointed out the “cardinal rule of diplomacy” that ambassadors “must not interfere in the domestic politics of the countries to which they are accredited.” In Germany, the former leader of the Social Democrats promptly compared Grenell to a “right-wing extremist colonial officer.”  

At a time when foreign policy analysts are worried that misunderstandings will amplify tensions between the U.S. and Germany, the new U.S. ambassador isn’t just doing Breitbart interviews—he also tweets about twice as much as President Donald J. Trump, which is saying something.

On his first day at work in Berlin he tweeted that, in light of President Trump sabotaging the Iran Nuclear Deal, “Germans doing business in Iran should wind down operations immediately.” The Germans’ angry responses on Twitter mounted into the thousands.ADVERTISING

One reason Grenell’s confirmation in the Senate was held up for almost a year reportedly  was concern among Democrats about his caustic and sometimes sexist social media habits. When he was the spokeman for Republican candidate Mitt Romney in the 2012 elections, Grenell tried to deleted a raft of nasty tweets. “Hillary [Clinton] is starting to look like Madeleine Albright,” he declared in one post, and noted in another that Michelle Obama, who likes sports, supposedly “was sweating on the East Room Carpet.”

After the Breitbart interview was published, the tweeting continued. Many critics suggested Grenell wants to “empower” figures like Alexander Gauland, the co-leader of the far right Alternative für Deutschland party.   “Absurd, I condemn these comments completely,“ Grenell tweeted, even though the 77-year-old Gauland loves to quote Edmund Burke and mainstream German media outlets have sometimes described him as a “clever“ or “old-fashioned“ conservative.

Probably Grenell realized the timing for a Gauland endorsement would look really very bad just now. Over the weekend, Gauland told a room full of fans from his party’s youth wing that Adolf Hitler, who brought about the death of at least 50 million people, is “just bird shit in more than 1,000 years of successful German history.“

Trump is obviously giving this particular unqualified, Nazi-curious, assassin access to all of America’s most closely held secrets for a reason. And it’s not a good one.

Pull Yourself Up by Bootstraps? Go Ahead, Try It https://t.co/a1JzVKbZ2k

— mike luckovich (@mluckovichajc) February 20, 2020

Amidst this morning’s play-by-play on last night’s Democratic debate — Elizabeth Warren “pretty much laid Michael Bloomberg out on the stage and then ran a truck back and forth over him while the crowd cheered like it was a Monster Jam rally” — Nicholas Kristof deconstructs the “bootstraps” myth behind so much bad Republican policy. Democrats might find it a handy counter-narrative should the economy not flag before November.

It seems the saying to “pull oneself up by the bootstraps” originated as 19th century snark for a preposterously impossible task. Building a perpetual motion device, perhaps, or heaving oneself over a river or fence by yanking up on your bootlaces. Practitioners of the unholy amalgam of Jesus Christ, Ayn Rand, and Horatio Alger that passes for American Christianity have repurposed the expression to excuse callousness towards their neighbors. God helps those who help themselves, because they won’t with their tax dollars (2 Chronicles 17:35). *

Kristof explains how the bootstraps narrative drives out good policy. It implies Americans bettered themselves “through rugged individualism — think of the pioneers!” Never mind that perhaps a quarter of Americans owe some of their family wealth to the homestead acts. Plus, public education, rural electrification, and the G.I. Bill, programs a much poorer US of A managed to afford somehow because it wanted to.

As the Luckovich cartoon atop Kristof’s column suggests, the bootstraps narrative fosters the excuse that development and benefits programs for Average Joe foster “dependency.” Yet, in countries with more robust social welfare systems, fewer people of working age drop out of the workforce than here in the U.S.

Third, Kristof argues, “the bootstraps narrative implies that everyone can pull a Ben Carson (Carson himself falls for this fallacy). This is like arguing that because some people can run a four-minute mile, everyone can.”

There’s more to the piece, including the road -to-Olympia experience of a conservative, Washington state carpenter who has had “a real change of heart.” He now favors government programs to help “provide opportunity and address addiction, mental illness and education.”

