Month: January 2024

And it is awesome

Perlstein will be writing his for the American Prospect. You can subscribe to it here and I highly recommend you do it. I don’t think that he or the folks at the American Prospect will mind if I reproduce this first introductory column in its entirety. It’s just so good. (I’ll follow the rules in the future, I promise.)

You Are Entering the Infernal Triangle

Authoritarian Republicans, ineffectual Democrats, and a clueless media

As a historian who also writes about the present, there are certain well-worn grooves in the way elections get written about by pundits and political journalists from which I instinctively recoil. The obsession with polling, for one. Polls have value when approached with due humility, though you wonder how politicians and the public managed to make do without them before their modern invention in the 1930s. But given how often pollsters blow their most confident—and consequential—calls, their work is as likely to be of use to historians as object lessons in hubris as for the objective data they mean to provide.

Pollsters themselves are often the more useful data to study, especially when their models encode mistaken presumptions frozen in place from the past. In 1980, for instance, Ronald Reagan’s landslide was preceded by a near-universal consensus that the election was tied. The pollster who called it correctly, Lou Harris, was the only one who thought to factor into his models a variable that hadn’t been accounted for in previous elections, because it did not yet really exist: the Christian right.

Polling is systematically biased in just that way: toward variables that were evident in the last election, which may or may not be salient for this election. And the more polls dominate discussions of campaigns and elections, the more they crowd out intellectual energy that could be devoted to figuring out those salient, deeper, structural changes conditioning political reality: the kind of knowledge that doesn’t obediently stand still to be counted, totted up, and reduced to a single number.

Another waaaaay too well-worn journalistic groove is prediction. I have probably read thousands of newspaper opinion column prognostications going back to the 1950s. Their track record is too embarrassing for me to take the exercise seriously, let alone practice it myself. Like bad polls, pundits’ predictions are most useful when they are wrong. They provide an invaluable record of the unspoken collective assumptions of America’s journalistic elite, one of the most hierarchical, conformist groups of people you’ll ever run across. Unfortunately, they help shape our world nearly as much, and sometimes more, than the politicians they comment about. So their collective mistakes land hard.

Just how hierarchical are they? How conformist? Well, one reason Timothy Crouse was able to write the most illuminating book about political journalism ever, The Boys on the Bus (1973), was because he was a playwright, who recognized what he was observing among campaign journalists as a collection of highly ritualized scripts. Like the time, after a contentious candidate debate, when members of the traveling press corps crowded around the man referred to as their “dean,” the Associated Press’s Walter Mears, as he hacked away at his typewriter. One asked, “Walter, what’s our lead?” The rest awaited his answer on tenterhooks. They needed him to tell them what they had just seen.

And how ritualized? Consider one of elite journalism’s most deeply worn grooves: the morning-after declarations, should any Democrat win a presidential election, that the Republican politics of demagogic hate-mongering has shown itself dead and buried for all time—forgetting how predictably it returns in each new election, often in an increasingly vicious form.

In 1964: When the author of the Civil Rights Act, Lyndon Johnson, defeated a Republican who voted against the Civil Rights Act, Barry Goldwater, one of the most distinguished liberal newspaper editors in the South, Sam Ragan of the Raleigh News & Observer, pronounced that all future American elections would be decided “on issues other than civil rights.” His essay quoted the Los Angeles Times’ Washington bureau chief, who affirmed that conventional wisdom by observing that henceforth, whichever party takes the Black vote would be no more predictable than who would win “freckle-faced redheads and one-armed shortstops.”

In 1976: When Jimmy Carter beat Gerald Ford, Washington’s most respected public-opinion expert, Everett Carll Ladd, said that the GOP was “in a weaker position than any major party of the U.S. since the Civil War,” because it had turned itself into an “institution for conservative believers.” He wrote that in a magazine article published in 1977. It came out in book form—poor guy—the week of the opening klaxon of the Reagan Revolution: the 1978 congressional elections, when a passel of New Right Republicans and conservative Democrats upset many of the longest-serving and beloved liberals in Washington.

In 2008: That year, I published a book called Nixonland, an account of Nixon’s brand of demagogic hate-mongering and the resistance to it in the 1960s as a crucible of our own contemporary political divisions. A Clinton White House adviser, Howard Wolfson, auditioning as a centrist pundit in The New Republic, wrote of how Obama’s imminent victory over a pol who “calls Senator Obama a socialist, trots out a plumber to stoke class and cultural resentments, and employs his Vice-President to question Obama’s patriotism by linking him to terrorists” proved that “Nixonland is dead.”
And in 2012, when Michael Lind wrote of Barack Obama’s re-election victory, “No doubt some Reaganite conservatives will continue to fight the old battles, like the Japanese soldiers who hid on Pacific islands for decades, fighting a war that had long before been lost … Any competitive Republican Party in the future will be to the left of today’s Republican Party, on both social and economic issues.”

This particular bias is rooted into elite punditry’s deepest, most dangerous groove of all: a canyon, if you will. On one side of the yawning gulf is the perennial fantasy that America is a nation fundamentally united and at peace with itself, “moderate,” “centrist,” where exceptions are epiphenomena entirely alien to settled American “norms.”

On the other side of the gulf is, well, reality.

The media habits that make it so hard to grasp that reality—that made Trump and his merry band of insurrectionists such a surprise to us—are perhaps as systematic as any foisted upon the public by state media in authoritarian nations. A little more innocent than, say, Pravda, however, because one wellspring of this stubborn fantasy, and why audiences are so receptive to it, is simple psychology. To acknowledge the alternative is to stare into a terrifying abyss: the realization that America has never not been part of the way to something like a civil war.

But suddenly, in 2024, no one can avoid acknowledging that abyss anymore. And that leaves journalism in a genuine crisis.

Generations of this incumbent, consensus-besotted journalism have produced the very conceptual tools, metaphors, habits, and technologies that we understand as political journalism. But these tools are thoroughly inadequate to understanding what politics now is.

According to polls (which, yes, have their uses, in moderation), something around half of likely voters would like to see as our next president a man who thinks of the law as an extension of his superior will, who talks about race like a Nazi, wants to put journalistic organizations whose coverage he doesn’t like in the dock for “treason,” and who promises that anyone violating standards of good order as he defines them—shoplifters, for instance—will be summarily shot dead by officers of the state who serve only at his pleasure. A fascist, in other words. We find ourselves on the brink of an astonishing watershed, in this 2024 presidential year: a live possibility that government of the people, by the people, and for the people could conceivably perish from these United States, and ordinary people—you, me—may have to make the kind of moral choices about resistance that mid-20th-century existentialist philosophers once wrote about. That’s the case if Trump wins. But it’s just as likely, or even more likely, if he loses, then claims he wins. That’s one prediction I feel comfortable with.

