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Trump’s defense starts its case this week

The Washington Post has an excellent write up today about where the Trump trial stands and what we can expect in the next couple of weeks:

Former Trump Organization insider Michael Cohen testified in state court that his ex-boss Donald Trump instructed him to fudge numbers on annual financial statements so that they would show his desired net worth.

Patrick Birney, a Trump Organization employee, said in court that a top executive told him Trump wanted a bigger bottom line on his annual statements, which were given to banks and insurance companies.

An insurance underwriter, Claudia Mouradian, whose deposition was played at the trial, said she relied on the Trump Organization’s claim that a statement reporting roughly $6 billion in combined golf and real estate assets had beenverified by professional appraisers.

These were among the assertionspresented during six weeks of trial and testimony in a lawsuit brought against Trump and his business by New York Attorney General Letitia James (D). Her civil case has sought to prove that the former president, his adult sons and their company deliberately inflated the values Trump included on his annual financial statements to secure better terms from bankers and insurers.

James filed her lawsuit last year, and she is asking New York Supreme Court Judge Arthur Engoron to fine the companyat least $250 million and render Trump and his family unable to operate in New York by barring them from borrowing money or owning companies. Trump’s defense has denied wrongdoing.

By the time James’s side rested Wednesday, with the defense team scheduled to begin presenting its case Monday, the attorney general’s office had sought to paint Trump as a figure whose ego relied heavily on how he compared to other billionaires and developers — and had lied in financial records to bolster his own standing.

A mountain of documents presented at the trial also demonstrated the company’s inconsistent and irregular methodologies in compiling the financial statements to his benefit. In total, 25 witnesses were called to discuss documents and share firsthand accounts.

Those included Trump, his adult sons Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trump, and his daughter Ivanka Trump, who is not a defendant in the case. Each of them testified of knowing little, if anything, about the creation of financial documents at the center of the trial.

Donald Trump Jr. and Eric Trumptestified this month that they trusted the company’s accountants.

“If they assured me in their expert opinion that these things were fine I would have been fine with that and signed off accordingly,”Donald Trump Jr. said.

Legal analysts and other observers say the testimony thus far haspotential shortcomings, including that no employee has testified that Trump ordered the values to be manipulated — except for Cohen, who previously admitted to lying under oath and has a well-documented, admitted grudge against Trump. And there is also no trail of records leading directly to Trump, who famously avoids communicating by email.

The case has clearly irritated Trump, though, who repeatedly attended and denounced the trial throughout the proceedings. It also carries enormous implications for him and his company.

Engoron, who is hearing the case without a jury, already ruled before the trial that thecompany’s financial statements were fraudulent and is requesting a receiver be installed to “dissolve” Trump’s entities in the state.

“If you had to win this case on the basis of people who were working with Trump you’d have a hard time,” George Washington University law professor Stephen A. Saltzburg said in an interview.

Saltzburg said James’s strongest point in public remarks to date has been about the significance of thefinancial statements.

“I think it’s going to be proven by the fact that the discrepancies are more than just honest judgment mistakes,” Saltzburg said. “I do think the judge is going to hold those who signed the documents responsible.”

This is a civil case, not a criminal trial, so none of the defendants face any time behind bars as a result. It comes as Trump is facing a looming swirl of legal troubles, including four separate criminal cases filed against him this year. Amid all of these allegations and indictments, Trump is also the leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination next year.

When Trump took the stand to testify last week, he clashed with Engoron and belittled James and her case. Her office also succeeded in getting Trump to confirm that he played a role in preparing the statements by sometimes providing input to his staff as they prepared them.

“Is it correct you were responsible for determining the values stated in the financial statement,” Kevin Wallace, a senior attorney on James’s team, asked Trump on direct examination.

“I … have shown that I know more about real estate than other people,” Trump said. “So if somebody would ask me or if I would have an opinion I would — I would give it.”

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Trump attempted to land some surprise counterattacks against the investigators, but didn’t always succeed. He repeatedly highlighted the lengthy legal disclaimers included in his annual statements, at one point pulling a copy of one from his pocket, trying to introduce his own unofficial exhibit at trial.

The disclaimer was no smoking gun — it had been a matter of public recordfor several years since Cohen first discussed Trump’s alleged use of the statements to mislead business partners and provided copies of records to Congress. When Trump, as a witness, was told he couldn’t introduce an exhibit, he added it to his long list of complaints claiming unfair treatment at the trial.

While the trial and lawsuit have taken aim at Trump’s own self-image as a business colossus, experts and legal analysts said James’s case also had limitations.

Other than Trump’s signature on the statements themselves, James produced no company documents showing Trump had a hand in preparing the statements or inflating the values.

Only one witness pointed a finger directly at Trump — and he has publicly acknowledged that he has not always been honest, even under oath.

“I was tasked by Mr. Trump to increase the total assets based upon a number that he arbitrarily elected … [to] increase those assets in order to achieve the number that Mr. Trump had tasked us,” Cohen, Trump’s former attorney and “fixer,” testified on Oct. 24.

Throughout hours of combative cross-examination, however, Cohen conceded that in February 2019 he told Congress that Trump never actually instructed him and longtime finance chief Allen Weisselberg to doctor up his annual net worth reports. Cohen later clarifiedin the ongoing civil trial that while Trump never outright said to order the falsifications, he hinted his expectations like a “mob boss” calling shots in code.