Rather than debates over which presidential candidate has the better plan that won’t get past a Mitch McConnell-led Senate, Democrats should speak to Americans’ values.

https://twitter.com/AnandWrites/status/1227620307596402689

Anand Giridharadas (Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World ) explained recently:

It’s un-American to let people die just because they forgot to register for health insurance. We don’t do that in foreign battlefields, we shouldn’t do it here.

When Michael Bloomberg says, “Medicare-for-All would bring America to its knees,” you talk back to Michael Bloomberg and you say, “You know what? The country that beat the Nazis can probably survive the implementation of Medicare for All. So if you don’t believe America can handle that, you’re not a believer, but I’m a patriot.”

As I said in a 2008 radio spot, “Leave no one behind” is a code of honor for our military. Why does that code apply only inside the base perimeter, but not outside in the private sector where it’s dog-eat-dog? This side of the line: All for one and one for all. That side: I’ve got mine, screw you. To our right-leaning neighbors, that somehow makes sense and both represent the best America has to offer. No, seriously.

Giridharadas says, “Talk like that in Michigan.” Talk like that in debates.

* The verse doesn’t exist. This makes it a handy reference for all sayings Americans think are buried in the Bible somewhere but are not.

● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

For The Win, 3rd Edition is ready for download. 2,600+ counties contacted, roughly 900 “opens,” over 400 downloads. (It’s a lead-a-horse effort.) Request a copy of my free countywide election mechanics guide at ForTheWin.us. This is what winning looks like.

Trump retweeted all these today:

#WATCH US President Donald Trump in Washington on his visit to India: I happen to like PM Modi a lot. He told me we will have 7 million people between the airport and the event. It's going to be the largest stadium in the world. It's going to be very exciting. pic.twitter.com/FdusHCInJ9

— ANI (@ANI) February 19, 2020

That leaves out the part at the beginning where he says that “India has not been good to the United State but “… he likes Modi a lot. Why? Because he’s pulling out all the stops to flatter the man he obviously understands is a barking moron.

#NamasteTrump | A 22-kilometre long roadshow is planned in Ahmedabad to welcome the United States President @realDonaldTrump on February 24@PriyankaSh25 has all the details! pic.twitter.com/8gOOoWchr6

— WION (@WIONews) February 19, 2020

Here's all that you need to know about US President Donald Trump's visit to India.#ITVideo
More videos: https://t.co/wMGGKJy9GN pic.twitter.com/QMXaRSO1CL

— IndiaToday (@IndiaToday) February 19, 2020

The world's newest & biggest #cricket stadium — also the venue of joint Modi-Trump visit in western #India's Gujarat state. #TrumpIndiaVisit https://t.co/2hgo3olufd

— Bhuvan Bagga 把奥文 (@Bhuvanbagga) February 19, 2020

He didn’t retweet this one:

Ahmedabad Municipal Corp is building a wall in front of slum along the road connecting Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel Intl Airport to Indira Bridge. The US Pres is scheduled to visit Ahmedabad during his 2-day India visit. Bijal Patel,Mayor says,"I haven't seen it,don't know about it". pic.twitter.com/moKjCy0M44

— ANI (@ANI) February 13, 2020

The US President’s motorcade is to go along the walled-in area from Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel International airport to Motera stadium, which Trump is to inaugurate. 

The Motera stadium, which has a capacity of around 100,000 people, is then to host an event called  “Kem cho Trump” (How are you, Trump?).

Ahead of his impending visit, Trump said that he was willing to ink a trade deal with India if the country turned out to be the “right one.” 

It’s very smart to fete him like an emperor. That will almost assuredly make him argue in their favor if anyone points out to him that the trade agreement isn’t favorable to the US.

No matter what the sentence is that the judge gives to Roger Stone, Bill Barr has already sent a message to the Department of Justice and the general public:

“Threatening witnesses to help Trump won’t be punished. Loyalty to Trump will be rewarded.”