Journalistically, this crisis could not strike more deeply. The tools we have for making sense of how politicians seek to accumulate power focus on the whys and wherefores of attracting votes. But the Republican Party and its associated institutions of movement conservatism, at least since George and Jeb Bush stole the 2000 election in Florida, has been ratcheting remorselessly toward an understanding of the accumulation of political power, to which they believe themselves ineluctably entitled as the only truly legitimate Americans, as a question of will—up to and including the projection of will by the force of arms.

Ain’t no poll predicting who soccer moms will vote for in November that can make much headway in understanding that.

Thus the challenge I have set for myself with this column: to conceptualize and practice journalism adequate to this extraordinary state of affairs.

I should say, the challenge I set for ourselves: This project must be plural, or nothing at all. Email me ideas, complaints, corrections, criticisms—and suggested role models, for there are plenty of heroic ones to discover out there; have always been plenty of heroic ones out there—at infernaltriangle@prospect.org.

A political journalism adequate to this moment must throw so many of our received notions about how politics works into question. For one thing, it has to treat the dissemination of conventional but structurally distorting journalistic narratives as a crucial part of the story of how we got to this point.

For instance, the way mainstream American political journalism has built in a structural bias toward Republicans. If one side in a two-sided fight is perfectly willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate without remorse in order to win, and journalists, as a matter of genre convention, must “balance” the ledger between “both sides,” in the interest of “fairness,” that is systematically unfair to the side less willing to lie, cheat, steal, and intimidate. Journalism that feels compelled to adjudge both “sides” as equally vicious, when they are anything but, works like one of those booster seats you give a toddler in a restaurant so that they can sit eye to eye with the grown-ups. It is a systematic distortion of reality built into mainstream political journalism’s very operating system.

A recent example was one of NBC News’s articles in response to Donald Trump’s new turn of phrase in describing immigration. It was headlined: “Trump Sparks Republican Backlash After Saying Immigrants Are ‘Poisoning the Blood’ of the U.S.”

It took exceptional ingenuity for someone at NBC to figure out how to wrench one side’s embrace of race science into the consensus frame, where “both sides” “agree” that major presidential candidates should not imitate Nazis. That frame squeezes out any understanding of how Trump’s provocations rest along a continuum of Republican demonization of immigrants going back decades (“Build the dang fence,” as John McCain put it in 2010), and that most Republicans nonetheless support Trump (or candidates who say much the same things) down the line.

Pravda stuff, in its way. Imagine the headache for historians of the United States a hundred years from now, if there is a United States a hundred years from now, seeking to disentangle from journalism like that what the Republican Party of 2024 is actually like.

There is, simultaneously, another force that functions systematically within our deranged political present to render genuine understanding of encroaching authoritarianism so much more difficult. It is the opposition political party’s complex and baffling allergy to genuinely opposing.

These traditions include Democratic “counterprogramming”: actions actively signaling contempt for the party’s core non-elite and anti-elitist base of support. That’s a term of art from the Clinton years, but it has its origins as far back as the early 1950s, when Adlai Stevenson Sister Souljah’ed a meeting with party liberals by announcing himself opposed to Truman’s goal of a national health care program, derided federal funding of public housing, and came out in favor of the anti-union Taft-Hartley Act.

Another Democratic tradition associates political surrender with moral nobility. Al Gore, for example, had wanted to concede on Election Night 2000, based merely on network projections that had Bush up by 4,600 votes in Florida—and not even wait for the actual initial count, which ending up having Bush ahead by only a few hundred.

A third Democratic tradition imagines that reactionary rage can be sated with technocratic compromise. Like the response from Democratic Senate Leader Chuck Schumer, a Jew, to Donald Trump’s incessant avowals that what Schumer and his party are really after is poisoning true America’s purity of essence: “What Donald Trump said and did was despicable, but we do have a problem at the border and Democrats know we have to solve that problem, but in keeping with our principles.”

Or like what Bill Clinton said upon signing into law Temporary Assistance for Needy Families: “After I sign my name to this bill, welfare will no longer be a political issue.” Leaving office, he told a reporter, “I really believed that if we passed welfare reform we could diminish at least a lot of the overt racial stereotypes that I thought were paralyzing American politics.”

This is the infernal triangle that structures American politics.

In one corner, a party consistently ratcheting toward authoritarianism, refusing as a matter of bedrock principle—otherwise they are “Republicans in Name Only”—to compromise with adversaries they frame as ineluctably evil and seek literally to destroy.

In the second corner, a party that says that, in a political culture where there is not enough compromise, the self-evident solution is to offer more compromise—because those guys’ extremist fever, surely, is soon to break …

And in the third corner, those agenda-setting elite political journalists, who frame the Democrats as one of the “sides” in a tragic folie à deux destroying a nation otherwise united and at peace with itself because both sides stubbornly … refuse to compromise.

And here we are.

All three sides of the triangle must be broken in order to preserve our republic, whichever candidate happens to get the most votes in the 2024 Electoral College. I have no prediction on offer about whether, or how, that can happen. All I know is that we have no choice but to try.

I will just add that I think the chances of us being able to break anything are probably nil if Trump and the Republicans win power in 2024. They will break us. But yes, we have no choice but to try either way.

Politico interviewed Christopher Rufo the new propaganda monister of fascist America. He’s very proud of himself for taking out a Black woman president of Harvard. What a coup.

Rufo isn’t shy about revealing the true motives behind his influence operations. Last month, he told me that his efforts to rehabilitate Richard Nixon’s legacy are part of broader ploy to exonerate former President Donald Trump. When I spoke to him on Tuesday afternoon, he was equally frank about what motivated his efforts to get Gay fired.

The following has been edited for clarity and concision.

How much credit do you think you deserve for Gay’s resignation?

I’ve learned that it never hurts to take the credit because sometimes people don’t give it to you. But this really was a team effort that involved three primary points of leverage. First was the narrative leverage, and this was done primarily by me, Christopher Brunet and Aaron Sibarium. Second was the financial leverage, which was led by Bill Ackman and other Harvard donors. And finally, there was the political leverage which was really led by Congresswoman Elise Stefanik’s masterful performance with Claudine Gay at her hearings.

When you put those three elements together — narrative, financial and political pressure — and you squeeze hard enough, you see the results that we got today, which was the resignation of America’s most powerful academic leader. I think that this result speaks for itself.

How closely have you been coordinating with the other people in those three camps?

I know all the players, I have varying degrees of coordination and communication, but —

What does that mean, “various degrees of communication and coordination?” Have you been actively working together?

Some people I speak to a little more frequently, some people a little less frequently. But my job as a journalist and even more so as an activist is to know the political conditions, to understand and develop relationships with all of the political actors, and then to work as hard as I can so that they’re successful in achieving their individual goals — but also to accomplish the shared goal, which was to topple the president of Harvard University.

On December 19, you tweeted that it was your plan to “smuggle [the plagiarism story] into the media apparatus from the left, which legitimizes the narrative to center-left actors who have the power to topple [Gay].” Can you explain that strategy in more detail?