Other witnesses called by James’s side declined to point a finger at Trump. Birney’s testimony largely relieved Trump executives of blame. Accountant Donald Bender, who did Trump’s personal and business taxes for decades, said he relied on the Trump Organization’s figures to compile reports but did not have knowledge of any intentional tampering.

Also, the Trump Organization’s biggest lender, Deutsche Bank, made millions off its relationship with the Trumps. Trump’s primary banker there previously said in a deposition that she was unaware of any bad information Trump or the other family members had given to the bank, potentially undermining the idea that the statements had unfairly benefited Trump.

Trump’s defense has argued that there were no victims in the case and nothing illegal occurred.

When the defense begins presenting its own case, Donald Trump Jr., Trump’s oldest son — who is a defendant in the case, as is his brother, Eric Trump — will return to the stand as the defense’s first witness. Trump’s attorneys are expected to arguethat his financial statements were legitimate, that valuations are subjective and that Trump properties were worth a fortune.

None of the banks were duped, because they did not rely on the statements to verify Trump’s worthiness as a business partner, the defense says.

A pretrial ruling by Engoron remains potentially momentous in the case — albeit with questions about its ultimate meaning.

In the Sept. 26 ruling, Engoron ordered all of Trump’s “business certificates” in the state be canceled. The decision arrived like an earthquake, clearly putting Trump at risk of losing control over his New York empire. But its wording left attorneys to argue what precisely it meant for his company.

New York business certificates allow limited liability corporations (LLCs) to operate under trade names. The Trump Corporation, for instance, has a certificate allowing it to operate under the name Trump International Realty, according to county records. The certificates are sometimes referred to as “DBA” certificates, for “doing business as.”

Engoron’s ruling confused some expertsin part because he canceled the certificates but not necessarily the underlying LLCs, potentially giving Trump’s attorneys a window to argue that the businesses could still be viable.

Legal experts said the effect would be the same.

“The Trump Organization is a partnership of all of these LLCs together, relying on the business certificates,” said Boston College law professor Brian Quinn. Bank loans probably require such affiliations to remain in place, he said.

Cornell University law professor Celia Bigoness said if the certificates were canceled so too would be “all other authorizations that stem from those certificates,” among them basic needs like the ability to collect sales tax.

The judge also ordered a receiver be put in place to “manage the dissolution of the canceled LLCs.”

Gregory E. Louis, associate law professor at CUNY Law School, said Engoron may not have been clear in his phrasing, but that his rulings taken together signaled that “at least Justice Engoron understands the scope of his order” as having dissolved the underlying companies as well.

Despite that setback, Trump has not backed away from the numbers on his statements, brashly explaining during his testimony on Nov. 6 that he felt most of the values were still lower than they should have been.

“The overall number of value is much higher than the number in the financial statements,” Trump testified.

Trump’s attorneys have apparently sought to create a record they could use in any appellate proceedings to help them preserve the company’s structure.

John C. Coffee Jr., a law professor at Columbia University, said Trump may be working against his team’s efforts to build the most effective appeal by focusing so much of his own energy on attacking Engoron.

“I think Trump’s rather volatile performance … [and his] occasional moments of rage does hurt him, because judges basically respect the judiciary and don’t like to be insulted by defendants,” Coffee said.

Trump and his lawyers are playing for the appeals courts. We’ll have to see if they are impressed with his case. Somehow, I doubt it.

“We just want the government to function… we’re just tired of it”

On the Sunday shows they’re still drooling over the polls showing that Biden is old and Trump is a vital young man with boundless energy sharp intelligence so they didn’t have much time to look at what happened on Tuesday. It’s too bad because there is a very interesting story that American who don’t follow the news closely but might tune in to Meet the Press would be interested to hear:

Meghan Budden’s family was considering moving if their Pennsylvania school district didn’t change course. She normally isn’t politically active, she said, but felt compelled to volunteer when a slate of Democrats launched bids to take back their school board in Central Bucks School District, just north of Philadelphia.

Central Bucks is well known both statewide and nationally for heated board meetings over masks and Pride flags, policies banning certain books and directives to not use students’ preferred names and pronouns. Accusations of discrimination against LGBTQ students have also led to an ongoing investigation by the U.S. Department of Education.

“I couldn’t have my kids in a school district where these kinds of things were happening,” Budden said.

Standing in the Bucks County Democratic headquarters on election night, Budden sobbed when the results rolled in — Democrats took all five seats up for election.

The room erupted in cheers; friends, neighbors and strangers hugged.

“It was very moving and a very joyous feeling from everyone,” Budden recalled. “And a sense of relief.”

If there was a question about whether the conservative-led school board’s policies reflected the will of the local community, Tuesday’s election may have provided an answer.

Three of the newly elected Democratic school board members will replace Republicans, including the board president, who helped set a right-wing agenda that aligned with national conservative movements around education. Voters effectively flipped the board from majority Republican to majority Democrat.

Republicans also lost majority control of school boards in Iowa, Virginia and a historically conservative district neighboring Central Bucks.

A surprising win for Democrats in a politically mixed district

Central Bucks School District is the third largest in Pennsylvania with more than 17,000 students. It’s also in a politically mixed, swing county.

