Her comments used to be the usual way people would defend the right to abortion — straightforward, no weasel words, practical and confident. Then the anti-abortion zealots became mainstream in the Republican party and Democrats went on the defensive and they didn’t emerge from it until 30 years later when the Supremes struck down Roe v Wade. The price for that foolish capitulation is extreme.
Donald Trump had an epic meltdown on his social media site Trump Social on Tuesday. Even for someone who is prone to ranting and raving in public, this was one for the books. Apparently on the verge of cracking under the financial pressure stemming from the civil judgments against hims for defamation and fraud, he let fly with post after post filled with whining and invective against New York Attorney General Leticia James and NY State Judge Arthur Engoran.
For instance, he wrote: “Any business thinking about moving into New York State is CRAZY! The level of anger and hostility toward businesses and business people is incredible. Numerous people have spoken to me about this since the Racist and Politically Corrupt A.G., who ran for office on a platform of “I will get Trump” without knowing anything about me or my business, and her corrupt puppet Judge, Arthur Engoron, who has already been overturned 4 times on this case, a record, started doing a number on me.”
He seems a little bit stressed, wouldn’t you say? He went on to claim that they are trying to take his fortune and force him to sell his assets in a “fire sale” which is a good indication that his boasts in his fraud trial deposition that he could find a “buyer from Saudi Arabia to pay any price he suggests,” (which Judge Engoran pointed out in his ruling “may suggest influence buying more than savvy investing”) might not be as much of a sure thing as he thought it was.
Donald Trump testified that he undervalued his properties, not overvalued them and that he was flush with hundreds of millions of dollars and no debt. Now it turns out he can’t get a bond (possibly because his properties are already leveraged and the lenders don’t want any other liens on them) and he’s crying that he doesn’t have any cash. It sure looks like that judge’s ruling was right on the money. He is an inveterate liar about his fortune. Why anyone ever loaned him money in the first place remains one of life’s biggest mysteries.
But maybe he can find a Russian oligarch to step up. Back in 2016 they even managed to make one of their assets, Paul Manafort, his campaign manager for a time. He turned out to be massively in debt to one and used inside information to pay him back. Back in those early days Trump didn’t yet know that he could get away with anything so he fired him when this information came out and Manafort ended being sentenced to 47 months in federal prison in one case and 73 months in another for a variety of crimes that were uncovered in the course of the Special Prosecutor’s investigation of Russian interference in the election.
You may recall that among other crimes like tax fraud and illegal foreign lobbying, Manafort pleaded guilty to money laundering related to his work in Ukraine with various Russian players but he subsequently lied so much to the Special Prosecutor’s office that they withdrew the plea agreement and he went to trial. And today his relationships with Ukraine and Russia should be of renewed concerns to federal authorities since according to the Washington Post, he’s now expected to join Trump’s 2024 campaign at a time when we know that Trump badly needs money.
One stated reason for the hire, which is cited in most reports, is that they need him to run the convention a job which he was well known for back in the 1980s before he decamped to Ukraine to run their campaigns and launder money. In 2016 they didn’t have a real organization and had to take what they could get so they eagerly hired anyone with a pulse and he was placed in the campaign by his former partner and Trump’s personal dirty trickster Roger Stone (who Trump also pardoned before he went into temporary exile at Mar-a-Lago.) But there is zero need to hire Manafort to “run the convention” now. There are plenty of people who could do that. It’s the other stated reason that makes more sense. The Post reported that the job would “include Manafort playing a role in fundraising for the presumptive GOP nominee’s campaign.”
Manafort hasn’t been involved in fundraising in America in many years. But he sure knows his way around Russian oligarchs and spies and he definitely knows how to broker a quid pro quo. As journalist Marcy Wheeler reminds us, Manafort’s contact during the 2016 campaign, the Russian asset Konstantin Kilimnik (who is under indictment in the United States) had once pitched him on Russian help in the election in exchange for allowing Russia to carve up Ukraine.
That deal didn’t pan out in the first term, but you can see why Trump, in his desperate financial straits, might want to re-open that line of communication. And it sure looks like Trump is ready to close the deal if he gets elected in November. It’s clear that he intends to withdraw military funding and let Russia have its way with the country (and anywhere else it chooses for that matter.)