It’s really a textbook example of successful conservative activism, and the strategy is quite simple. Christopher Brunet and I broke the story of Claudine’s plagiarism on December 10. It drove more than 100 million impressions on Twitter, and then it was the top story for a number of weeks in conservative media and right-wing media. But I knew that in order to achieve my objective, we had to get the narrative into the left-wing media. But the left-wing uniformly ignored the story for 10 days and tried to bury it, so I engaged in a kind of a thoughtful and substantive campaign of shaming and bullying my colleagues on the left to take seriously the story of the most significant academic corruption scandal in Harvard’s history.

Finally, the narrative broke through within 24 hours of my announcement about smuggling the narrative into the left-wing media. You see this domino effect: CNN, BBC, The New York Times, The Washington Post and other publications started to do the actual work of exposing Gay’s plagiarism, and then you see this beautiful kind of flowering of op-eds from all of those publications calling on Gay to resign. Once my position — which began on the right — became the dominant position across the center-left, I knew that it was just a matter of time before we were going to be successful.

Why is it so important to get the story into the center-left media?

It gives permission for center-left political figures and intellectual figures to comment on the story and then to editorialize on it. Once we crossed that threshold, we saw this cascade of publications calling on her to resign.

Do you think that playbook works on any issue, or do you think that the Israel-Palestine issue is unique, insofar as it’s already dividing elite liberal organizations?

I’ve run the same playbook on critical race theory, on gender ideology, on DEI bureaucracy. For the time being, given the structure of our institutions, this is a universal strategy that can be applied by the right to most issues. I think that we’ve demonstrated that it can be successful.

Why do you think you can be so open about your strategy and still have it work? Why don’t you feel like you need to be covert about it?

First, and most simply, because I’m telling the truth — and the truth has an inherent and innate power. I believe that if it’s propagated correctly, it has the power to defeat lies.

The reason that I announced my strategy in advance is both to demoralize my opponents — and it certainly does a good job at that — but also to teach my potential friends and allies how the game works. Machiavelli wrote The Prince not to teach people who already knew the principles of how power works, but to teach people who need to know — and in reality, the people who need to know about how politics works are American conservatives. So I tried to publicly narrate what I’m doing in order to teach my friends how to do it themselves. I think that this is a big service — with the added benefit that it demoralizes and deranges my enemies.

Do you think you understand how the left-wing influence ecosystem works better than the people inside it do?

Well, I spent 10 years directing documentaries for PBS, lived in large, left-wing American cities, and I’ve studied how the media, NGOs and universities circulate and legitimize information regimes. I’ve just applied that knowledge — and in some senses, I’ve stolen some of the earlier tactics from previous generations of the American left and weaponize them against the current regime.

What I’m doing is teaching conservatives how to hack that system and to use our asymmetrical disadvantages to our strategic advantage. We need to be very lightweight and very aggressive, and we need to be faster and smarter and rhetorically more sophisticated than our opponents — who, unfortunately for them, have grown complacent, lazy, entitled and ripe for disruption.

What is your broader objective here, beyond forcing the president of Harvard to resign?

My primary objective is to eliminate the DEI bureaucracy in every institution in America and to restore truth rather than racialist ideology as the guiding principle of America.

In her letter of resignation, Gay said that she was troubled by “threats fueled by racial animus.” How do you respond to that?

It was absolutely not fueled by racial animus. It was fueled by Claudine Gay’s minimization of antisemitism, her serial plagiarism, her intimidation of the free press and her botched attempts to cover it all up. It had nothing to do with her race or sex and everything to do with her merit, her competence and her failure to lead.

How significant of a victory do you consider this campaign for the conservative movement?

I worked on critical race theory for a very long time before it yielded fruit, but this Claudine Gay story has shown that we can drive major, paradigm-shifting victories over a compressed timeframe. I’d like to engage in more experimentation on how we can cycle up some of these campaigns very quickly.

The amount of media devoted to this campus scandal is unbelievable. I can guarantee that the majority of Americans don’t actually give a shit.

Rufo is a propagandist and he admits it. Apparently, them media knows it and is perfectly fine being led around by the nose by him. It’s unbelievable.

Look at this:

Those are each different articles from the last two days about this “scandal.” I feel like I’m losing my mind.

I’m going to share this twitter thread from Dave Roberts who nailed this issue better than I can:

I just want to describe a certain pattern/dynamic that has replicated itself over & over & over again, as long as I have followed US media and politics. I have given up hope that describing such patterns will do anything to diminish their frequency, but like I said: compulsions. 

The center-left pundit approach to these things is simply to accept the frame that the right has established and dutifully make judgments within it. In this case, they focus tightly on the question of whether particular instances qualify as plagiarism as described in the rules. 

Inevitably, this is done with a certain air of self-congratulation. “Look at me, I’m making a tough call that goes against my side! I’m so judicious nonpartisan and independent!” And all the other center-left pundits nod soberly, noting — more in sorrow than anger! — how lamentable it is that all the left partisans out there lack this protean ability rise above it all and see clearly and apply standards equally to all sides.

And — the part that really chaps my ass — they refuse, almost as though it’s a matter of principle to ask the larger questions: Why are we talking about this? Is there any reasonable political or journalistic justification for *this* being the center of US discourse for weeks on end? Who has pushed this to the fore, and why, and what are they trying to achieve? 

It is as though these questions are evasions or cheats or something, as though intellectual integrity demands only heeding those questions that the right has put into the frame. It is a kind of bizarre, proud naivete — gormlessness posing as wisdom. 

“We must only discuss whether plagiarism is ok or not; those are the rules.” But why are those the rules? Why should the media and pundits ignore context here? It’s not like that context is secret –Rufo goes out bragging about it on social media frequently! 

You could cite hundreds of examples of this kind of thing, but one I frequently think about is “Climategate.” Right wing shitheads stole a bunch of emails from a climate research org, sifted through them, plucked sentences, phrases, and even individual words out of context … 

… and then demanded that the climate community defend these contextless bits. Of course the media chased the shiny ball and of course center-left pundits dutifully scratched their chins and said, “well maybe they have a point about this one, or this one.” 

Then, as now, it was treated as some sort of partisan cheat to draw attention to the fact these were emails stolen by explicitly malicious actors who explicitly were trying to destroy climate science. “Sir, please focus on the contextless bits.” 

Of course, after multiple extensive investigations, it all turned out to be bullshit. But the damage was done. Climate science was smeared and suffered reputational damage that dogged it for years.

In other words, the malicious actors got exactly, precisely what they wanted. 

No journalist or pundit ever apologized for, or even acknowledged, the fact that they were used as instruments by bad people to achieve bad things. To my knowledge there was absolutely zero reflection from any journalistic outlet about it. They just went on to the next thing. 

To return to the Harvard thing: why are we talking about this? Corruption is endemic in virtually every conservative Institution –the NRA, CPAC, the Supreme Court, you name it. Why aren’t we talking about them? 

Antisemitism is endemic in RW spaces and has been for decades. Why aren’t we talking about that? House Republicans are trying to cut off aid and leave Ukraine stranded. Why aren’t we talking about that? The economy is booming. Why aren’t we talking about that? 