“I wasn’t supposed to win,” said Democratic candidate Heather Reynolds, who beat the board’s current president and sole Republican incumbent in the race.

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Reynolds’ newly won seat represents a part of the district that’s more red than others, she said.

“I think that the community has had enough. They’ve seen what this former board majority has done and they said, ‘No more. We deserve better as a district, as a community. This isn’t who we are.'”

Reynolds said residents and parents were exhausted by the chaos that had become a normal part of monthly school board meetings.

Fiscal responsibility was also high on their list of concerns, she said: In July, the board increased Superintendent Abe Lucabaugh’s salary by almost 40%, making him the second-highest paid superintendent in the state after Philadelphia. Lucabaugh had stood by the board’s controversial policies, even as the district spent at least $1 million on a law firm following claims of discrimination and more than $140,000 on a public relations firm that managed media requests, among other things.

NPR reached out to Central Buck’s Republican board candidates for comment; some declined to be interviewed and others did not respond. Only one candidate was willing to go on the record, Glenn Schloeffel. He said the results were disappointing.

“We put a lot of work into trying to get a successful outcome, and it didn’t go our way.”

Schloeffel believes the board majority got “thrown under the bus” after the accusations of discrimination. And he doesn’t think it’s fair to characterize their decisions around books as a “book ban.” He said the books the current board removed from libraries “were highly graphic and sexual in nature. Absolutely disgusting … There’s no place for that in our schools.”

Republican candidate Steve Mass told the Delaware Valley Journal, “The only winners in Tuesday’s elections are the private schools, who will have their enrollment skyrocket in the next few years when parents see what policies are coming into our district.”

Republicans had one big donor, Democrats received more individual donations

Across the country, school board campaign funding seems to be on the rise. In 2018, a survey by the National School Boards Association reported 75% of elected officials spent less than $1,000 on their campaigns.

But this election cycle, Central Bucks candidates raised about $600,000 combined, as of Thursday, according to campaign finance records.

Local venture capitalist Paul Martino bankrolled the Republican campaigns and donated a majority of their funding — $239,000 of the $279,000-plus total. Martino – whose wife, Aarati Martino, ran for the board as a Republican this year – spent a total of $500,000 on school board races across Pennsylvania in 2021.

He also contributed $40,000 to the Stop Bucks Extremism PAC. During the campaign, the PAC mailed literature to district homes with excerpts from the often-targeted books Gender Queer and This Book Is Gay. The mailer included the message: “Extreme Central Bucks Democrats are fighting to keep these books in our middle school and high school libraries. Request an early vote ballot to protect our children!”

In total, the Democrats raised over $315,000. The Democrats’ PAC, Neighbors United, raised over $174,000. Its largest donations came from Turn Bucks Blue, a local PAC that supports Democrats throughout the county, and the Pennsylvania State Education Association. Much of the Democrats’ funding came from smaller individual donations, between $50 and $250. Each candidate also had their own PAC.

“We knew what [Martino] spent the last time, so we had to be prepared to respond to that,” said Karen Smith, a Democrat who won her race as an incumbent.

Martino declined NPR’s requests for comment.

Two Independent parents were tired of the chaos

District parent Elizabeth Derham identifies as an independent and has been disappointed with board leadership over the last two years. Derham’s husband, Jeff, is also an independent and would sometimes split his ticket. But this year was the first time he voted blue down the line, along with Elizabeth.

“No one I talk to is for any of this stuff or cares much about some of the things that they’re putting so much effort into,” Elizabeth said of the board’s conservative members.

The Derhams said their votes felt like a small-scale attempt to save their local democracy — and their public school district.

“We just want the government to function… we’re just tired of it,” Elizabeth said. “I just want people to listen to us.”

Now that the election is over, she hopes Central Bucks school board meetings become boring again.

These people are not extremists. They are normies who had the wingnut MAGAs reach right into their homes and try to indoctrinate their children. They did not like it. So they got out there and changed it.

Dan Pfeiffer talks about the public’s view of Trump’s mental acuity in his newsletter today:

The fact that Donald Trump is leading Joe Biden in news reports from The New York Times and other sources is puzzling for many of us. How could a chaotic criminal who spews conspiracy theories be on the cusp of returning to the White House? There’s not just one simple answer to how we ended up in this situation; it’s a combination of Biden’s low approval rating, divisions in the democratic coalition, dissatisfaction with the economy, a historic level of cynicism and institutional distrust, and radicalization of the Republican Party. The polarization and demographic makeup of the Electoral College mean that upcoming elections will continue to be closely contested. However, one specific finding in The New York Times/Siena College poll explains Trump’s strength and offers a particular strategy for defeating him again in 2024.

There is no sugarcoating it: Joe Biden’s age is a significant political obstacle. Many people across the country think he’s too old for the presidency, and even among Democrats, a lot of folks tell pollsters they’d rather have a younger candidate. In one sense, Biden’s age is an insoluble problem. There is no way to make him younger; he will get older as the campaign continues. Certainly, there will be high-leverage  moments such as the State of the Union, the Democratic Convention, and the debates where the President can showcase the stamina and vigor required for the job.

There has been a lot of internal debate among the Democratic Party about how to approach the age issue. Handle it with humor, lean into it by emphasizing that wisdom comes with experience, highlight the younger members of Biden’s team, or ignore it entirely. There are merits to all of those approaches. But I think the best way to defuse concerns about Biden’s age is to focus on Trump’s temperament.