Threatening witnesses is not a joke. Even if the person who made them looks like a cartoon villain. Even if the person who they were directed at, Randy Credico, said that he didn’t take them seriously and didn’t want Stone sent to jail.  The original prosecutors decided and, the parole officers agreed, that the sentencing guidelines of 7 to 9 years for Stone was appropriate.

People need to know that the death threats to Randy Credico were part of a 2 YEAR CAMPAIGN to intimidate him. That includes kidnapping his dog who is his service support animal. 

I’m writing this before the judge announces her decision. Because of Barr’s involvement ANY sentence she gives will need to be interpreted. Likely the judge herself will write about why she chose the sentence she did.

The media and their legal analysts will describe the back and forth about sentencing guidelines. They will look at what the judge decided and ask if she is standing up for the law or standing up to Trump and Barr.

If you want to hear how a former United States Attorney and state Attorney General think about the case, listen to this podcast. Bharara and Milgram acknowledge how there could be differences of opinions on sentencing. They explain how USAs decide what to do and when. They explain how Barr’s actions are out of line. (16 sec clip

Full episode of Stay Tuned with Preet Bharara from Feb 12, 2020

I’m not part of the legal commentary community but they will do what I’ve seen the media do with Trump. They look at his actions and start with a “good faith explanation” to be through and to prove they aren’t biased. Chris Hayes, Rachel Maddow, and Lawrence O’Donnell will then have them on to explain why this happened.

This good faith reason for the actions give Trump cover and time–until Trump tweets out the real reason he did it.

I’m sure the legal community sees this pattern too, but what I want is someone who can cut right to the bad faith actions and say, “This breaks the law, here is how it happened and this is what we must do to punish the people who broke the law.”

If it is just another Trump Norm Breaker™ I say dig deeper because as we have seen some things that are legal become illegal when there is corrupt intent.

I’m glad the judges are having an emergency meeting but unless Trump appointed judges make a strong recommendation the GOP will attack them for being Democrat “activist judges.”

Frankly I don’t know who should be leading the charge to protect the integrity of the DOJ. I’m glad to see Elizabeth Warren coming out on this, but we also need someone who understands the DOJ, the constitution, devious lawyers, mob tactics, power leverage and politics to direct actions.

There is another way that the DOJ is like the media. The DOJ people love to brag about how apolitical they are. But just like how the right wing said telling the truth makes you the liberal media, the right wing will say following the law makes you a democrat who hates Trump.

The Stone case is part of a larger plan from Barr and Trump to reshape the justice system to bend to power.

Because of all these factors we need someone who IS political and an activist to help fight back. 

What power do we have now to prevent this reshaping?

1. Understand the tricks Barr is using
   Help us out law-talking people!
2. Expose the corrupt intent behind the tricks
   We’ve all learned what corrupt intent is, now we need the email, Twitter and audio evidence.
3. Remove or weaken the people who are protecting Trump
   Jim Jordan is on the Judiciary committee. His cover up of the sexual abuse at OSU makes him weak. Who else in this area is weak?

I want to know who are our allies in this fight and what they can do. I want someone who understands that leverage is being used over our enemies and have a plan for us to remove it or use our own leverage of this knowledge against them.

Bottom line: What are the multiple actions different groups should be taking now?

No matter what the judge rules there must be additional actions taken to stop the interference in our justice system by Trump and Barr. Until we do Trump’s lifelong lesson is proved true. Intimidation works!

Perhaps people would be likely to dismiss this as the desperate ravings of a wanted man, but after yesterday it is all too believable:

Donald Trump offered Julian Assange a pardon if he would say Russia was not involved in leaking Democratic party emails, a court in London has been told. The extraordinary claim was made at Westminster magistrates court before the opening next week of Assange’s legal battle to block attempts to extradite him to the US.

Rohrabacher told the Wall Street Journal that as part of the deal he was proposing, Assange would have to hand over a computer drive or other data storage device that would prove that Russia was not the source of the hacked emails. “He would get nothing, obviously, if what he gave us was not proof,” Rohrabacher said.