There are a lot of important things going on right now. Why are we talking about this and not any of those?

We know why: the right is expert at ginning up these artificial controversies and manipulating media. Again, they brag about it publicly! 

What I don’t understand is why media and center-left pundits are so *passive* in the face of this obvious, explicit manipulation. They just dutifully follow the right around, shrugging their shoulders: “I guess we have to talk about this now.” 

I guess we have to talk about the “border crisis” now. I guess we have to talk about trans people in girls’ high school sports now. I guess we have to talk about Bud Light and Target now. I guess we have to talk about whatever the fuck they want to talk about. [shrug] 

Equally maddening is the fact that the left, broadly speaking, and the D Party in particular, are also just as passive! They’ve watched this go on for decades, one fake scandal after another, one BS distraction after another, & they seem utterly helpless to do anything about it. 

For as long as I’ve been alive, left pundits like @brianbeutler have been begging & pleading with Dems to do what the right is doing: take control of the discourse. Create controversies that focus attention where they want it. Create moments, create memes. Do politics FFS! 

But no, they just drone on about policy and kitchen tables. They sniff with disdain at the idea of engaging in purposeful acts of symbolism. “There’s no point holding hearings about Clarence Thomas’s corruption because there’s no obvious policy recourse” kind of shit. 

And so here we are, all of us, talking about what the right wants us to talk about, actively doing its bidding, actively helping it destroy higher education & smear black scholarship & distract from its institutional antisemitism. We are all Rufo’s bitches. 

This exact same kind of cycle has now happened so many times that I frankly can’t believe anyone is unaware of how it works. It really looks like everyone — right, journalists, pundits — is happy with their role in these things. They feather everyone’s nest quite nicely. 

Anyway, this went on longer than I intended and I should shut up now. My one, futile plea to everyone is simply: before you jump in with an opinion on the discourse of the day, ask yourself *why* it is the discourse of the day and whose interests the discourse is serving. 

And maybe, just on occasion, have the courage to *talk about something else*, something *you* deem important, not just whatever the puke funnel has served up for you. </fin> 

It’s maddening.

Secretary Mayorkas will be impeached

Marjorie Taylor Greene has been pushing for this from the moment Mayorkas was confirmed. It’s her personal crusade and they are all afraid of her so it is happening:

House Republicans will forge ahead with steps to impeach Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas over his handling of the border crisis, a GOP source tells CNN.

In a statement provided to CNN, a committee spokesperson said “the House Committee on Homeland Security has conducted a comprehensive investigation into Secretary Mayorkas’ handling of, and role in, the unprecedented crisis at the Southwest border” for nearly a year.

“Following the bipartisan vote in the House to refer articles of impeachment against the secretary to our Committee, we will be conducting hearings and taking up those articles in the coming weeks,” the statement said.

The announcement of the impeachment proceedings comes as immigration is shaping up to be a top issue in the 2024 presidential election, with Republicans slamming President Joe Biden’s immigration policies. On Wednesday, House Speaker Mike Johnson, along with some of his Republican colleagues, will visit one of the busiest sections of the US-Mexico border, where only a few days ago border authorities wrestled with a fresh surge of migrants.

It’s part of a long-running dispute between Republicans and the Biden administration over the handling of the southern border that’s culminated in impeachment proceedings against the DHS chief who’s charged with border security.

The committee spokesperson told CNN the hearing will begin next week. “The Committee will ensure that the public is aware of the scope of Secretary Mayorkas’ egregious misconduct and refusal to enforce the law, but also that this process is completed promptly and accountability is achieved swiftly—as the American people have demanded,” the statement said.

The Department of Homeland Security responded in a statement Wednesday, arguing House Republicans are “pursuing a baseless political exercise that has been rejected by members of both parties and already failed on a bipartisan vote.”

“There is no valid basis to impeach Secretary Mayorkas, as senior members of the House majority have attested, and this extreme impeachment push is a harmful distraction from our critical national security priorities,” DHS spokesperson Mia Ehrenberg said.

“Secretary Mayorkas and the Department of Homeland Security will continue working every day to keep Americans safe.”

The government is about to shut down and the GOP clown show is putting on pageants at the border (by the way, crossings are down right now) and impeaching Biden and Mayorkas to appease Marge and the Trump cult. I guess they think this will get them re-elected. I’m not so sure. This stuff looks ridiculous to anyone who isn’t a die hard Trump loving wingnut.

Oh, I hope so …

The Daily Beast noted this about that Jack Smith filing during the holidays arguing against allowing Trump to have immunity:

As Special Counsel Jack Smith makes the case that former President Donald Trump shouldn’t have vast immunity to commit crimes, Smith has compiled a very curious list of theoretical misdeeds that seem to telegraph potential bombshells at his upcoming D.C. trial.

Accepting a bribe, ordering an FBI director to fake evidence against a political foe, ordering the military to murder critics, and even selling nuclear secrets to a foreign enemy—these are the particular and peculiar crimes that prosecutors say Trump could get away with if he succeeds in arguing that presidential immunity gives him king-like powers to do as he pleases from the White House.

Again, theoretically, of course.

“In each of these scenarios, the president could assert that he was simply executing the laws; or communicating with the Department of Justice; or discharging his powers as commander-in-chief; or engaging in foreign diplomacy,” prosecutors wrote to appellate judges on Saturday.

They used nearly identical phrasing in a court filing to U.S. District Judge Tanya Chutkan in October.

The billionaire and the special prosecutor are currently battling ahead of a criminal trial in the nation’s capital, tentatively scheduled to begin in March on the eve of Super Tuesday. Trump is desperately trying to delay it, with his lawyers openly complaining that the trial could interrupt his presidential campaign at the height of the state primary elections. Meanwhile, Smith wants to start it as soon as possible, something that would allow GOP voters choosing their top Republican candidate to see federal prosecutors finally lay out their evidence that Trump broke the law by trying to overturn the 2020 election.

But D.C. appellate judges must first consider key issues, including whether Trump can effectively render himself immune from criminal prosecution by justifying everything he did as an official presidential act.

That’s what has Smith’s prosecutors warning that Trump’s delusions of invulnerability pose a danger to the fate of the republic.

“The implications of the defendant’s broad immunity theory are sobering. In his view, a court should treat a President’s criminal conduct as immune from prosecution as long as it takes the form of correspondence with a state official about a matter in which there is a federal interest, a meeting with a member of the executive branch, or a statement on a matter of public concern,” they wrote on Saturday.

Over the weekend, the usual legal commentators who weigh in on MAGA madness zeroed in on Smith’s bizarre examples of specific scandals.

“Interesting choice of hypotheticals…” tweeted the lawyer George Conway, whose ex-wife Kellyanne Conway long served as a Trump political adviser.

“It took quite an imagination,” he later added, sarcastically.