Trump’s Temperament Is No Longer the Issue

One particular quote from a participant in The New York Times poll has lingered in my thoughts:

Ms. Fermin, who immigrated from the Dominican Republic as a teenager, worried that Mr. Biden’s immigration policies have put additional economic strain on the country. She voted for Mr. Biden in 2020 over concerns about Mr. Trump’s temperament, but this time around her concerns are largely focused on Mr. Biden. “Biden is too old and doesn’t have the capacity mentally,” she said. “We need somebody stronger. I think Trump can deliver this time.”

Trump’s temperament—his erratic behavior—was always his biggest weakness. I remember seeing focus group reactions in 2019 and 2020 where many voters’ biggest concerns about Trump were his tweets. I know that sounds ridiculous. I thought so at the time. But Trump spending all of his time airing petty grievances on social media was a metaphor for what concerned voters about his temperament. He was focused on the wrong things at the wrong time,and his behavior was both alarming for swing voters and embarrassing for his supporters.

But The New York Times poll makes it clear that Trump’s temperament is no longer a driving issue for voters. In 2020, Biden had a 19-point advantage on temperament. In 2023, it’s only four points.

People have forgotten because they haven’t seen him! My God, just his behavior in the courthouse steps is crazy enough but nobody’s seeing it because the media has decided to protect he public’s gently eyes and ears from his antics because well, it’s unseemly. YES IT’S UNSEEMLY! He’s a monster. But unless people can see it with their own eyes they won’t believe it.

Temperament? How about this?

How many people saw that? Only those who love Trump. Nobody even half way normal could look at that and think “well, at least he’s strong…” No he’ s fucking nuts.

Pfeiffer points out in his piece that He was banned by most social media as well but that isn’t the only problem:

In 2023, Trump resurfaced with his legal issues and presidential campaign. He has been reinstated on all major social media platforms. However, there are indications that most Americans might not be fully aware of what Trump is communicating. One reason is that many people don’t follow the news at this early campaign stage. According to Pew Research, the number of Americans who say they follow the news closely has dropped 14 percent since right before the 2018 elections.

People have tuned out because it’s just so awful. It’s also the reason they assume the country is in hell even though they think their own personal circumstances are good as is their state’s. They aren’t getting the full picture anymore.

Secondly, in previous times, individuals who were not actively seeking political news would still come across it inadvertently. Open up Facebook to check in on your nieces or pop on X (formerly Twitter) to see how people are reacting to an NBA trade, and you would almost always see some political news posts. That is no longer the case. Both platforms have tweaked their algorithms to show people less news—specifically, less political news. According to an Axios report based on data from Similarweb, referrals to news sites from Facebook and X  have plummeted since Trump left office.

How helpful.

Finally, as I detailed in this post, the news media is not adequately covering the most outrageous statements made by Trump. While political enthusiasts like us may be inundated with Trump’s unconventional remarks, it’s likely that most Americans haven’t been exposed to more than a minute of Trump’s speeches, rallies, town halls, or interviews since before January 6th.

They have self-righteously declared that “there is a cost” to them personally if they show Trump to their audience. I have never understood what that means. Unless you truly believe that everyone in this country is either a delicate flower who will run from the room if faced with reality or they are so craven and stupid that mere exposure to that cretin will convert them to his cult, it seems to me that decent people need to see what he says and what he plans to do over and over and over again.

His lies are activating the craven and stupid and only the truth will motivate the decent people to vote.

Pfeiffer says the Democrats must focus on Trump’s mental fitness and I couldn’t agree more:

While Trump has made some gains in how people view his temperament and mental fitness, the biggest shift has been growing concerns about Biden. These shifts are undoubtedly related to the dramatic increase in concern about the President’s age. In this case, it seems that the only way around is through. The President will have to use the campaign to assuage those concerns. More performances like this great economic speech in Belvedere, Illinois, will go a long way.

The focus has been on Biden for more than two years now. There has been an extensive, messy conversation about his age and fitness for office. Unfortunately, these conversations have drowned out discussion of the President’s voluminous record of achievement. It’s time for Democrats to try to shift some of that focus back to Trump. We need to remind Americans why they hated Trump in the first place. Certain voters who backed Trump in 2016 but shifted to supporting Biden in 2020 due to apprehensions about Trump’s behavior are now contemplating a return to supporting Trump. Millions of people became politically active after 2016 because they perceived Trump as a distinct threat, but some have now returned to the sidelines as their concerns have diminished. 

I understand why Democrats started their advertising campaign with positive spots about Biden and his record. Some of that should continue. All of the polling shows that voters like Biden more when they learn about what he has done. There is an information vacuum to fill. However, it’s time to start putting Trump’s erratic behavior and deranged rants back into people’s social media feeds. This can be done with campaign ads and organic content created by progressive allies and shared by all of us.

There is no need to gild the lily with ads filled with ominous music and fear-inducing voiceovers. Just show people Trump is in his own words. The Biden-Harris campaign social media accounts have begun doing exactly that, and we can help them by sharing their content within our networks.