The weird and inexplicable relationships between Trump,Ukraine and Russia have been a constant refrain for the past eight years and nothing ever shakes Trump’s bizarre willingness to court this scandal over and over again. There have been investigations and impeachments and trials and convictions and yet he just can’t leave it alone. His obsequious behavior toward Russian president Vladimir Putin, his hostility toward Ukraine, the fatuous rationale to end NATO because “it doesn’t pay its bills” and the recent comments that he would allow Russia to invade any country it wants have never made any sense, even for him. Yes, he is a shallow, puerile narcissist who loves to suck up to tyrants so they’ll let him into the strongman club but that doesn’t fully explain his apparently endless need to prove his fealty to Vladimir Putin.
And now he wants to re-hire the convicted felon he later pardoned, a man who admitted to laundering money for Russian oligarchs to do fundraising. It’s true that Trump is overwhelmingly stressed out about having his lies about his fortune exposed and possibly losing everything but it’s hard to believe that even he’d be so reckless as to go there for a bailout. But then he’s gotten away with everything so far so why not?
As he says, he likes Putin and he knows Putin likes him too. Why shouldn’t he turn to his good friend in his time of need?
Psychically, TFG “needs to make the election a referendum on himself.”
Perhaps the most delicious part of the 24/7 Trump reality show is watching the 77-year-old spoiled brat come apart at the seams, and his organization with him. It seems “panic mode is setting in.”
The former president never expected to win the presidency in 2016, botched the transition, didn’t know what the hell he was doing, hired sycophants and relations to whom he didn’t listen, and hundreds of thousands of Americans died in his tardy response to the COVID-19 outbreak. Because he’s corrupt as hell, never ran anything larger than a small family business, and because Donald Trump is about Donald Trump 24/7/365.
Trump does not keep chickens that I know of, but they are coming home to roost anyway. Psychically and financially, if not yet criminally.
A smart, ah say, a smart challenger-candidate with Trump’s pandemic record wouldn’t touch the “Are you better off?” question with a ten-foot cattle prod. The classic strategy, David Frum explains in “The Ego Has Crash-Landed,” is to assume “the voters’ verdict will be on the incumbent; the challenger’s job is simply to refrain from doing or saying anything that gets in the way.”
But Trump psychically needs to make “the election a referendum on himself,” Frum writes in The Atlantic:
In two consecutive elections, 2016 and 2020, more Americans voted against Trump than for him. The only hope he has of changing that verdict in 2024 is by directing Americans’ attention away from himself and convincing them to like Biden even less than they like Trump. But that strategy would involve Trump mainly keeping his mouth shut and his face off television—and that, Trump cannot abide.
Trump cannot control himself. He cannot accept that the more Americans hear from Trump, the more they will prefer Biden.
Almost 30 years ago, I cited in The Atlantic some advice I’d heard dispensed by an old hand to a political novice in a congressional race. “There are only two issues when running against an incumbent,” the stager said. “[The incumbent’s] record, and I’m not a kook.” Beyond that, he went on, “if a subject can’t elect you to Congress, don’t talk about it.”
Trump’s two issues, Frum observes, “are his record and Yes, I am a kook. The subjects that won’t get him elected to anything are the subjects that he is most determined to talk about.”
Couldn’t happen to a more fatuous sociopath.
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Consider:
In “The Bloodbath Candidate,” Yale history professor Timothy Snyder, author of “On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century,” analyzes Donald “91 Counts” Trump promising in Ohio last Saturday there would be a “bloodbath for the country” if he’s not elected:
The Vandalia rally began with a brazen celebration of the convicted criminals who took part in Trump’s failed coup attempt. Those present were instructed to “please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages.” The reference was to convicts serving time for attempting to overturn the results of the last presidential election and thereby overthrow the American form of government.
The phrase “horribly and unfairly treated January 6th hostages,” booming over the loudspeaker, was substituted here for the call to rise to the flag or the national anthem. The people who tried to overthrow the Constitution were inserted where a pledge to American values would ordinarily be. Americans were being asked to honor violence in the service of overthrowing the American system.
This Gesamtkunstwerk was designed to bring people into a sense of unity with the perpetrators of the January 6th crimes. As a chorus of convicted criminals sang over video, people rose and then joined in song. They put their hands on their hearts. Along with the coup convicts, those who attended the rally performed a perforated version of the national anthem. In so doing, they joined a virtual community of violence.