Smith’s prosecution team has been incredibly tight-lipped in the run-up to trial, forcing journalists to rely almost entirely on the steady stream of court documents in the case—but leaving the curious crowd of onlookers reading the tea leaves and trying to make sense of hints and innuendo. Some found it humorous when the D.C. indictment charging the 45th American president ran 45 pages. This time around, the peanut gallery swears Smith is telegraphing his case.

I assumed that Smith was just pointing out what might happen in the future if they decide that a president can claim that committing crimes while in office is part of his official duties and granting him immunity from prosecution. That would basically mean we have a dictator without any legal recourse. But who knows? Let’s just say that it wouldn’t surprise me if he did any of those things.

It’s not because he thinks he’s losing

The new year is off to a strong start with two weeks to go to the first primaries, more debates for second place in the offing and legal filings dropping in the Trump cases day and night. And we’re only three days in. I hope everyone got themselves a good rest over the holidays because there’s going to be no time to catch your breath between now and election day next November. The games have officially begun.

The Republicans primaries look to be gelling exactly as predicted. The weak and tepid Trump opposition hasn’t been able to get any real traction despite hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. The race for second place is between Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis and former S. Carolina Gov. It’s clear that Trump is still the leader of the party and, as predicted, will almost certainly get the nomination.

There have been a number of articles in recent days taking a look at his campaign. The Washington Post published a long piece about how he “reignited his base and took control of the Republican primary” which ends up concluding that he never really lost the base in the first place. In fact, according to a new poll by the same paper with the University of Maryland they have not only stuck with him on the questions about January 6th, a few who believed that he might have done something wrong at the time have now come back to his side. But it isn’t a large number. They loved him then and they love him now.

The good news is that according to that same poll, the majority of Americans are not so enamored. 55% believe that January 6th was an attack on democracy and 56% believe that Trump is definitely or probably guilty of a crime. Only 11% of Republicans are among them but that’s just par for the course. That majority may not be huge but it could obviously make a difference in the election. The New York Times looked at polling over the last six months which asked if a conviction would change voters’ minds about voting for Trump and the numbers were substantial enough to change the outcome. Citing their own findings should Trump be convicted:

[T]he poll found the race in these six [swing] states would seismically shift in the aggregate: a 14-point swing, with Mr. Biden winning by 10 rather than losing by four percentage points. The same poll also provides insights into the effect a Trump conviction would have on independent and young voters, which are both pivotal demographics. Independents now go for Mr. Trump, 45 percent to 44 percent. However, if he is convicted, 53 percent of them choose Mr. Biden and only 32 percent Mr. Trump.

The movement for voters ages 18 to 29 was even greater. Mr. Biden holds a slight edge, 47 percent to 46 percent, in the poll. But after a potential conviction, Mr. Biden holds a commanding lead, 63 percent to 31 percent.

These findings were backed up by several others as well.

Acknowledging the general uselessness of these early polls to predict the outcome of the election, I think it’s fair to say that this response may actually be a pretty good gauge of the public’s attitude on this issue. Sure, Republicans don’t care. They’re even starting to warm to the idea of Trump serving from a jail cell. But a majority of Americans still cling to the idea that the president of the United States should not be a convicted criminal.

This explains one bizarre aspect of the Trump strategy. Yes, he rants daily about “deranged Jack Smith” and the other prosecutors, claiming he’s being persecuted by the deep state and whining about the unfairness of it all. That’s just him. But there is a method to his madness. NBC reports his campaign believes the J6 trial was specifically timed to take him off the trail at a crucial stage so they think they are outsmarting the prosecutors by wrapping up the primary early. (That sounds like something they told their client to make him happy…)

But Trump also wants to get the primary race out of the way so that he can legitimately claim to be the presumptive nominee and use that argument to back up his fatuous assertion that that this is a political prosecution and he cannot be put on trial before the election. That’s not going to work but I suspect he thinks it will be politically useful. For the same reason, he’s been strong arming all the elected Republicans to publicly endorse him and according to Politico, they are being good little MAGA sycophants even though it’s obvious that many of them really don’t want to. Trump believes that this will strengthen his argument that the criminal charges he faces are going to be witch trials.

There are many pending legal issues before the courts that will have to be decided, not the least of which is Trump inane claim that staging a coup was part of his official duties and therefore he has immunity from prosecution. If the courts decide in his favor, it’s all over for the January 6th case and it’s unlikely any of the others will come before the election. But if Trump truly believed he was going to prevail it’s unlikely that his campaign would have adopted this current strategy to end the traditional campaign early so that he can wage a different one in court.

Rolling Stone reports that they’re planning to turn the January 6 trial into a “MAGA freak show” based on the infamous Chicago 7 disruption strategy. Apparently, “his legal team — who largely view the Jan. 6 case as a “suicide mission” anyway, and have their eyes on the appeal — are gearing up to turn the volume up to 11 at trial.”

The Special Prosecutors office must have gotten wind of this because over the holidays they filed a brief with the court asking that the judge preclude any such shenanigans. Despite the shrieking from the right about this being an attempt to prevent him from defending himself, lawyers say that it’s perfectly normal for the prosecution to ask for the judge to lay out the boundaries of what the defense is allowed to present to the jury. Most believe that Trump’s plan to call Nancy Pelosi to the stand to grill her about why she allegedly allowed the insurrection to happen or his attempt to “prove” the election was stolen will likely be forbidden by Judge Tanya Chutkan. She won’t want this trial to devolve into another episode of the Trump Show.

Trump doesn’t want this trial to happen and he really doesn’t want to be convicted, despite his lawyers’ assurances about an appeal. Obviously, if he wins the election, he will simply pardon himself and be done with it. What he’s worried about are those numbers that say if he’s convicted his chances of losing the election go up substantially. Evidently, the rule of law and the Constitution still hold some meaning in our political culture after all and that could spell the end for him.

Salon

Hamlet never imagined this

It’s long seemed as if this country is suffering a severe case of mass insanity. The truth is out there. It is more than QAnon, but please see that obligatory nonsense at the bottom later.

The occasion for revisiting societal mental breakdown is a couple of headlines this morning. This will take a moment.

Texas doctors do not need to perform emergency abortions, court rules (Washington Post)

A federal appeals court on Tuesday ruled that Texas hospitals and doctors are not obligated to perform abortions under a long-standing national emergency-care law, dealing a blow to the White House’s strategy to ensure access to the procedure after the Supreme Court overturned the constitutional right to abortion in 2022.

The federal law “does not mandate any specific type of medical treatment, let alone abortion,” the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 5th Circuit concluded, faulting the Biden administration’s interpretation of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act, or EMTALA. The law “does not govern the practice of medicine,” the court added.

The three-judge panel also faulted the Biden administration’s process of issuing its emergency-care guidance, saying that federal officials did not go through the proper rulemaking process when the administration instructed health-care providers that they were protected by EMTALA if they believed an abortion to be medically necessary. The panel further said that the federal emergency-care law did not “directly conflict” with a near-total abortion ban in effect in Texas, which was written by the state’s Republican legislators and includes exceptions for medical emergencies.

We know already that those Texas exceptions functionally do not exist.