The shared clips shouldn’t be the ones where Trump does his tinpot dictator act. They should be the moments where he acts like a clown. The best way to defeat a wannabe strongman is to make him look like a joke. Increasing concerns about Trump’s mental acuity rise will help Biden defuse the age issue with voters.

If you are reading this newsletter, you don’t need anyone to remind you that Donald Trump is an unhinged lunatic who should not come within 1,000 miles of the nuclear codes. But most Americans have barely thought about Trump in years. Haven’t seen him speak or post on social media. They haven’t heard of Truth Social. In this new media environment, the press and the social media platforms won’t do that work for us. If we want the campaign to be about Donald Trump, we must make it so. There’s no reason to wait any longer.

As you know, I share both the tin-pot dictator and the clownish clips liberally and I’ve been doing it ever since he came on the scene. People need to know what he’s saying. Hiding your head in the sand and pretending that he doesn’t exist hasn’t worked out so well.

I encourage you to send those clips to people you know or post them on your social media feeds. It’s important to remind people who he is because it’s obvious many of them have been subject to the propaganda that his first term was actually a rousing success and others have forgotten who he really is.

He’s gotten worse people and his thirst for revenge and attachment to the fascist members of his MAGA movement is stronger than ever.

He’s always been very proud of his “good German blood”

After being confronted with the party’s leading candidate for president ranting in public about “Communists, Marxists, Fascist and Radical Left Thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country” on Meet the Press, there was a time when a Chair of the Republican National Committee would be compelled to say something other than “I am not going to comment on candidates and their campaign messaging.” We are long past that time:

There was also a time when a person who would say such a thing would not be the front runner for the presidential nomination. Oh sure, there were always Republicans who said things like that. It’s right out of the McCarthy era to denounce the phantom commies who were allegedly destroying the country. But they weren’t presidential candidates with massive followings. They were cranks like Sen. Joe McCarthy who, with his close adviser Roy Cohn, who also advised Donald Trump in later year, ruined a lot of lives with his outlandish accusations but was eventually repudiated by his own party.

I hope everyone realizes that Trump’s definition of “Communists, Marxists, Fascists and Radical Left thugs” isn’t really about ideology, about which he has zero knowledge. They are old cold war epithets which he first heard as a kid and have come back into fashion on the far right. He’s applying them to his political enemies who are Democrats and certain Republicans who he believes have betrayed him. The rest of his post on Veterans Day, which Kristen Welker failed to recite went like this:

The threat from outside forces is far less sinister, dangerous, and grave, than the threat from within, Despite the hatred and anger of the Radical Left Lunatics who want to destroy our Country, we will MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!

I’m so old I remember when Hillary Clinton said at a speech that you could put half of Trump supporters into a “basket of deplorables” and the media had a full fledged meltdown with the Trump campaign getting the vapors and issuing a breathless denunciation:

Just when Hillary Clinton said she was going to start running a positive campaign, she ripped off her mask and revealed her true contempt for everyday Americans.

It was rich then and its even richer now. Today, Trump is on the stump threatening daily to exact revenge on his political enemies, which includes Democrats, the press, election officials, the Department of Justice and anyone else he believes has crossed him. It is the main theme of his campaign. But calling these enemies vermin takes it to a whole new level and one which has even more resonance than usual with the current discussion of antisemitism. He’s now blatantly using he language of Nazi Germany to degrade and dehumanize Jews in the 1930s.

If I had to guess, I would say that Trump didn’t come up with that word himself. He’s more of a “rats” guy than a “vermin” guy when it comes to rhetoric. And the fact that he repeated the exact phrase from the teleprompter at a rally later in the day on Saturday indicates that it was a speech writer’s work not his own, although it certainly reflects his feelings on the matter. I suspect it was either written or inspired by his right hand fascist, Stephen Miller, featured heavily in yet another chilling article in the NY Times about the Trump agenda for his second term.

We know he plans to purge the executive branch of civil service employees and turn the entire branch into a patronage grift for cronies and sycophants to do his bidding and nothing else. And we’ve learned that he will gut the Department of Justice and plant right wing lawyers along the lines of John Eastman, the architect of the coup attempt after the 2020 election. They will implement the Insurrection Act on the first day of the term to have in place the mechanism to deter and quell any demonstrations like the Women’s March that took place in 2017, dwarfing the inauguration crowds (which Trump has never gotten over.)

None of that is secret and it’s obviously just the tip of the iceberg. The latest Times expose relates to their plans to completely shut down all immigration and begin a draconian deportation program:

Former President Donald J. Trump is planning an extreme expansion of his first-term crackdown on immigration if he returns to power in 2025 — including preparing to round up undocumented people already in the United States on a vast scale and detain them in sprawling camps while they wait to be expelled.

It goes without saying that he plans to ban immigrants and asylum seekers entry to the country, But he’s got plans to deport millions of people based upon Eisenhower’s “Operation Wetback” which he relentlessly flogged during his 2016 campaign as well. And, yes, there will be “camps” to hold people for whatever purposes the choose, without due process. He will pay for all this with military funds if the congress refuses to allocate taxpayer money for it.

They plan to revoke visas for any foreigners they might disapprove of for any reason, they will end birthright citizenship “by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. ” He has promised to deny entry to all Communists and Marxists and asked his rally goers what should be done with “all the ones that are here.” They chanted “deport them, deport them.” Whether that only applies to foreign born commies is left up to the imagination. Much of this will depend upon the Supreme Court but it’s obvious that Trump will have no problem defying their orders. Who will stop him?