The singing was interwoven with a recording of Trump reciting the pledge of allegiance, as though he were the only American who mattered. Baseball cap still on head, Trump saluted a recording of himself. Both of these details, too, are mockeries of patriotic performance. Trump has no right to salute at that moment. Not removing the cap means that he, and he alone, is above it all — the martyr in chief, the most “horribly and unfairly treated.”
Will Bunch in his Tuesday Philadelphia Inquirer newsletter wrote, “Trump’s literal salute” in song “to those willing to commit violence on behalf of his MAGA movement — both the arrestees he now calls ‘hostages’ and the slain rioter Ashli Babbitt, hailed by the ex-president as a martyr” echoes the “Horst-Wessel-Lied,” or “The Horst Wessel Song.” The tune celebrating a fallen brownshirt became a Nazi anthem. “It was even played in churches as Goebbels forged his own version of Christian nationalism.”
Keep an eye out for that happening soon, willya?
Trump apologists explain away Trump’s bloodbath remark as a metaphor. He was talking about the auto industry and was taken out of context. But, Snyder explains, the entire rally is context. “In this sense Trump’s defenders are the one who are taking Trump’s remarks out of context.” In full context, Trump is worse.
Calling convicted, imprisoned insurrectionists “unbelievable patriots” and “hostages” he pledges to pardon is context.
“That is perhaps the most essential element of context to Trump’s later reference to a bloodbath,” Snyder explains. “He has already made clear, in a the collective performance, that violent insurrection is the best form of politics. Well before he actually used the word, he had instructed his audience that bloodbaths are the right form of politics” when done in his name.
For which (like Wessel) they would be remembered, celebrated, and forgiven.
Trump’s speeches are suffused with grievance justifying law-breaking. The Big Lie takes center stage. He invoked it nine times by Snyder’s count.
The fascist-style martyrdom cult justifies violence, in two ways. It makes a hero of criminals, thereby making criminality exemplary. And it establishes prior innocence — we suffered first, and therefore anything we do to make others suffer will always be justified. The Nazis sang their Horst Wessel Song as they conquered countries and killed millions.
In another way, Trump’s Vandalia speech also summoned up the fascist historical context. For fascists, political opponents are enemies because they are animals or are associated with animals. The border theme in Trump’s campaign is meant to link the Biden administration to violent subhumans. In the Vandalia speech, Trump called migrants animals, snakes, and monsters.
“I don’t know if you call them people,” Trump said, speaking of jailed Mexican gang members. “These are animals.”
Trump told his Jan. 6 “Stop the Steal” rally, “We fight like hell. And if you don’t fight like hell, you’re not going to have a country anymore.” Just a rhetorical flourish? What happened next?
Snyder insists:
Trump is calling for a bloodbath in front of people who stood to honor bloodshed. People who have just sung with coup criminals. People whom he implicitly promises he will pardon if they carry out another insurrection. And he is doing this in the fascist style of telling a big lie that confers martyrdom upon criminals who try to overthrow a democracy they associated with subhumans.
We should see Trump for what he is: an aspiring fascist who likes, wants, and needs violence. But we need not fear him or his plans. There were not that many people assembled in Vandalia, and their reactions to Trump’s rhetoric were muted. Some left before he was done. Although Trump himself has (absurdly) escaped punishment for his attempted coup, the foot soldiers of the last insurrection are in prison. Trump won’t actually be able to pardon anyone this fall.
In coaching his followers towards a November 2024 insurrection, Trump is telling them (and us) that he doesn’t really plan to win the election. As he did in 2016, as he did in 2020, he is telling us that the vote count does not decide the issue for him. He wants to get close enough in the tally to make some kind of a play. But the vote count will matter to the rest of us. If the election is not close, it will matter even to his followers.
On that last part, I’m not so sure.
MAGAstan is a place where facts don’t matter, where the only reality is one Trump specifies, in which white, Christian males (and oligarchs like Trump) rule atop the social ladder, and all others know their place. Trump lost the popular vote in 2016, and by a wider margin in 2020. When he lost the 2020 election, his followers rioted and sacked the U.S. Capitol. The vote was rigged. The machines were rigged. Bamboo ballot paper came from China. Election officials double-counted votes and fabricated others. Ineligible “illegals” voted and handed the win to Joe Biden, etc. Trump is selling the Big Lie still. It’s part of the MAGA catechism.