The report quoted an unnamed administration official as saying that Kelly had told Rohrabacher that the proposal “was best directed to the intelligence community”. The same official said Kelly did not convey Rohrabacher’s message to Trump, who was unaware of the details of the proposed deal.

Of course, Trump dispatched Rohrabacher to bribe Assange to clear him in the Russia probe. Isn’t it obvious? But unfortunately, we know that Dear Leader is not subject to the rule of law so whatevs …

Here’s something to keep you up tonight:

Conventional wisdom is that those who stayed home in 2016 cost Hillary Clinton the election and if Democrats can just increase turnout in 2020, they’ll defeat President Donald Trump in November. That assumption is likely wrong.

Report after report has shown that nonvoters nationwide prefer Democrats over Republicans. But new data from the Knight Foundation suggests that if every eligible adult voted in 2020, Democrats would likely increase their popular vote lead from the 2016 presidential election—but still lose the Electoral College.

In the closest battleground states, more nonvoters say they’re likely to support Trump, if they vote, than support the Democratic Party’s nominee. And that could have serious implications for the two major parties’ traditional approaches to getting people to the polls on Election Day.

And that could be true even if the Democrats win a huge popular vote victory.

This is not an argument for low turnout. Everyone should want all people in a democracy to vote. But it’s pretty clear that we don’t have a normal democracy. For a long time, it functioned as one, even with this flawed system. But now we’re starting to see the weaknesses being tested.

The good news in that study for Democrats is that the Republicans are so racist that they are suppressing the vote in states where they are very likely to be disenfranchising their own potential voters. They seem to have assumed that the only people affected are people of color who are more likely to vote for the Democrats. It’s possible that some of those people of color would actually vote for the Republicans but it’s just as likely that they are disenfranchising white non-voters who are sympathetic to them. Oops.

But again, the real problem is the electoral college. The United States should elect the person who gets the most votes, period. We haven’t been a loose confederation of sovereign states for 250 years now. It’s time we voted like a real country.

Sure, Elizabeth Warren may be third in the delegate count at the moment, ahead of Bloomberg, Klobuchar and Biden. And yes, she may have come in a close second to the tie in Iowa but that obviously didn’t matter because nobody talked about it and New Hampshire voters wrote her off because of it. But none of that means it’s too early for the media to treat her like she has simply vaporized into thin air.

Alexandra Petri at the Washington Post, sums it up with more humor than I can muster:

Determined to look on the bright side of the fact that her name has mysteriously not been included in head-to-head polling matchups and keeps vanishing from the lips of pundits despite her having one more delegate than Amy Klobuchar after the first two states (and eight more delegates than Mike Bloomberg), Sen. Elizabeth Warren looks forward to using this newfound invisibility to her advantage in the debate.

“Mayor Pete will be talking,” a voice told me, coming from I could not tell where, “and then suddenly his tie will be waving in the air! Or Mike Bloomberg will clear his throat, about to answer, but then an invisible hand will make an unexpected adjustment to his microphone! Imagine, an invisible hand that opposes billionaires! It’ll really be somethin’!” The voice seemed optimistic that this apparent magic would really make an impression.

Warren is hoping to maybe sneak up on Tom Steyer as he attempts to make an overture to Bernie Sanders and gently say “Boo!” Likewise, she looks forward to delivering a detailed response, only to have the moderators blink, baffled, in her direction, before turning back to Buttigieg. She had contemplated covering herself in money to make herself visible, but decided that this approach was best left to Bloomberg.AD

Yet the initial novelty of invisibility seemed to have worn off. After one wild ride secretly treating herself to an airline Economy Plus seat, the voice said that she was eager to be seen again so she could take part in discussions instead of sitting there for hours with only a floating policy paper visible, waiting to be called upon. “Also, the selfie line is a real disappointment lately.”

There’s more and it’s all depressingly on target.

Remember: the media knows what’s best. They determine the narratives under which all presidential campaigns live or die. We voters just have to sort our way through it as best we can.

