Month: April 2023

The Taliban is falling behind

This story from the L.A. Times about a 9-year-old and her goat got mine:

Every day for three months, Jessica Long’s young daughter walked and fed her goat, bonding with the brown and white floppy-eared animal named Cedar. But when it was time for Cedar to be sold and slaughtered at the Shasta District Fair last year, the 9-year-old just couldn’t go through with it.

“My daughter sobbed in her pen with her goat,” Long wrote to the Shasta County fair’s manager on June 27, 2022. “The barn was mostly empty and at the last minute I decided to break the rules and take the goat that night and deal with the consequences later.”

Long purchased the goat for her daughter to enter into the 4-H program with the Shasta District Fair. Children are taught how to care for farm animals. The animals are then entered in an auction to be sold and then slaughtered for meat in hopes of teaching children about the work and care needed to raise livestock and provide food, as farmers and ranchers do.

In her letter, Long pleaded for the fair to make an exception and let her and her daughter take Cedar back. Aware that Cedar had already been sold in auction, she also offered to “pay you back for the goat and any other expenses I caused,” according to the letter obtained by The Times.

A young girl didn’t want to slaughter the goat she raised for 4H. The state senator who bought the goat at auction agreed to let it live out its days eating weeds. But sheriff’s deputies drove 500 miles to kill the goat and teach a 9-year-old a lesson. https://t.co/3U5dY27paR

— Julia Shumway (@JMShumway) April 1, 2023

Not just no, but hell, no, said Shasta County officials. (Yes, that Shasta County.)

“Making an exception for you will only teach [our] youth that they do not have to abide by the rules,” Shasta District Fair Chief Executive Melanie Silva responded to Long in an email before dispatching sheriff’s deputies across 500 miles of Northern California to locate the goat.

Deputies obtained a search warrant permitting them to “utilize breaching equipment to force open doorway(s), entry doors, exit doors, and locked containers” as they might during a drug bust. And to search “storage rooms, and outbuildings of any kind large enough to accommodate a small goat.”

Deputies eventually located and confiscated Cedar who was slaughtered for a barbecue.

Long filed a federal lawsuit alleging violation of her and her daughter’s 4th and 14th Amendment rights.

“It was never about money,” said Vanessa Shakib, an attorney for Advancing Law for Animals who represents Long. “County officials were clear that they wanted to teach this little girl a lesson.”

Given the spreading atmosphere of misogyny across the land (and the MAGAness of Shasta County), perhaps the response was not surprising.

“It’s shocking,” said Ryan Gordon, an attorney with Advancing Law for Animals. “It’s a little girl’s goat, not Pablo Escobar.”

Meanwhile, in Iran (The Guardian):

Two women have been arrested in Iran for not covering their hair in public after having a tub of yoghurt thrown over them.

Video footage that went viral on social media showed two female customers being approached by a man who engages them in conversation.

He then takes what appears to be yoghurt from a shelf and throws it over their heads.

Iran’s judiciary said the two women had subsequently been detained for allegedly violating the country’s hijab rules.

That will teach those two. Their attacker was arrested for disturbing the peace and no doubt will get a slap on the wrist.

Meanwhile, the shopkeeper has received a formal warning for allowing women without "proper" hijab into his shop.

This was reported by the judiciary-run Mizan News Agency.

— Kian Sharifi (@KianSharifi) April 1, 2023

“Unveiling is tantamount to enmity with [our] values,” said an Iranian judiciary official. “[A]nomalous acts will be punished” and “prosecuted without mercy,” he said without elaborating.

Cedar the goat might testify to that but was unavailable for comment.

The parallels I’m drawing are not extreme. That attitudes of fanatics in authority are. And they reflect an opinion among minority conservatives, particularly religious ones. They will be damned if they won’t see women and minorities put back in their “proper” places.

Traditionally disfavored women and minorities of all kinds have had enough of that shit. They demand treatment as equal citizens in this country, as is their right, and as women still protesting in Iran believe it should be.

But the backlash against modernity thst began in the U.S. after the 1960s has grown stronger in the U.S. since 2008 and stronger still since 2020. It will surge again with the arrest and indictments of hardliners’ bigoted avatar. They want to turn back the clock 70 years, if not 100.