Trump is hemorrhaging support and cracking under the financial and legal pressures he’s brought on himself. That’s the bloodbath he fears most and for which he swears the retribution of Real Americans™, the ordinary people in his cult. Though likely fewer by the time the election rolls around, they won’t go quietly into that good night. “He’s the bloodbath candidate,” says Snyder, and he’s advertising it.
Update: More “ordinary people.”
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Arizona’s anti-abortion laws impact women across the Grand Canyon State, and one Democratic state senator spoke out about how those laws have hurt her as she seeks to end an unviable pregnancy, urging GOP lawmakers to consider the harm caused by the restrictive laws they support.
An emotional Sen. Eva Burch described, in a speech Monday on the Senate floor, the hoops she has had to jump through to secure an abortion, after finding out her pregnancy is not viable. Despite knowing for weeks that her pregnancy is likely to result in a miscarriage, the Democrat from Mesa has not yet received the care she needs.
“I don’t think people should have to justify their abortions,” she said, her voice shaking. “But I’m choosing to talk about why I made this decision because I want us to have meaningful conversations about the reality of how the work that we do in this body impacts people in the real world.”
Burch was forced to undergo a transvaginal ultrasound, hear a list of mandated recommendations from her provider — including advice to avail herself of foster care or adoption alternatives, despite the fact that her fetus has no chance of survival — and wait 24 hours before receiving an abortion. All of those requirements are mandated by state laws approved by GOP lawmakers.
Burch said the legislature shouldn’t be enacting restrictive laws around abortions, because doing so ties the hands of providers and is detrimental to women. She pointed to the state-mandated information her doctor was forced to give her, despite it clearly not applying in her case, as “cruel” proof that the laws are harmful.
“The only reason I had to hear those things was a cruel and uninformed attempt by outside forces to shame and coerce and frighten me into making a different decision other than the one I knew was right for me,” she said. “There’s no one-size-fits-all script for people seeking abortion care, and the legislature doesn’t have any right to assign one.”
And while Burch, who is about 8 weeks along in her pregnancy, is still legally able to obtain an abortion, she acknowledged that not all women in Arizona can — and access to the procedure is still in flux.
The state is currently under a 15-week gestational ban, with no exceptions for rape or incest. Another law forbidding abortions for the sole reason of a genetic fetal abnormality is also still in effect, pending the outcome of an appeal to block it. And the Arizona Supreme Court is weighing whether to reinstate a near-total ban from 1864, that would prohibit all abortions except for those to save the patient’s life and punish doctors who violate that rule with a mandatory 2 to 5 years in prison.
Burch herself was nearly prevented from accessing reproductive health care two years ago when Arizona was teetering between the 15-week ban and the 1864 law, amid legal uncertainty shortly after the U.S. Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade.
At the time, Burch was devastated to learn that a much-wanted pregnancy would result in a miscarriage, requiring an abortion to keep her safe. When she began miscarrying the night before her scheduled abortion, doctors were only willing to give her medication to speed up her miscarriage, hesitant to greenlight an emergency abortion until she was in a critical state.
The next day, she had an abortion. Just two weeks later, abortion clinics across the state paused services in the aftermath of the high court’s ruling.
Burch on Monday denounced legislative restrictions on abortions, saying that lawmakers have no place making decisions that should be reserved for women and their medical teams.
“Doctors and patients should be making those determinations, not legislators who don’t have to suffer through the consequences themselves,” she said.
This is a monstrous situation.
By the way, her GOP colleagues scurried out of the room so they didn’t have to hear about it.
Trump is suing George Stephanopoulos for saying that he was found liable for rape when interviewing Nancy Mace. Seriously:
Former President Trump sued ABC News and George Stephanopoulos on Monday, alleging defamation over the anchor’s questioning of Rep. Nancy Mace (R-S.C.) about her endorsement of Trump.
The March 10 interview on “This Week” made headlines after Mace, a rape survivor, accused Stephanopoulos of trying to “shame” her by probing why she endorsed the former president despite juries’ recent verdicts against him in advice columnist E. Jean Carroll’s sexual battery and defamation lawsuits.
