Judgment’s coming
There’s no telling what the Manhattan jury in the Donald Trump falsified records trial will do. Summations are due to start today. Right-wing media outlets claim there is no there there. Leftier services make it clear that the evidence against Trump is solid. Neither set of pundits gets a vote in the jury room.
CNN‘s Stephen Collinson:
The summations mark the climax of a trial that started more than a month ago. They are expected to last all day Tuesday and could stretch into the following day. After Judge Juan Merchan instructs jurors on the law, Trump and the rest of the country will be held in suspense to see whether he will become the first ex-president and presumptive GOP nominee to be convicted of a crime after allegedly falsifying financial records to hide a hush money payment to an adult film star in 2016.
The verdict will reverberate far beyond the courtroom and Trump’s personal life since the case has become intertwined with his bid to reclaim the White House. The stakes are especially high since this is likely to be the only one of four pending criminal trials expected to go to a jury before November’s election. The former president appeared to be in a bitter mood on the eve of his return to the courtroom, lashing out at opponents he called “Human Scum” in a message on social media marking Memorial Day.
It’s easy to dismiss Trump’s raging about “Human Scum” as his usual impotent bluster, but his increasingly crazed rants send messages that his cult members could act on whether or not he is convicted. His followers heard those messages loud and clear after the 2020 election did not go his way. They flocked to Washington, D.C. at his beckoning on January 6, 2021, for the “Stop the Steal” rally he promised would be “wild.” Many came prepared and equipped for the wilding that followed. Not since the British burned the Capitol on August 24, 1814, a date largely forgotten, has the seat of government been so violated. Not even during the Civil War.
Trump may be out of power at the moment, but his army of believers means he is not powerless. What might he do with real power if Americans are foolish enough to hand it to him again?
Greg Sargent cautions readers not to dismiss Trump’s raging as just that:
On Sunday, Donald Trump posted video of a man raging and cursing uncontrollably at MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough outside what appears to be an airport in New York. This generated a flurry of attention on social media, with some pointing out that Trump’s fury at Scarborough has a history dating back to the Morning Joe host’s public turning against Trump, which includes Trump falsely suggesting Scarborough murdered a young MSNBC intern.
Scarborough and the whole Morning Joe crew have been stern Trump critics for years, but I’d like to focus on something beyond Scarborough here: The video’s declaration that if Trump wins the presidency, “liberals” are “done.”
As the man delicately puts it:
He’ll get rid of all you fucking liberals. You liberals are gone when he fucking wins. You fucking blowjob liberals are done. Uncle Donnie’s gonna take this election—landslide. Landslide, you fucking half a blowjob. Landslide. Get the fuck out of here, you scumbag.
By posting this video, Trump appears to be endorsing that sentiment about not only Scarborough but about liberals generally. Shouldn’t that be pretty big news in and of itself?
Well, no, because the press has acclimated to Trump being Trump. Trump may fume, but two-thirds of the country is not conditioned to the permanent state of froth to which right-wing talk radio and television have addicted their audience. Another 20 percent tunes in each day for a “fix.” The rest of us grow too weary of the hair-afire rhetoric for the mainstream press to dish it out as relentlessly.
Besides, this is all performative. Sure, Trump re-Truths this stuff, but he and his followers are just cranks, right? Ask the scarred Capitol Police about Trumpish cranks.
Sargent caustically observes:
There is a mini-cottage industry of punditry that is forever on the lookout for the merest hint of disrespect toward conservative voters, particularly rural and working-class white ones. But the fact that the GOP nominee for president approvingly posted a video that declares a large ideological subgroup of Americans “done” and “gone” if he is elected—never mind the vile epithets directed at them—appears to have garnered almost no headlines. Few if any top shelf pundits have scowled with disapproval.
This is not intended as whataboutism. Rather, the point is that allowing such moments to remain decontextualized makes it easier to evade grappling with their true underlying intent. After all, it is undeniable that a central rationale of Trump’s presidential run is the threat to use state power to persecute and target—in a newly aggressive way—a large albeit ill-defined class of Americans who are designated as enemies of Trump and his MAGA movement.
Importantly, this vow is not merely rhetorical. As CNN’s Oliver Darcy shows, Trump’s threat to “investigate” the media exists in the form of a concrete program, with ideas about prosecuting media figures now discussed openly by Trump loyalists who are expected to serve in a second Trump administration. This talk has taken a truly dangerous turn.
What was it Dubya once observed? “Fool me once”? The Confederacy lost the Civil War but won the peace. Southerners refused to accept Lee’s surrender the way MAGA refused to accept Trump’s 2020 loss. Whites reasserted control, sabotaged the Reconstruction amendments, instituted Jim Crow, and enforced it with a reign of terror that lasted decades. Indeed, it took 100 years to pass the Civil Rights and Voting Rights acts over southern objections.
Trump’s MAGA movement is simply civil war by other means, a backlash with a long history. Sargent asks, “What if some subset of Trump supporters continues backing him not in spite of his efforts to place himself above our institutions and the law—not in spite of his threats to unleash punishment and suffering on other large groups of Americans—but precisely because of those things?”
Do not dismiss his raging, or his cult’s, as impotent bluster. Not as long as Trump has followers who will believe up is down if he says so.
“South Carolina is too small for a republic, but too large for an insane asylum,” said James Louis Petigru of Charleston, South Carolina in December 1860, after secession. That’s true today of MAGAstan.
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