This is not new. I wrote this one in 2015:

I think people sense the press puts its thumbs on the scale in a number of different ways in campaign coverage. They even admit it, as when USA Today’s Susan Page told Chuck Todd that journalists were yearning for a Joe Biden candidacy. Now it may be that they don’t have an ideological agenda but rather a bias toward drama, but the effect is the same. (And frankly, I do believe a sort of negative or positive group-think takes hold in the media that also tilts the playing field.)

The point is that what the press chooses to report is just as important as the reporting itself. If they knowingly publish or broadcast information they know is suspect and they also know that it influences the way campaigns are forced to deal with this suspect information, they are knowingly influencing our politics in a direction it would not necessarily go if the coverage, which they admit is suspect, was different.

They have agency in this — they are not potted plants. These polls can be presented in context and the analysis that flows from these polls can be presented in context. They can choose not to run screaming headlines about campaigns being in “free fall” or talking about dumb things like word clouds all day on cable as if they mean something real. The coverage is not some abstract thing that has a life of its own.

I’ve discussed that dozens of times over the years and it never really changes. In fact, I’ve pretty much given up on media criticism in this vein because I see little appetite for changing it even among progressives when it’s one of their favorites getting the boost. Voters need to educate themselves and that isn’t an easy task with all the noise and confusion. But that’s what democracy really relies on at the end of the day, regardless. Let’s hope that the electorate’s common sense asserts itself this time. The stakes have never been greater.

Aaron T. Rupar runs down the list of Trump’s pardons yesterday and it’s even more shocking than I realized. He’s not even trying to hide his corruption now:

The backdrop to all of this is Trump’s recently completed impeachment trial — one stemming from the president getting caught trying to leverage congressionally approved military aid to Ukraine into politically motived investigations of the Bidens.

Trump tried to justify his actions by arguing that as president, “I have an absolute right, perhaps even a duty, to investigate, or have investigated, CORRUPTION.” That logic was echoed by his legal team during the trial. But it was belied by the fact that a top Defense Department official told Congress last May that Ukraine had made good enough progress on anti-corruption efforts to merit the aid — not to mention the glaring hypocrisy stemming Trump’s refusal to divest from his business, one that enables foreign governments, corporations, and US politicians to curry favor with him by patronizing his properties and directly enriching him.

Then, in the hours following Trump’s string of pardons and commutations, the Daily Beast reported that family members of one of the men Trump pardoned, Paul Pogue, donated lavishly to his fundraising committee and campaign in the months leading up to the pardon — a chain of events that appears to be about as corrupt as it gets.

He points out that both Bush Sr and Bill Clinton had pardon scandals but they at least claimed to have a principled reason for doing it and went through the normal channels. Trump doesn’t even try:

The New York Times’ Maggie Haberman and Michael Shear reported that Trump didn’t follow Justice Department vetting process before making the announcements, which they described as “mostly aimed at wiping clean the slates of rich, powerful and well-connected white men.” And statements released by the White House listed a number of Fox News personalities as character witnesses.

He’s making it pretty clear that this was also part of his revenge tour:

Meanwhile, in comments to reporters, Trump erased the DOJ by describing himself as “the chief law enforcement officer of the country.” He went on to suggest that any prosecution in which former FBI director James Comey was even indirectly involved is fair game for pardons.

TRUMP: "I'm actually, I guess, the chief law enforcement officer of the country." (The attorney general is the top law enforcement officer of the country.) pic.twitter.com/5ajK5CkTxB

— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) February 18, 2020

Rupar concludes that the purpose of Trump’s pardons is:

[C]onsolidating power; dismissing the sort of obstruction of justice and financial crimes he’s been implicated in; and laying the groundwork for pardoning or commuting the sentence of longtime confidante Roger Stone, who’s scheduled to be sentenced on Thursday.

Blatantly using the pardon power for personal and political purposes is yet another Trump innovation. It’s hard to imagine how to put that evil genie back in the bottle either. Some other authoritarian will almost certainly find it useful as well.