Trump’s lawsuit takes aim at how Stephanopoulos at multiple points in his questioning said Trump had been found “liable for rape.” The jury had found Trump liable for sexual abuse under New York law, but not rape.
“Judges and two separate juries have found him liable for rape and for defaming the victim of that rape. How do you square your endorsement of Donald Trump with the testimony we just saw, ” Stephanopoulos asked during the interview.
“These statements were and remain false, and were made by Defendant Stephanopoulos with actual malice or with a reckless disregard for the truth given that Defendant Stephanopoulos knows that these statements are patently and demonstrably false,” Trump’s attorney, Alejandro Brito, wrote in the 20-page complaint.
I sure hope Brito got his money upfront because this case is way down the list of important Trump cases.
Trump is being a moron here. He’s about to go to trial for illegally funneling hush money to a porn star during his first presidential campaign. There’s going to be a whole lot of talk about his creepy sexual behavior 18 years ago when his wife was at home with their newborn child. Now he’s drawing attention to the detail of his grotesque assault on E. Jean Carroll? Does he think that people, especially women, like this stuff about him?
George Conway wrote this on twitter:
The theory of Trump’s complaint here is that, since the jury in Carroll II, the case tried last year, unanimously found that Trump forcibly and without consent penetrated Carroll’s vagina with his fingers and not his penis, and since this constituted sexual assault and not rape as defined by the New York Penal Code, Stephanopoulos libeled him by saying he had been held liable for “rape,” even though the judge in the Carroll case has held multiple times since the verdict that in common parlance (and the law of most other jurisdictions) forcible digital penetration is rape.
In other words, Trump is suing Stephanopoulos and ABC because Stephanopoulos repeated what a federal district judge has said repeatedly in written opinions. By bringing this lawsuit, Trump will only bring more public attention to what he did to Carroll. And he and his lawyers may very well be—in fact, ought to be—sanctioned. Another brilliant stable-genius move. Trump is not only a rapist, he’s a nut job, and a very, very dumb one at that.
Another brilliant stable-genius move. Trump is not only a rapist, he’s a nut job, and a very, very dumb one at that.
Some of his people really do think this reflects his “manly vigor” I guess. What kind of people would think such a thing?
In fairness, he did break the news on their air so I guess that 4 minutes was enough.
If you wonder why Republicans seems so incredibly misinformed and yes, stupid, these days, this is why.
I’m not really in the space where I devote a lot of time to critiquing the centrist Democrats these days what with the rise of fascism and all. And that may not be the best idea since they are often fascist enablers, like Joe Lieberman (who isn’t really even a centrist anymore.) This piece by Zack Carter in Slate spells out why.
He asks why it is that despite the roaring economy and Biden’s undeniably excellent performance on that issue which is always at the forefront of people’s minds unless we are in the middle of a war,that the administration isn’t getting more credit for it. We’ve all heard about the fact that people really are hurting from inflation (which peaked almost two years ago and has been retreating ever since) and I think we can all agree that the media narrative has been miserable for Biden and continues to this day. But Carter sees another reason and I think he’s right, especially since that may be the main reason for the media’s relentless negativity: the Democratic think tanks, nonprofits, academic experts and journalists that “regulate the liberal intellectual atmosphere”:
While Biden himself has certain centrist tendencies on issue like police reform and immigration (and, obviously, Israel) on economics he has been the most progressive president since Roosevelt. And that, he argues, has incited a a “centrist revolt” that “established a narrative of failure” which seems impervious to reality:
From his first day in the Oval Office, Biden has embraced nearly every progressive criticism of Barack Obama’s approach to the economy, and translated those critiques into policy. Obama scoffed at labor unions; Biden walked a picket line and appointed the most pro-worker National Labor Relations Board in decades. Obama’s Education Department screwed over student debtors; Biden has canceled $138 billion in student debt. Obama defended big business; Biden has been an antitrust warrior. Obama was a free trader, while Biden subsidizes domestic manufacturing. Obama offered to cut Social Security; Biden just torched Republicans during his State of the Union for planning the same thing.
The list goes on. But the most important economic distinction between Biden and Obama is on crisis relief. The unemployment rate was high and rising when Obama entered office, escalating to 9 percent by April 2009, a level it would not retreat below for more than two years. When jobs did eventually return, most of those that were created paid poverty wages. The abysmal labor market made his presidency synonymous with the Great Recession.