Behold:

Talked to this Trump supporter who’d like to get back to a time before the civil rights movement. pic.twitter.com/6W8ggL5VxI

— The Good Liars (@TheGoodLiars) April 1, 2023

Are reactionaries entitled to their opinions? Hell, yes. And entitled to be damned for them.

By supporting Trump they are signing away any chances they have to win. Ron Brownstein lays it out:

The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee.

In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination.

Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms.

“It is definitely a conundrum that this potentially helps him in the primary yet sinks the party’s chances to win the general,” says Mike DuHaime, a GOP strategist who advises former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. “This better positions [in the primary] our worst candidate for the general election.”

That conundrum will only intensify for Republicans because it is highly likely that this is merely the beginning of Trump’s legal troubles. As the first indictment against a former president, the New York proceeding has thrust the U.S. into uncharted waters. But the country today is not nearly as far from shore as it may be in just a few months. Trump faces multiple additional potential indictments. Those include possible charges from Fulton County, Georgia, District Attorney Fani Willis, who has been examining his efforts to overturn the 2020 election results in that state, as well as the twin federal probes led by Special Counsel Jack Smith into Trump’s mishandling of classified documents and his efforts to block congressional certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.

“I think I had a pretty good track record on my predictions and my strong belief is that there will be additional criminal charges coming in other places,” says Norm Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution. “I think you are going to see them in Georgia and possibly [at the] federal” level.

The multiple legal nets tightening around Trump create the possibility that he could be going through one or even multiple trials by the time of next year’s general election, and conceivably even when the GOP primaries begin in the winter of 2024. In other words, Trump might bounce back and forth between campaign rallies in Iowa or New Hampshire and court appearances in New York City, Atlanta, or Washington, D.C. And such jarring images could change the public perceptions that polls are recording now.

“You are just looking at a snapshot of how people feel today,” Dave Wilson, a conservative strategist, told me.

Yet even these initial reactions show how Trump’s legal troubles may place his party in a vise.

Polls consistently show that Trump, over the past several weeks, has widened his lead over DeSantis and the rest of the potential 2024 field. That may be partly because Trump has intensified his attacks on DeSantis, and because the Florida governor has at times seemed unsteady in his debut on the national stage.

But most Republicans think Trump is also benefiting from an impulse among GOP voters to lock arms around him as the Manhattan investigation has proceeded. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released this week, four-fifths of Republicans described the various investigations targeting Trump as a “witch hunt,” echoing his own denunciation of them. “There’s going to be some level of emotional response to someone being quote-unquote attacked,” Wilson said. “That’s going to get some sympathy points that will probably bolster poll numbers.”

Republican leaders, as so many times before, have tightened their own straitjacket by defending Trump on these allegations so unreservedly. House GOP leaders have launched unprecedented attempts to impede Bragg’s investigation by demanding documents and testimony, and even Trump’s potential 2024 rivals have condemned the indictment as a politically motivated hit job; DeSantis may have had the most extreme reaction by not only calling the indictment “un-American” but even insisting he would not cooperate with extraditing Trump from Florida if it came to that (a pledge that is moot because Trump has indicated he plans to turn himself in on Tuesday).

As during the procession of outrages and controversies during Trump’s presidency, most Republicans skeptical of him have been unwilling to do anything more than remain silent. (Former Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson, a long-shot potential 2024 candidate, has been the most conspicuous exception, issuing a statement that urged Americans “to wait on the facts” before judging the case.) The refusal of party leaders to confront Trump is becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because GOP voters hear no other arguments from voices they trust, they fall in line behind the assertion from Trump and the leading conservative media sources that the probes are groundless persecution. Republican elected officials then cite that dominant opinion as the justification for remaining silent.

But while the investigations may be bolstering Trump’s position inside the GOP in the near term, they also appear to be highlighting all the aspects of his political identity that have alienated so many swing voters, especially those with college degrees. In that same NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist survey, 56 percent of Americans rejected Trump’s “witch hunt” characterization and described the investigations as “fair”; 60 percent of college-educated white adults, the key constituency that abandoned the GOP in the Trump years, said the probes were fair. So did a slight majority of independent voters.