Trump’s rhetoric in this regard is also right out of the Nazi playbook:

“Nobody has ever seen anything like we’re witnessing right now. It is a very sad thing for our country. It’s poisoning the blood of our country. It’s so bad, and people are coming in with disease. People are coming in with every possible thing that you could have.”

The man in charge of drawing up these plans is Stephen Miller who the Times interviewed for their story. He said:

Mass deportation will be a labor-market disruption celebrated by American workers, who will now be offered higher wages with better benefits to fill these jobs. Americans will also celebrate the fact that our nation’s laws are now being applied equally, and that one select group is no longer magically exempt.

I don’t think I need to explain the economic consequences of that.

It’s clear that Trump and his henchmen are planning a Nazi-style administration and they aren’t trying to hide it. His campaign told the Times to speak to Miller who generously shared his agenda with the paper. They want people to know what they are plotting. This time no one should assume that it’s just hyperbole. As Miller told the Times, ‘bottom line President Trump will do whatever it takes.” Don’t doubt it.

Salon

Elections are about choices

It’s said that Republicans don’t build anything. Except detention camps. They’re hell at detention camps.

Joe Biden is running for president of the United States again to invest in this country. Infrastructure week was not a joke on his watch (Mike Lux):

Joe Biden and the Democratic trifecta got more than 80% of Americans immunized from COVID despite the worst public health disinformation campaign ever. They revived our economy from the depths of the COVID recession faster than any other major country, got Americans much needed money to keep them going in the hardest times, and saved state and local governments from having to make massive cuts in police, fire, and desperately needed public services. They delivered the first gun safety bill in over 30 years. They delivered the biggest infrastructure bill since the interstate highway system was built in the 1950s. They revitalized American manufacturing with Buy in America policies, the CHIPs Act, and the Inflation Reduction Act. They passed legislation to force Big Pharma to negotiate on drug prices and bring the cost of insulin down right away. They made the biggest investment any country has ever made in clean energy.

The four trillion dollars in investments in the American economy and American people will transform the economy for generations to come.

Biden has not announced plans for a second term, but the Associated Press considers what Biden has planned:

But his ambitions are no secret, and his goals for child care, community college and prescription drugs have been laid out in detail during the Democrat’s his first term. He also has unfulfilled promises on civil rights, such as protecting access to the ballot box, preventing police misconduct and restoring the nationwide right to abortion. Banning firearms known as assault rifles remains a priority as well.

The result is a second-term agenda that could look a lot like Biden’s first-term agenda, with some of the same political challenges. Almost none of this can get done without cooperation from Congress, and many of these goals already have been blocked or pared down because of opposition on Capitol Hill.

Biden has achieved bipartisan victories on infrastructure projects and public funding for the domestic computer chip industry. But Democrats would need to win wide majorities in both the House and the Senate to clear a path for the rest of his plans.

“We’re going to finish as much of the job as we can in the next year,” said Bruce Reed, Biden’s deputy chief of staff. “And finish the rest after that.”

Biden’s campaign expressed confidence that the president’s agenda would stack up well against Republicans in next year’s election. Kevin Munoz, a spokesman, described the election as “a choice between fighting for the middle class or shilling for rich special interests” and he said ”it’s a contrast we are more than happy to make.”

Progress or purges, America? What’s a greater source of American pride?

All they lacks are railcars

The headline on Masha Gessen’s New Yorker conversation with psychoanalyst, psychiatrist and author Robert Jay Lifton promises to reveal how one maintains hope in an age of catastrophe. It is a fascinating conversation with a man who has studied human depravity, literal fallout from it, and what differentiates “the helpless victim and the survivor as agent of change.” As for how one maintains hope today, the headline is a tease.

“Lifton is fascinated by the range and plasticity of the human mind, its ability to contort to the demands of totalitarian control, to find justification for the unimaginable—the Holocaust, war crimes, the atomic bomb—and yet recover, and reconjure hope,” Gessen writes.

Amidst the bickering over the war in Gaza, less tease and more how-to would have been nice. Given the obvious trajectory of the Trump cult, what’s needed is a way both to avoid being a victim and needing to be change agents after the fact of a period of “psychic numbing” and “malignant normality” that leads to unspeakable evil by banal men and women.

Areeba Shah warns at Salon that networks seem desensitized to Donald Trump’s eliminationist rhetoric. After covering years of it, the malignant normality of it is no longer shocking even if it is news:

“If we don’t call out the rhetoric as extreme, we risk making it normal and acceptable,” Libby Hemphill, a professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information and the Institute for Social Research, told Salon.

Too late.

Trump’s recent comments about vowing to implement rigorous ideological screening of immigrants to the U.S., particularly suggesting he would turn away anyone who doesn’t like “our religion,” received little coverage. Broadcast news “totally ignored the comments,” Media Matters pointed out. Meanwhile, cable news devoted just under seven minutes of coverage and CNN and MSNBC each devoted about three minutes, with Fox News devoting less than one minute.

Even so, the Washington Post last week alerted readers to Trump’s (and his enablers’) plans to turn a second term into a festival of revenge and retribution that could make Stalin smile. For all its sins, the New York Times has not totally forsaken raising the alarm about mass deportations and more detention camps. The strategist behind Trump’s second-term war on immigrants is a man who’d look at home in a gray uniform: Stephen Miller.