The chief lesson Biden’s advisers took from this miserable experience was that the government didn’t spend enough in Obama’s 2009 stimulus package to get unemployment under control. More money would have meant more jobs, and more jobs would have put upward pressure on wages.
So Biden opted to spend much bigger out of the gate—$1.9 trillion to Obama’s $800 billion—and continued to secure additional rounds of support right up to the 2022 midterms. Obama began calling for budget cuts with unemployment still stuck above 9 percent, but Biden never pivoted to austerity, and ultimately secured well over $1 trillion in additional public investment after his initial stimulus bill had been enacted.
All this fiscal support resulted in a much stronger labor market. The unemployment rate fell below 5 percent by September 2021—a level Obama did not enjoy until the final days of his presidency—amid record wage growth for low-income workers. The economy never recovered all the manufacturing jobs it lost during the Wall Street crash. Biden had recovered all of those lost in the COVID collapse by May 2022. The COVID crash was sharper, deeper, and more physically disruptive to global trade than the 2008 Wall Street meltdown was, but the U.S. economy rebounded faster, stronger, and more equitably thanks to Biden’s more aggressive relief effort.
But not everyone was happy about this strategy at the time. When Biden signed his first economic relief bill into law in March 2021, former Obama adviser Larry Summers declared it “the least responsible macroeconomic policy we’ve had in the last 40 years” and upbraided “the Democratic left” for preventing a smaller package. All this spending, Summers claimed, risked a run of inflation. People were going to have too much money on their hands, and this excess spending power would lead to higher prices that made everyone poorer. When prices did indeed begin rising in the second half of 2021, the business press hailed Summers as a prophet, and a host of liberal commentators began tipping their hats to him.
Inflation arrived when the national mood was already in the toilet. Deadly car accidents were up, road rage incidents were soaring, and murder rates were rising. More people died from COVID-19 in 2021 than in 2020, even though vaccines were widely available. In monthly Gallup polling, Biden’s approval rating fell from 56 percent in June 2021 to 40 percent in January 2022, and all of this negativity made progressive institutions increasingly reluctant to claim credit for his approach to economic relief. Voters didn’t seem to care about Biden’s strong labor market—they were mad about inflation and everything else.
And so the economic commentary field remained open to Summers and the expert doomsayers—including some with politics well to Summers’ left. Economics dominated the news cycle in a way that it hadn’t since the banking crash, and seemingly everyone had something terrible to say about it. Biden wasn’t creating enough union jobs. His spending was really just a corporate welfare extravaganza. He was stealing jobs from Europe. There were too many regulations on manufacturers. There weren’t enough regulations on manufacturers. A recession was coming. A recession was already here. Some high-profile Democrats even insisted that a recession was necessary—on CNBC, former Obama and Clinton adviser Jason Furman argued that millions of workers would have to be laid off to get inflation back under control. Summers even floated the possibility of 10 percent unemployment.
To give all these haters their due, it really is hard to understand what is happening in the economy in real time, and even the best economists sometimes make predictions that look silly in retrospect. But what is remarkable about the Biden era is the degree to which critics on the left, right, and center basically agreed with one another beneath all the ideological dross. Almost everyone had come up with a way to argue that Biden had engaged in wasteful spending that left ordinary people behind.
Almost everyone. Throughout all this ugliness, a niche discourse continued in the econosphere about whether Summers had correctly nailed the cause of inflation. If Americans really were victims of overspending, then the only way to get inflation back down would indeed be to cause a recession. The problem, according to Summers and Furman, was that everyone had too much money. The solution was to take that money away.
But another camp argued that this was the wrong way to look at an economy that had just emerged from a massive shock like the COVID-19 pandemic. In this telling, inflation was driven not so much by an excess of consumer demand as by a dearth of product supply. It was a lot harder to make and distribute a whole host of goods when businesses around the world kept shutting down, and even once everything had fully reopened, it took a long time for companies to reestablish sources and connections. If supply shortages were indeed responsible for higher prices, then Biden’s spending was a feature, not a bug—it was the only thing standing between American households and the economic abyss.
(By the way, Paul Krugman was among those making that argument from his high perch on the New York Times but for some reason the beltway intelligentsia seems to think Larry Summers is the only guy worth listening to.)