In new national results released yesterday morning, the Navigator project, a Democratic polling initiative, similarly found that 57 percent of Americans, including 51 percent of independents, agreed that Trump should be indicted when they read a description of the hush-money allegations against him.

The Manhattan indictment “may keep his people with him, it may fire them up, but he’s starting from well under 50 percent of the vote,” Mike DuHaime told me. “Somebody like that must figure out how to get new voters. And he is not gaining new voters with a controversial new indictment, whether he beats it or not.” Swing voters following the case in New York, DuHaime continued, “may not like it, they may think Democrats have gone too far, and that might be fair.” But it’s wishful thinking, he argues, to believe that voters previously resistant to Trump will conclude they need to give him another look because he’s facing criminal charges for paying off a porn star, even if they view the charges themselves as questionable.

The NPR/PBS Newshour/Marist survey underlines DuHaime’s point about the limits of Trump’s existing support: In that survey, a 61 percent majority of Americans—including 64 percent of independents and 70 percent of college-educated white adults—said they did not want him to be president again. That result was similar to the latest Quinnipiac University national poll, which found that 60 percent of Americans do not consider themselves supporters of Trump’s “Make America great again” movement. The challenge for the GOP is that about four-fifths of Republicans said they did consider themselves part of that movement, and about three-fourths said they wanted him back in the White House.

[…]

Given Trump’s hold on a big portion of the GOP coalition, no one should discount his capacity to win the party nomination next year, no matter how many criminal cases ensnare him. And given the persistent public dissatisfaction with the economy and lackluster job-approval ratings for Biden, no one dismisses the capacity of whoever captures the Republican nomination to win the general election.

The best-case scenario sketched by Trump supporters is that a succession of indictments will allow him to inspire even higher turnout among the predominantly non-college-educated and nonurban white voters who accept his argument that “liberal elites” and the “deep state” are targeting him to silence them. But even the heroic levels of turnout Trump inspired from those voters in 2020 weren’t enough to win. For the GOP to bet that Trump could overcome swing-voter revulsion over his legal troubles and win a general election by mobilizing even more of his base voters, Bennett said, “seems to me the highest risk proposition that I can imagine.”

The GOP racing to support him has they’ve done in the last couple of days shows they are still as self-destructive as ever. They didn’t need to do it. They could have just said, “let the justice system do its work and let the voters decide” and leave it at that. Instead they had to go full MAGA and screech about the system being rigged and the case political even though they haven’t even seen the charges much less the evidence. They reacted reflexively with “Witch Hunt!” without caring what this was going to mean for them and the party — or the country. That says everything about them.

It’s all bad, but this one takes the cake:

Historians have long wondered what cause might bring together Robert E. Lee and Frederick Douglass, and apparently it’s their shared adoration for their Lord and Savior Donald John Trump. https://t.co/si7JnJQ3mb

— Kevin M. Kruse (@KevinMKruse) March 31, 2023

Cult? Nah…

No it’s not crazy to hold a president accountable:

In the eyes of the world’s media, the indictment of Donald Trump was not the big freaking deal many Americans might expect. Save for a handful of English-language websites and newspapers, the story ranked beneath most regional and local concerns and in more than a handful it was found alongside or just above the coverage of other celebrity news items like the denial of parole to Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius and the Gwyneth Paltrow ski accident trial.

There’s a reason for this and it may be hard for many Americans to hear. For all our chest-thumping about our world-leading democracy, we lag the world in living up to the idea that no one is above the law, particularly when it comes to heads of state and government. While, as much coverage at home and abroad noted, the indictment of a president is unique in American history, to the rest of the world, holding leaders to account is much more commonplace.

In fact, it is hard to find a major country as reluctant to require its leaders to face the legal music as we have been. Contrary to the MAGA GOP argument that prosecuting Trump makes us look like a “banana republic,” the reality is that placing our president above the law is a clearer sign of political backwardness than the alternative.

Consider that as of this moment, a former British prime minister is under investigation for misleading Parliament, Israel’s prime minister is under investigation for corruption, and Pakistan’s former prime minister is facing a slew of serious charges including terrorism.