The White House and federal health officials have invoked EMTALA — the 1986 law that requires hospitals and physicians to treat emergency medical conditions or risk fines, civil lawsuits and being blacklisted from federal health programs — in the wake of the Supreme Court’s June 2022 decision that overturned the national right to abortion and led to about two dozen state bans on the procedure. The Biden administration is now engaged in several lawsuits that are expected to set precedent over whether the emergency-care law applies to abortion access, including the Texas case.

Pregnant women in distress in Texas can just die untreated, says the 5th Circuit. No harm, no foul. Abortion rights advocates, the Post reports, “decried the ruling, which they said signaled a disregard for women in life-threatening pregnancy situations.”

Meanwhile, doctors must never stop treating anorexia patients.

Should Patients Be Allowed to Die From Anorexia? (New York Times, gifted)

Naomi “had been starving herself for 26 years.” Nothing was helping. “I’ll either die of anorexia or I’ll die of suicide,” Naomi told reporter Katie Engelhart when they first spoke. “I’ve accepted that.”

Should Naomi be allowed to check out of the hospital? Should she be allowed to stop medical and psychological treatments and seek palliative care until she dies?

The field of palliative care was developed in the 1960s and ’70s, as a way to minister to dying cancer patients. Palliative care offered “comfort measures,” like symptom management and spiritual guidance, as opposed to curative treatment, for people who were in pain and would never get better. Later, the field expanded beyond oncology and end-of-life care — to reach patients with serious medical illnesses like heart disease, H.I.V. and AIDS, kidney failure, A.L.S. and dementia. Some people who receive palliative care are still fighting their diseases; in these cases, the treatment works to mitigate their suffering. Other patients are actively dying or in hospice care. These patients are made “comfortable,” or as comfortable as possible, until the end.

But not for patients with unremitting anorexia whose conditions appear futile. Naomi’s doctor, Jonathan Treem, discussed options:

To Treem, it felt as if Naomi was asking for something more than his nonintervention; she wanted his mercy. His permission to let go, his compassion. It made him think about the other doctors who had treated her. “This is where it gets into a passionate discussion,” he told me. “If you are going to accept responsibility for the people you save, and you’re going to elevate them as examples of why everyone should undergo compulsory treatment, you had better recognize the blood on your hands. That, on some level, in order to ‘save everyone,’ you are perpetuating suffering in others.”

Yet Treem had his limits. He told Naomi that he could not look away if she was actively suicidal. Several times, after an especially unsettling appointment, Treem walked her down to the emergency room, where she was put on a 72-hour mental-health hold.

It is a very long, very complex story reminiscent of Whose Life Is It Anyway? (1981). It raises serious medical ethics questions:

What’s more, in somatic medicine, a patient didn’t need to have a good reason for stopping care. She didn’t even have to try getting better in the first place. A cancer patient could decline chemotherapy that would very likely save her life. Because she didn’t think the benefit was worth the pain. Because she wanted to go home to her children. Because she preferred to be treated by a homeopath. She could do what she wanted, just because she wanted to. Why should patients with mental illnesses be held to a different standard?

“It doesn’t make sense,” says Dr. Joel Yager. A paper he co-authored argues “that psychiatry needed its own subfield of palliative care: specifically for the 15 to 20 percent of patients whose anorexia developed a ‘chronic course’ and did not respond to standard treatment — and for the fraction of those patients who did not want to keep trying to get better.”

“They’re ‘incompetent’ unless they want treatment?” His critics, he said, had no data at all to back up their claim of universal incapacity among anorexic people. Existing studies showed the opposite. Yager thought his critics were suffering from “positive outcome bias”; they remembered the patients who were saved and were grateful for it, but not the ones who died slowly and suffered all the while.

“Absolutely unconscionable,” a Denver-based forensic psychiatrist focused on eating-disorder care ethics said of the paper’s ideas.

To be or not to be

So here we have America in 2024. U.S. states prevent doctors from easing the suffering of women with nonviable pregnancies, and the conservative 5th Circuit absolves them of responsibility should the women die. Meantime, the medical profession insists Naomi stay alive no matter how much and how long she suffers with anorexia. In both cases, women’s lives are not their own.

I don’t have answers. But excuse me for thinking we’ve gone around the bend.

Not to be missed, further evidence from The Hill:

House Republicans are beginning a crucial election year with a heightened focus on border issues as negotiations in the Senate on asylum policy changes drag on and the conference prepares to bring impeachment proceedings against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas.

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R. Ga.) is on the case. Impeached for what, you ask?

Republicans have also claimed Mayorkas has violated the law, failing to meet the standards of the Secure Fence Act, which defines operational control of the border as a status in which not a single person or piece of contraband improperly enters the country. 

But not a single secretary of Homeland Security has met that standard of perfection, something Mayorkas has pointed out as the GOP has grilled him on the law.

You were expecting electeds voted in by these people (below) to act reasonably or rationally?

Remind me again why we’re not allowed to mock MAGA cult members?pic.twitter.com/2BxAXTHc8j

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 23, 2023

Can you point to me a single judge who ruled the election was stolen?

MAGA cult member: “Look at the Supreme Court”

But the SC hasn’t accepted any of these cases

MAGA cult member: “I have alternative news and I find out differently”

These people vote🤦‍♂️pic.twitter.com/jYeb18ywDq

— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) December 30, 2023

If you don’t know, you don’t care

From Civil Discourse with Joyce Vance, A Warning:

One morning before Christmas, I was working out with a friend who I adore, and workout with regularly. She’s young, smart, and a recent college graduate. In the middle of our session, my phone started going off incessantly and I finally picked it up. It was, of course, breaking news. That day, it was about the Giuliani bankruptcy.

I apologized to her for taking the call. I got off quickly and told her, by way of explanation, “Rudy Giuliani just filed for bankruptcy.”

“Who’s Rudy Giuliani?” she asked.

Vance realizes that her friend born after 9/11 has no idea that Giuliani was once “America’s Mayor.” And has no reason to know.

I decided to get a gut check from my 21-year-old. “Do you know who Rudy Giuliani is?” I asked. He rolled his eyes. Of course he does. He reminded me he’s my son. But then, he schooled me on how it works for his generation. College kids, or most of them, don’t watch TV news or read newspapers. They get it from their social media feeds.

Intellectually I know this.

“Giuliani and Trump are all over your newsfeed Mom but now newsfeeds are customized. The only news I’ve seen today is about chess and rap music. [editor’s note: have I failed as a parent?] The algorithm generates your feed based on what you’re interested in, and over time, you just get what you’re already into.” So it makes sense that my friend hadn’t seen anything about Rudy Giuliani. She’s not a politics junkie or a news junkie.

This explains, in part anyway, why youth turnout in elections is so low. Remember the excited reports of a big percentage jump in the level of youth turnout in 2018 and 2022, the first election after Trump’s ascendance? The stories don’t emphasize where that level started or how far it has to go to match the turnout of voters over 45.