The centrists believed interest rate hikes would naturally induce job losses and then inflation would come down and we could all have a stiff drink and go home. (Too bad about the workers but sometimes you’ve just gotta take one for the team, amirite?) Well…
The layoffs, however, refused to materialize. When inflation peaked at 9.1 percent in June 2022, the unemployment rate stood at 3.6 percent. Today, using the same metrics, inflation is just 3.2 percent, and unemployment is at just 3.9 percent. For 12 of the previous 19 months, the jobless rate has held steady at or below its June 2022 level, while inflation has been running below 4 percent since June 2023. Economists are still debating why the Fed’s higher rates didn’t translate into job losses, but the important point is that millions of people were not, in fact, fired. Moreover, millions of people did not need to be fired in order to fix inflation. As Mike Konczal concluded in a report for the Roosevelt Institute in September 2023, the vast majority of inflation during the Biden years was driven by pandemic-related supply problems. Whatever was going wrong in 2022, it wasn’t because you were too rich.
Carter wrote the book on John Maynard Keynes so he knows his stuff on this subject. And we can chalk this one up in the Keynes column for sure. But if this incredible, if poorly understood, economic victory is not politically rewarded I wonder if it will matter. Certainly the Republicans will ignore any data that doesn’t fit their preconceived belief in tax cuts uber alles. Trump is thinking of making that supply-side wack job Arthur Laffer the Fed Chair so I think we know how that’s going to go.
The good news is that, as Carter concludes, there may be a tiny bit of hope for the Democratic Party. Maybe…
There is some evidence that the economic commentariat is coming to its senses as the 2024 election approaches. Some of the same centrists who ripped Biden’s stimulus package in 2021 are now applauding his recovery. The anti-Biden left has largely abandoned the economic playing field, finding cleaner grounds for criticism on other subjects. Contrary to the narrative abuse directed at Biden over the past few years, the economic numbers across his presidency tell a simple, optimistic story about the art of government in the democratic world. The American economy is strong today for the same reason that the labor market has been strong throughout Biden’s presidency: the U.S. government spent a ton of money to support workers and their families. Biden has not only established a blueprint for successful crisis management, but he has achieved something on the economy that pessimists across the ideological spectrum have been declaring impossible for much of the 21st century: He learned from the government’s prior mistakes and found a way to govern better.
In order for this victory to stick, Biden has to win the election. Some of the long term fruits of Bidenomics will only start to show up in the next term as the infrastructure projects get up and running and people settle down about the inflation they already endured during the pandemic. Otherwise, Trump will get credit and the wingnuts and the centrists will all just go back to their failed beliefs and rituals as we wait for the next crisis to hit without having learned anything from this one.
Of course, if Trump wins we’ll have bigger problems so at that point this whole thing will be moot…
I was tough on Jon Stewart for his “both sides” first episode back on the Daily Show. But this from his earlier show was quite good:
Last night she released a ridiculous order requiring the prosecution that may end up getting her removed from the case. Joyce Vance wrote about it in her newsletter:
Late in the day, Judge Cannon gave an order in the Mar-a-Lago case that has a lot of people shaking their heads. In an order that consisted of two pages and three footnotes, the Judge gave both sides until April 2 to “file proposed jury instructions limited to the essential elements of the offenses charged in Counts 1 through 32.” The trial is scheduled for May, and the Judge still has key motions to consider. This is a short deadline for a Judge who has been comfortable keeping far more pressing matters on a back burner.
Although the order is only two pages, it’s perplexing. I read it several times, trying to figure out what it means. It turns out it’s two pages of crazy stemming from the Judge’s apparent inability to tell Trump no when it comes to his argument that he turned the nation’s secrets into his personal records by designating them as such under the Presidential Records Act. After failing to reach a final decision on that motion last week, she is now presenting the parties with two “legal scenarios,” each of which seems to assume that the Presidential Records Act gives Trump the ability to morph national secrets into personal papers. Her two scenarios involve two different ways the Presidential Records Act could help Trump out, but they’re both wrong. The Presidential Records Act isn’t a way around the rules for handling classified information. Just like when the Eleventh Circuit reversed her when she tried to prevent the government from using the items seized during the search of Mar-a-Lago in its investigation, Judge Cannon misses the fact that these items were government property, not Trump’s personal possessions.