But almost every major country you can think of has respected the requirements of the law or has leaders who have been charged or prosecuted for crimes. Former French President Sarkozy was convicted of illegal campaign finance charges. Former Italian Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was a one-man crime wave, convicted on a wide range of charges from sex crimes to corruption.

Germany’s former President Christian Wulff was tried on bribery charges and found not guilty in 2014. Spain has seen prime ministers ousted on corruption charges and another fined for breaking electoral law. Another former Spanish minister who once ran the IMF was convicted of corruption charges and sent to prison.

South Korea’s former President Park Geun-hye was impeached, convicted, and sentenced to 24 years in prison. Taiwan has seen more than one president convicted. Malaysia, too, has seen more than one top leader go to jail, including a prime minister and, controversially, an opposition leader.

While headlines in India are today about the way Prime Minister Modi forced a leader of the opposition, Rahul Gandhi, out of parliament, it is a reminder that his grandmother, former Prime Minister Indira Gandhi, was once found guilty of corrupt electoral practices.

Brazil’s current president, Luiz Inacio “Lula” da Silva, was convicted of corruption and spent time in jail before the convictions were annulled. But he is not the first president of Brazil to be charged with a crime. Mexico, too, has seen presidents accused of crimes and corruption, as indeed, have many countries in the Americas and I could go on.

But it is clear that as far as behaving like third world countries goes, we could certainly learn a lot from the third world and indeed, the rest of the world on such matters.

This is not to say the rest of the world did not find anything notable about the Trump convictions. In the U.K., both The Daily Mail and The Telegraph provided lively coverage with a special focus on handcuffs for their BDSM readers. The Telegraph had extensive coverage, as did the U.S. version of The Guardian. But when I looked at The Standard, its Trump story was not trending.

In Australia, the lead in Australia’s Daily Telegraph focused on the “political persecution” angle offered up by Trump and his supporters, whereas The Australian offered a fairly dry explainer on the case. One of the only insightful commentaries I saw on the case anywhere in the world came from Charissa Yong of the Singapore Straits Times, who argued that “Trump’s indictment may energise support for him now but seal his fate in the future.”

Unusually, in the South China Morning Post, I found a story that also highlighted the political persecution angle, trending. The Xinhua News Agency of China gave the story exactly zero coverage on its English-language homepage, perhaps because sending leaders to jail is an uncomfortable subject there. (That said, China has not hesitated in the past to jail former senior officials for corruption.

Pravda, in Russia, whose president stands accused of war crimes by the International Criminal Court, included a story looking ahead to what may follow Trump’s criminal charges and illustrating it, weirdly, with a picture of Trump at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem, wearing a yarmulke.

In India though, in the Hindustan Times, there was not much coverage, although an explainer was featured in the Times of India.

Mexico’s Reforma offered low-profile, modest coverage with a piece that was a “who’s who” of the Trump case. La Prensa in Mexico offered nothing, while El Universal asked, “What’s next for Trump after being indicted and what will happen to his presidential campaign?” In Brazil’s biggest paper, Folha da Sao Paolo, there was very little, and what coverage there was on ex-presidents who might be in trouble focused on their own mini-Trump, Jair Bolsonaro.

In Israel’s papers, both the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz had lead stories on U.S.-Israel relations, Trump stories took a back seat to stories like “Republicans Rally Behind… Netanyahu.” The Haaretz story, way down in U.S. news, was “Trump hit with criminal charges over Stormy Daniels payoff, a first for an ex-US president.” The Times of Israel just offered an explainer, which, like many of the stories that did run worldwide, highlighted the fact that the case involved a “porn star.”

Europe’s bigger papers did offer more thoughtful commentary. France’s Le Monde wrote, “Donald Trump does not intend to hide, but on the contrary to embrace this crisis, to pose as the victim of a ‘Deep State’ conspiracy.”

Meanwhile, the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, which did devote comparable attention to the Pistorius case, had a commentary saying, “Donald Trump has mastered the art of attrition. He keeps causing outrage—and everyone is exhausted when it really matters. This time, a Democratic prosecutor is helping him”, and another assessing how Democrats and Republicans were responding to the case.

On the other hand, Italy’s Corriere Della Serra seemed inclined to give Gwyneth better coverage, although it did include an explainer on the Trump case.