You can run this joint

Vance urges readers to discuss with younger friends urgent matters like, oh, the impending collapse of American democracy if Donald Trump gets reelected in 2024.

Not everyone watched the January 6 committee hearings or has been exposed to the overwhelming evidence of Donald Trump’s perfidy. Take the time to start the conversation, whether it’s over a cup of coffee, in line at the supermarket, or in the gym. One voter at a time.

The youth vote is both democracy’s salvation and its Achilles heel. Younger voters lean left and unaffiliated. They just don’t turn out like us oldsters (see by-now familiar graphic at top). Where is the greatest potential for increasing turnout that favors Democrats? In the blue-shaded area to the left of the white vertical line. I tell the young’uns: If you and your friends just vote, you can run this joint. But not if you aren’t sitting at the table.

Republicans know this. It’s why they make it as hard as possible for younger Americans to vote by splitting university campuses, limiting on-campus voting sites, and passing voter ID laws. And that’s why we’re fighting back.

Folks, the @NCDemParty can proudly say 7️⃣0️⃣ out of 1️⃣1️⃣3️⃣ universities and community colleges will have their students IDs count as *valid voter IDs* for the 2024 election cycle. This would NOT have been possible without the hard work of @linville_nathan & @CollegeDemsNC. #ncpol https://t.co/JWvFIVnrUx

— Anderson Clayton☀️ (@abreezeclayton) December 29, 2023

Vance’s conversation yielded benefits:

I got lunch with my friend after we worked out today. She told me she’d read a few articles about Giuliani and realized what it was about. She asked a couple of questions about the election interference case against Trump. Apparently, those few articles she’d looked at piqued her interest—and influenced her algorithm.

Donald Trump will end American democracy if he’s reelected. He will corrupt our country for his own benefit. He has not made a secret of it. The only question is whether enough of our fellow citizens will be aware of what the 2024 election means for the future and care enough when we go to the polls to prevent Trump from returning to power. The small steps that we take during the next few months will pay big dividends.

One voter at a time.

(h/t KS)

That is 100% a lie. They did none of that. All the evidence is available. Nancy Pelosi did not turn down his request for the National Guard on January 6th. And no, unless you are saying that Jonathan Turley represents the “most respected legal minds in the Country” there is virtually no one saying that he’s “fully entitled” to immunity for what he did.

MSNBC keeps saying that they won’t show what Trump is saying because “there’s a cost” to them. Actually, there’s a cost to everyone if they don’t. People need to see it and they need to see the arguments against it. Today I saw them put up Liz Cheney’s response to this but not the post itself which didn’t show just how deranged he really is.

Trump needs to be seen by everyone in all his glory. What they’re doing now is inadvertently covering for him. They need to stop it.

So much information has gone under the bridge about the insurrection that I’ve lost sight of some of the more interesting details that flush out what happened on January 6th — and who is responsible. (People like Marcy Wheeler who follow the trials are very well aware, of course.)

This piece from June 2021 by Amanda Carpenter came to my attention over the holidays and I thought it was interesting. If you still think that Trump didn’t actually incite the insurrection, this is important to consider:

To understand January 6, 2021, we must first look back to June 1, 2020.

That was the day Donald Trump delivered a terse Rose Garden speech threatening to deploy the U.S. military to any city or state that “refuses to take the actions that are necessary to defend the life and property of their residents.” The speech was prompted by the protests that began on May 26 in Minneapolis and spread throughout the country after George Floyd was killed by police. Trump’s staff argued that the threatened military deployment would have been permitted under the Insurrection Act of 1807, which empowers the president to deploy federal troops for domestic law enforcement under certain circumstances.

As Trump spoke, federal law enforcement officers, joined by officers from other local jurisdictions, clashed with protesters near Lafayette Square, just north of the White House. Officers outfitted in riot gear pushed protesters away from the square, firing rubber bullets at them. Tear gas was used. Army helicopters buzzed the crowds. Trump then marched across the square, flanked by officials and aides, including Secretary of Defense Mark Esper and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley. All so Trump could have a photo op in front of St. John’s Church.

The message was clear. Trump had a military and was willing to use it. But the backlash from the military community came quickly. Admiral Mike Mullen, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, said he was “sickened” to “see security personnel—including members of the National Guard—forcibly and violently clear a path through Lafayette Square to accommodate the president’s visit outside St. John’s Church.” Gen. James Mattis, the respected Marine general who had preceded Esper as Trump’s defense secretary, said he was “angry and appalled.”

Secretary Esper soon distanced himself from Trump, albeit after the fact. He told reporters at a June 3 Pentagon briefing, “The option to use active-duty forces in a law enforcement role should only be used as a matter of last resort, and only in the most urgent and dire of situations. We are not in one of those situations now. I do not support invoking the Insurrection Act.” Gen. Milley later reportedly got into a “heated discussion” with Trump over whether to send active-duty troops to the streets, and in July he publicly apologized, saying, “I should not have been there” for Trump’s photo op.

But Republican politicians and conservative commentators supported Trump’s move. Sen. Tom Cotton wrote an op-ed for the New York Times titled “Send in the Troops”; it was so controversial that the paper later said it should never have been published and one of the responsible editors resigned.

Through it all, Trump never let go of the idea. And as summer changed into fall, talk on the right of an “insurrection” that might be met with a military response shifted from the George Floyd protests and civil unrest to the 2020 election. The same terms and the same proposed action, just a new target.

In a Fox News appearance in September, host Jeanine Pirro asked Trump how he would react if he won the 2020 election and Democrats rioted. “We’ll put them down very quickly if they do that. We have the right to do that. We have the power to do that if we want,” Trump said. “Look, it’s called ‘insurrection.’ We just send in, and we do it, very easy. I mean, it’s very easy.” That same month, in an appearance on conspiracy theorist Alex Jones’s InfoWars program, Trump’s longtime ally Roger Stone—who would later be pardoned by Trump for witness tampering in the Russia investigation and lying to Congress—also talked up the idea of Trump invoking the Insurrection Act.

Although Trump and his allies were in disagreement with the military community about the Insurrection Act, Trump seemed to have other ideas about whom he could call for backup.

During the September 29 debate, Fox News anchor Chris Wallace asked Trump whether he was willing to “condemn white supremacists and militia groups and . . . say that they need to stand down.” Trump replied “sure” but then said the Proud Boys groups should “stand back and stand by” for the election.

“But I’ll tell you what,” Trump continued, “somebody’s got to do something about Antifa and the left because this is not a right-wing problem.”

After the press called the election for Joe Biden on November 7, Trump quickly fired Esper, who had openly opposed invoking the Insurrection Act, and installed Christopher Miller as acting defense secretary. And, as “Stop the Steal” efforts gained steam through November and December, Trump’s allies Sidney Powell, Lin Wood, and Michael Flynn often advocated using the Insurrection Act as a catch-all solution to any number of problems Trump faced. One disturbing Politico headline makes the point: “MAGA leaders call for the troops to keep Trump in office.”