In her order, the Judge writes, “understanding that juries are judges of the facts, not the law, the proposals shall take care to specify … exactly what factual questions are reserved for the jury on Counts 1 through 32 in light of the recently argued motions to dismiss.” Then, she goes on to say, “With respect to the proposed language pertinent to the issue of “unauthorized possession” specifically, the parties must engage with the following competing scenarios and offer alternative draft text that assumes each scenario to be a correct formulation of the law to be issued to the jury, while reserving counterarguments.”
First off, juries indeed decide issues of fact not issues of law. So the Judge should be doing the heavy lifting here. Instead, she seems to want to pass this off as a quasi-factual issue, asking the lawyers to figure out how she can let the jury decide whether Trump transmogrified classified documents into personal property. (Even if he pulled off that feat, it wouldn’t prevent Trump from being prosecuted for violating a criminal law that protects National Defense Information, because Trump can’t magically change the nature of the information contained in the documents recovered during the search of Mar-a-Lago.)
Second, lawyers don’t write hypothetical jury instructions. They propose the instructions they believe are correct and the judge makes a final decision about how to instruct the jury as to the law it must apply, once the jury decides what the facts are. I’ve never had a judge say, “you know, I have no idea what the law is here, so lets make a couple of different assumptions about it, and even though they’re both wrong, give me some ideas.”
The assumptions in Judge Cannon’s two scenarios virtually direct the jury to find Trump not guilty, by suggesting that a president can hold onto any government property he wants to as long as he designates it as personal before he leaves office. The only questions she leaves open is whether anyone can second guess a former president who pinky promises he decided something was personal before he went back home. For instance, in the first one, she directs the lawyers to assume that juries get to examine each item a former president is charged with retaining and decide whether the government has proven that it is personal or presidential. So, it’s up to the jury to decide what’s personal and what isn’t.
In her second scenario, she writes, “A president has sole authority under the PRA to categorize records as personal or presidential during his/her presidency. Neither a court nor a jury is permitted to make or review such a categorization decision. Although there is no formal means in the PRA by which a president is to make that categorization, an outgoing president’s decision to exclude what he/she considers to be personal records from presidential records transmitted to the National Archives and Records Administration constitutes a president’s categorization of those records as personal under the PRA.” In other words, Judge Cannon believes Trump has a magic wand that could turn the nuclear codes into his personal notes as long as he says he did it, and no one has the right to tell him no.
So Judge Cannon, who didn’t rule for Trump on the specious Presidential Records Act motion last week, essentially acknowledged she intends to do so today. She’s wrong about the law, offering two options, one that is really bad and one that is worse. Under option one, if only one juror thought a record had been designated by Trump as personal, he’d be acquitted. But under option two, as long as Trump says they’re personal records, the government is entirely out of business. Presumably, the Judge would take the case away from the jury and dismiss the charges. And that’s nuts, because, I’ll say it again, it means Trump (and any future president) can take documents clearly marked as Top Secret and containing information about matters like nuclear codes, U.S. battle plans, or information that identifies highly placed human sources putting their lives at risk, declare them to be his personal papers and walk out of the White House with them.
The government can’t play ball here with Judge Cannon’s bad interpretation of the law. Expect their response to be hard-hitting. The bottom line is that the Presidential Records Act doesn’t forgive Trump for violating criminal laws regarding handling of national secrets.
If you watched Weissmann in the video above you know that he thinks Smith will take it to the 11th circuit forthwith and ask for Cannon to be removed. She is in the tank for Trump and over her head and this case concerns some really important issues which the courts just can’t let slide because Trump is such a special boy. Well, I say “can’t” advisedly. They can do whatever they want and there’s nothing we can do about it. Let’s just hope they don’t.
That sounds like a very stable genius, just the kind of person you want in the most powerful job in the world.
He doesn’t want to sell his assets, probably because they’re already mortgaged to the hilt. Sad!
And here we thought he had so much cash…
“I didn’t even need the loan you can see the kind of cash I have. I have a lot of cash, I have a lot of everything” #TrumpIsBroke https://t.co/Uh7E2Jlpkj pic.twitter.com/D98ag0YL7L
— The Lincoln Project (@ProjectLincoln) March 19, 2024