Mr. Trump’s campaign referred questions for this article to Stephen Miller, an architect of Mr. Trump’s first-term immigration policies who remains close to him and is expected to serve in a senior role in a second administration.

All of the steps Trump advisers are preparing, Mr. Miller contended in a wide-ranging interview, rely on existing statutes; while the Trump team would likely seek a revamp of immigration laws, the plan was crafted to need no new substantive legislation. And while acknowledging that lawsuits would arise to challenge nearly every one of them, he portrayed the Trump team’s daunting array of tactics as a “blitz” designed to overwhelm immigrant-rights lawyers.

“Any activists who doubt President Trump’s resolve in the slightest are making a drastic error: Trump will unleash the vast arsenal of federal powers to implement the most spectacular migration crackdown,” Mr. Miller said, adding, “The immigration legal activists won’t know what’s happening.”

Blitz, indeed. Spectacular crackdown. Like no one’s ever seen. And Trump’s spirit infuses the effort. But, oh, we’ve seen it before.

His stoking of fear and anger toward immigrants — pushing for a border wall and calling Mexicans rapists — fueled his 2016 takeover of the Republican Party. As president, he privately mused about developing a militarized border like Israel’s, asked whether migrants crossing the border could be shot in the legs and wanted a proposed border wall topped with flesh-piercing spikes and painted black to burn migrants’ skin.

As he has campaigned for the party’s third straight presidential nomination, his anti-immigrant tone has only grown harsher. In a recent interview with a right-wing website, Mr. Trump claimed without evidence that foreign leaders were deliberately emptying their “insane asylums” to send the patients across America’s southern border as migrants. He said migrants were “poisoning the blood of our country.” And at a rally on Wednesday in Florida, he compared them to the fictional serial killer and cannibal Hannibal Lecter, saying, “That’s what’s coming into our country right now.”

Trump and Miller would ship immigrants they round up in railcars without a second thought about the optics. And perhaps to gleefully drive home the point that they mean business.

I was really looking forward to how to maintain hope in an age of catastrophe.

Lucky for me, I’m not a psychiatrist. I can declare this man, his henchmen, and his NAR true believers fucking lunatics and it’s no violation of professional standards.

It was everywhere at the January 6th insurrection

You know by now that Mike Johnson is a far right theocrat who should not be let anywhere near power in our constitutional republic. His beliefs are way beyond the pale even for most evangelicals. But it gets worse. Keen eyes spotted a flag outside his office last week that tells a much more disturbing story:

The flag — which Rolling Stone has confirmed hangs outside his district office in the Cannon House Office Building —  is white with a simple evergreen tree in the center and the phrase “An Appeal to Heaven” at the top. Historically, this flag was a Revolutionary War banner, commissioned by George Washington as a naval flag for the colony turned state of Massachusetts. The quote “An Appeal to Heaven” was a slogan from that war, taken from a treatise by the philosopher John Locke. But in the past decade it has come to symbolize a die-hard vision of a hegemonically Christian America.

To understand the contemporary meaning of the Appeal to Heaven flag, it’s necessary to enter a world of Christian extremism animated by modern-day apostles, prophets, and apocalyptic visions of Christian triumph that was central to the chaos and violence of Jan. 6. Earlier this year we released an audio-documentary series, rooted in deep historical research and ethnographic interviews, on this sector of Christianity, which is known as the New Apostolic Reformation (NAR). The flag hanging outside Johnson’s office is a key part of its symbology.

The New Apostolic Reformation is a set of networks of Christian leaders that formed in the 1990s around a renegade evangelical seminary professor named C. Peter Wagner. These networks are part of the nondenominational charismatic segment of Christianity (“charismatic” here is a technical term of Christian theology and practice describing a spirituality built around miraculous manifestations and aiming to re-create the supernaturally imbued environment of the early Christian church). Wagner and his cohort believed that they were at the vanguard of a revolution in church leadership that Wagner often described as “the most radical change to the way of doing church since, at least, the Protestant Reformation.”

The hundreds of leaders who joined Wagner’s movement and leadership-networking circles almost all identify as apostles (enterprising church builders) or prophets (who hear directly from God), though some identify as both. In the mid-2000s, these NAR networks collectively embraced a theological paradigm called the “Seven Mountain Mandate,” a prophecy that divides society into seven arenas — religion, family, government, education, arts and entertainment, media, and business. The “Mandate,” as they understand it, is given by God for Christians to “take dominion” and “conquer” the tops of all seven of these sectors and have Christian influence flow down into the rest of society. 

Drawn into American politics by this aggressive theological vision, many New Apostolic Reformation leaders became very active in right-wing political circles, including one of Wagner’s key disciples, an apostle-prophet named Dutch Sheets. Sheets is not a household name in Christian politics like Jerry Falwell or Ralph Reed or James Dobson, but he has real influence. Sheets has written more than 18 popular evangelical books, and his Intercessory Prayer has sold more than a million copies. He was an endorser and faith adviser to Newt Gingrinch’s short-lived candidacy for president in 2012, and he openly espoused the lie that Barack Obama was secretly a Muslim.