Perhaps the excitement triggered by the Trump case will grow with future indictments if they involve more serious matters or the prosecutors are the U.S. Justice Department. Perhaps it will take convictions to get them really engaged in the story. But the reality is that even those developments may be seen by audiences worldwide as just another example of the U.S. finally catching up to them and at last living up to the ideals regarding the rule of law that we have for so long preached to them.

If we can’t hold this criminal accountable in any way, even to the extent that he can foment a coup and then run for president again, then we truly are a banana republic.

Bragg’s predecessor didn’t take up the case. The Justice Department didn’t take up the case. Bragg first said he would not take up the case. This is very political, not a matter of justice. In this case, let the jury be the voters.

— Jeb Bush (@JebBush) April 1, 2023

Here’s the thing: this may help Trump get the nomination. It won’t help him win the presidency. The man is a pig, accused of rape and sexual misconduct by dozens of women. Jeb apparently forgets that the whole thing is about Trump paying hush money to the porn actress he slept with while his wife was taking care of their newborn baby. I suppose if that was the only thing Trump had done, and the rest of his presidency was immaculate, the majority might chalk it all up to politics. But it’s just one of hundreds of transgressions, failures, corrupt acts and incompetency that we all saw with our own eyes.

It’s not prosecution that’s selective

“For my friends, everything; for my enemies, the law.” – Field Marshal Óscar R. Benavides, former president of Peru.

Donald Trump niece Mary Trump summed up her uncle’s view of the world in just over 20 words Thursday night: “He knows the difference between right and wrong. He just never in a million years thought it would apply to him.” [timestamp 3:50]

Trump believes in due process, but only for himself and people he likes. https://t.co/QzB344SA2k pic.twitter.com/7FbG9p4oqG

— Adam Serwer 🍝 (@AdamSerwer) April 10, 2018

Selective constitution is now an organizing principle for the party that all but bears Trump’s name. It seems an awful lot of its members respect neither the Constitution or the rule of law, yet aspire to run a country ostensibly run based on them.

Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis says he won't help in the extradition of Trump to New York. But there is literally a clause in the Constitution that says he has to. Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2, to be precise – aka, the Extradition Clause. https://t.co/wyDtfpf9Dd pic.twitter.com/aLon0dFnVA

— Greg Walters (@thegregwalters) March 30, 2023

I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will will not support and defend the Constitution of the United States.

.@RepBrianMast just announced on @cnn that he has no faith in US juries and our justice system. And he thinks @RonDeSantisFL should ignore the Constitution, Article IV, Section 2, Clause 2, which provides for the extradition of an accused criminal back to the state where they… pic.twitter.com/xoKq6ynncJ

— Jeanne MillikenBonds 👣 🐏 🇺🇸 ✝️ (@JeanneBondsNC) March 31, 2023

The only thing American about them are their birth certificates.

Unless it is

No, really. These GOP state senators in North Carolina introduced this bill on Thursday.

I’m still not convinced it wasn’t an early April Fools’ Day gag. I am certain it’s Tim Moffitt trolling the left. VERY on brand. He’s also introduced legislation to allow one of his counties to “prohibit or restrict skateboarding” on public streets.

Multiple outlets have reached out to Timmeh for comment on the trophy bill. So far, Moffitt’s not talking. Probably too busy snickering.

JV Last takes a look at the GOP primaries’ various possibilities in light of the indictment:

Dynamics

The most immediate question is what Trump’s indictment does to the dynamics of the 2024 primary campaign. Generally speaking, there are three possibilities:

No effect: The campaign continues to develop no differently than it would have had Trump not been indicted.

Instability: The race destabilizes and becomes more volatile and less predictable.

Freeze frame: The race becomes frozen where it is.

I’m going to give you the argument for each scenario. And then I’ll tell you which I think is right.

No Effect. The dynamics of the race are as follows: Trump has a serious lead. DeSantis is the only (currently) viable challenger. Trump has been making slow gains. DeSantis has experienced a correction after having 18 months of generally positive momentum.

Mike Pence has made his potential candidacy known and been preemptively rejected. Brian Kemp has tested the waters only gently and gotten no interest. Tim Scott, Nikki Haley, and Chris Christie are margin-of-error candidates.