I know the J6 Committee pursued some of this. But I haven’t seen it put so succinctly before. We knew that Trump had been basically calling for the Insurrection Act since the George Floyd protests and kept talking about it all the way up to January 6th. I think what I didn’t understand before was how much having “insurrection” out there in the ether was being interpreted by his own followers.

If anyone was primed to take marching orders about insurrection from Commander-in-Chief Trump, it was Oath Keepers founder Stewart Rhodes. To him, it must have sounded like a bugle call directly in his ears.

Rhodes, who founded the group in 2009, has been talking about insurrection for years. And the combination of COVID lockdowns and BLM protests apparently triggered his militant aspirations more than ever. He wrote on Facebook in August 2020 that “Civil war is here, right now” and warned there would be “open warfare with Marxist insurrectionists by Election Day.” Shortly after the media called the election for Biden, Rhodes said in a livestreamed speech that viewers should “stand up now and call on the president to suppress the insurrection.”

He meant it.

Court filings from the Department of Justice containing communications from Oath Keeper militants—some of whom are said to have acted as personal security for Roger Stone at “Stop the Steal” rallies, including on the eve of the January 6 insurrection—show how clear Rhodes’s thinking was about it.

According to prosecutors, Rhodes held a planning meeting for the attack on November 9, 2020. During it, he said:

-“We’re going to defend the president, the duly elected president, and we call on him to do what needs to be done to save our country. Because if you don’t guys, you’re going to be in a bloody, bloody civil war, and a bloody—you can call it an insurrection or you can call it a war or fight.”

-He told his followers they needed to be prepared to fight Antifa, which he characterized as a group of individuals with whom “if the fight comes, let the fight come. Let Antifa—if they go kinetic on us, then we’ll go kinetic back on them. I’m willing to sacrifice myself for that. Let the fight start there. That will give President Trump what he needs, frankly. If things go kinetic, good. If they throw bombs at us and shoot us, great, because that brings the president his reason and rationale for dropping the Insurrection Act.”

-He continued, “I do want some Oath Keepers to stay on the outside, and to stay fully armed and prepared to go in armed, if they have to. . . . So our posture’s gonna be that we’re posted outside of D.C., um, awaiting the president’s orders. . . . We hope he will give us the orders. We want him to declare an insurrection, and to call us up as the militia” (emphasis added).

Rhodes was convicted of seditious conspiracy and sentenced to 18 years in federal prison. Others were as well. They heard Trump talking about insurrection and “stand back and stand by” and thought he was giving instructions.

He didn’t evoke the Insurrection Act on January 6th. Instead, he sent the crowd to the Capitol and watched as they stormed the building to stop the peaceful transfer of power.

Paul Krugman agrees that things are looking up. Will people recognize it in time or will they continue to blame Joe Biden for the chaos and ugliness that Trump and his cult are creating?

Almost four years have passed since Covid-19 struck. In America, the pandemic killed well over a million people and left millions more with lingering health problems. Much of normal life came to a halt, partly because of official lockdowns but largely because fear of infection kept people home.

The big question in the years that followed was whether America would ever fully recover from that shock. In 2023 we got the answer: yes. Our economy and society have, in fact, healed remarkably well. The big remaining question is when, if ever, the public will be ready to accept the good news.

In the short run, of course, the pandemic had severe economic and social effects, in many ways wider and deeper than almost anyone expected. Employment fell by 25 million in a matter of weeks. Huge government aid limited families’ financial hardship, but maintaining Americans’ purchasing power in the face of a disrupted economy meant that demand often exceeded supply, and the result was overstretched supply chains and a burst of inflation.

At the same time, the pandemic reduced social interactions and left many people feeling isolated. The psychological toll is hard to measure, but the weakening of social ties contributed to a range of negative trends, including a surge in violent crime.

It was easy to imagine that the pandemic experience would leave long-term scars — that long Covid and early retirements would leave us with a permanently reduced labor force, that getting inflation down would require years of high unemployment, that the crime surge heralded a sustained breakdown in public order.

But none of that happened.

You may have heard about the good economic news. Labor force participation — the share of adults in today’s work force — is actually slightly higher than the Congressional Budget Office predicted before the pandemic. Measures of underlying inflation have fallen more or less back to the Federal Reserve’s 2 percent target even though unemployment is near a 50-year low. Adjusted for inflation, most workers’ wages have gone up.

For some reason I’ve heard less about the crime news, but it’s also remarkably good. F.B.I. data shows that violent crime has subsided: It’s already back to 2019 levels and appears to be falling further. Homicides probably aren’t quite back to 2019 levels, but they’re plummeting.

None of this undoes the Covid death toll or the serious learning loss suffered by millions of students. But overall both our economy and our society are in far better shape at this point than most people would have predicted in the early days of the pandemic — or than most Americans are willing to admit.

For if America’s resilience in the face of the pandemic shock has been remarkable, so has the pessimism of the public.

By now, anyone who writes about the economic situation has become accustomed to mail and social media posts (which often begin, “You moron”) insisting that the official statistics on low unemployment and inflation are misleading if not outright lies. No, the Consumer Price Index doesn’t ignore food and energy, although some analytical measures do; no, grocery prices aren’t still soaring.

Rather than get into more arguments with people desperate to find some justification for negative economic sentiment, I find it most useful to point out that whatever American consumers say about the state of the economy, they are spending as if their finances are in pretty good shape. Most recently, holiday sales appear to have been quite good.

What about crime? This is an area in which public perceptions have long been notoriously at odds with reality, with people telling pollsters that crime is rising even when it’s falling rapidly. Right now, according to Gallup, 63 percent of Americans say that crime is an “extremely” or a “very” serious problem for the United States — but only 17 percent say it’s that severe a problem where they live.

And Americans aren’t acting as if they’re terrified about crime. As I’ve written before, major downtowns have seen weekend foot traffic — roughly speaking, the number of people visiting the city for fun rather than work — recover to prepandemic levels, which isn’t what you’d expect if Americans were fleeing violent urban hellscapes.

So whatever Americans may say to pollsters, they’re behaving as if they live in a prosperous, fairly safe (by historical standards) country — the country portrayed by official statistics, although not by opinion polls. (Disclaimer: Yes, we have vast inequality and social injustice. But this is no more true now than it was in earlier years, when Americans were far more optimistic.)

The big question, of course, is whether grim narratives will prevail over relatively sunny reality in the 2024 election. There are hints in survey data that the good economic news is starting to break through, but I don’t know of any comparable hints on crime.

In any case, what you need to know is that America responded remarkably well to the economic and social challenges of a deadly pandemic. By most measures, we’re a nation on the mend. Let’s hope we don’t lose our democracy before people realize that.

Biden didn’t do all of that, of course. The country has shown itself to be resilient in many ways and that’s to our credit. But he’s the guy who presided over this remarkable recovery and he should get the credit.

Unfortunately, we are awash in hideous cultural nastiness caused by right wing authoritarians and it’s caused a sour mood throughout the country. Overcoming that isn’t going to be easy.