Why would any of this change?

Trump is the most well-known commodity in the history of presidential politics. He’s been a public figure for 40 years. He’s a creature of tabloid scandal sheets. He’s been embroiled in lawsuits and allegations of corruption, misconduct, and criminality almost literally since before Ron DeSantis was born.

Is it possible that a criminal indictment wasn’t priced into his stock by Republican primary voters before yesterday?

Republican voters know exactly who Donald Trump is. They thought he could win in 2016 and 2020 and they thought he could win as of 48 hours ago. How does a witch-hunt indictment by a Soros-funded prosecutor change any of that?

An indictment doesn’t change anything in this race. The only thing that will flip the dynamics is DeSantis catching fire with voters.

Instability. We’ve never had a major party presidential candidate under indictment and in this view, Republican voters freak out.

It’s not that they don’t support Trump—they’re with him. They think he’s innocent; it’s a witch hunt; etc. But they start worrying that he can’t beat Biden.

In this scenario, Republican primary voters turn off the Id Theory of Politics and become cold-eyed realists, scouring the polling on independent voters and adjusting their preferences accordingly.

With some portion of Trump’s voters suddenly in play there are a couple different things that could happen. They could all flow to DeSantis, increasing his strength. Or they could consolidate around someone else, creating a three-candidate dynamic.

It’s also possible that some Republican candidates themselves will attack Trump over the indictment—either on the merits or because it makes him weaker against Biden. The indictment provides an opportunity for them to create contrast with Trump without abandoning any MAGA policies.

Or the indictment could lure some other, off-the-radar candidate into the race. Like a cable news host or a business figure. Someone untraditional whose implicit proposition would be, “Let’s just start this whole populist revolution over.”

Don’t forget: There will be a stream of developments on this case over the coming months. We’ll get the charging docs. We’ll get motions and testimony. Maybe there’s an incident of political violence. There may be more indictments.

There are a lot of events about to unfold and Trump has only a limited ability to control them. In this chaos, there will be opportunity.

Freeze Frame. But the truth is, I don’t buy either of those arguments. The most likely outcome is that this indictment freezes the race where it is and makes it very hard to change its trajectory. Here’s why:

Trump’s indictment is now the top story for the 2024 presidential campaign. It will suck up all of the coverage. It’ll force Fox to kill their shadow ban on him. And here’s the key point: Every single member of the Republican party and Conservatism Inc. will have to stipulate that Trump is innocent, the prosecution is a witch hunt, and the entire case is dangerous to America.

That will be the baseline for the Republican discourse.

How is any other candidate supposed to break through? By coming up with a plan for entitlement reform?

No. The only way to get attention will be to talk about Trump and the only thing Republican voters will tolerate hearing about Trump is that he’s innocent and Alvin Bragg / the Democrats are evil and Republicans must fight for Trump.

And once you have a single dominant story with a single party line, then there are very few opportunities for anyone to provide contrast and make cases for themselves.

Just put yourself in the mind of a Republican candidate. What do you say about the indictment when you go on Fox?

This is a travishamockery. If the radical Democrats can do this to President Trump, they can do it to any of us. We must fight back against this witch hunt and send the communists a signal that we will triumph. So you should vote for . . . me?

Yeah, no. Makes no sense.

Another part of the dynamic that gets frozen is DeSantis. As it stands right now, just about everyone assumes he’s running. It would destabilize the race if DeSantis didn’t run.

And Trump’s indictment almost certainly keeps DeSantis in, even if his polling continues to decline. We know this because yesterday evening—by total coincidence—Florida Republicans introduced their bill to change the law so that DeSantis could run for president as the sitting governor.

This makes sense because it underscores the extent to which DeSantis is less a competitor to Trump than his understudy. He’ll keep making demonstrations and preparing his run because someone has to be ready in case Trump blows up.

In short: I can see how the indictment might introduce uncertainty into the Republican primary. But right now I’m convinced that it will function as an artificial stabilizing element which actually makes it harder for the campaign to develop and change according to its own logic.

Agreed. It’s frozen. And DeSantis is freezing to death.