In 2013, Sheets was given an Appeal to Heaven flag by a friend who told him that, because it predated the Stars and Stripes, it was the flag that “had flown over our nation at its birthing.” Sheets describes this experience as revelatory, and he seized upon the flag as a symbol of the spiritual-warfare driven Christian nationalist revolution he hoped to see in American politics. In 2015, he published a book titled An Appeal to Heaven and rolled out a systematic campaign to propagate this symbol in right-wing Christian circles. That same year Sarah Palin wrote an opinion piece in Breitbart, endorsing the Appeal to Heaven campaign and thanking her “[s]pecial friends, Pastor Dutch and Ceci Sheets,” who had given her the flag.

Sheets and his fellow New Apostolic Reformation leaders were the tip of the spear of Christian Trumpism, endorsing Donald Trump’s candidacy early on and championing his cause to their fellow Christians. Over the course of the 2016 campaign, the Appeal to Heaven flag and the NAR’s vision of a Christianity-dominated America became entwined with Trump, a potent-though-covert symbol.

Since 2015, you can find these Appeal to Heaven flags popping up over and over: in the background of pictures of far-right politicians and election deniers like Doug Mastriano; as wall decorations in state legislators’ offices; at right-wing rallies. It even flew over the Illinois State Capitol for a time at the instigation of the Illinois Apostolic Alliance, a local NAR activist group.

[…]

This is why, if you look closely at the panopticon of videos and pictures of the Capitol insurrection, Appeal to Heaven flags are everywhere. There are dozens, perhaps hundreds, of them punctuating the crowd, including even on the front lines of clashes between rioters and Capitol police officers — a powerful signal of the spread of Sheets’ ideas and influence. 

Hundreds of Christian figures supported Trump’s effort to overthrow the 2020 election, but, having spent years researching and tracking the direct influences on Christians who actually showed up on Jan. 6, we contend that no single Christian leader contributed more to this effort to mobilize Christians against the very structures of American democracy than Sheets. One case in point: Sheets and his team were reportedly at the White House a week before the insurrection, strategizing with administration officials, as we reported on Jan. 6, 2023: 

On December 29, 2020 — eight days before the insurrection — Sheets and his team of prophets were in Washington, D.C., staying at the Willard Hotel, the site of the various war rooms overseen by Rudy Giuliani and Steve Bannon. On that day, Sheets, along with 14 other apostles and prophets, had a multi-hour meeting inside the White House with Trump administration officials. Who exactly among White House Staff attended this meeting is unclear (and the Trump administration has made the White House Visitor Logs secret and invulnerable to FOIA requests until 2026). But members of Sheets’ team posted photos of themselves (with White House visitor passes) both outside and inside the building.

The Appeal to Heaven flag was the banner of this mobilization, which brings us back to Mike Johnson and the flag outside his office. What does it signal that the speaker of the House of Representatives is purposely flying this symbol of Christian warfare? 

When Rolling Stone reached out to Johnson’s office for comment, a spokesperson for his personal office noted that all members have three flag posts outside their office and that Johnson flies the Appeal to Heaven flag alongside the American and Louisiana flags. “Rep. Johnson’s Appeal to Heaven flag was a gift to him and other members of Congress by Pastor Dan Cummins, who has served as a guest chaplain for the House of Representatives over a dozen times, under Speakers from both parties,” the spokesperson wrote, adding that Johnson appreciates the “rich history of the flag,” citing its connection to George Washington and John Locke.

Accepting this backstory as true, it does not in any way refute our basic premise that this flag, since Dutch Sheets’ spiritual-warfare appropriation of it in 2013, connotes an aggressive form of Christian nationalism. In fact, Pastor Dan Cummins, whom Johnson credits as the one who gave him the flag, is a mentee of another major NAR leader (and Trump evangelical adviser) named Jim Garlow. Johnson has described Garlow as having “a profound influence” on his life and spirituality.

Garlow and Cummins have long operated as Christian nationalist activists targeting members of Congress. The Appeal to Heaven Flag was flown over Garlow’s former California church beginning in 2017, and Garlow himself has celebrated how the flag “has recently become an important flag in the present day spiritual warfare prayer movement.” If anything, Johnson’s office’s statement only highlights another vector of NAR and Christian nationalist influence on the new speaker.

The Appeal to Heaven flag isn’t Johnson’s only connection to Sheets, either. Johnson has spent his entire career in Congress linking arms with one of Sheets’ top acolytes, a Louisiana apostle named Timothy Carscadden. Carscadden leads a church in Johnson’s district called Christian Center Shreveport. Johnson has spoken at the church, had Carscadden come to Washington, D.C., and expressed his closeness to Carscadden’s views. 

For his part, Timothy Carscadden speaks alongside Dutch Sheets, mimics Sheets’ theological ideas, and shares in Sheets’ vision to see Christianity reign supreme in every sphere of American life. Carscadden’s Facebook profile page is a photo of him holding an Appeal to Heaven flag, and the Louisiana apostle posted his support for the gathering crowds of protesters on Jan. 6, 2021, writing: “We will be live in person and online as we stand with the million plus in Washington DC today. We Appeal To The Courts of Heaven today!!!!”

It is simply untenable to think that Johnson is unaware of what the Appeal to Heaven flag signals today. It represents an aggressive, spiritual-warfare style of Christian nationalism, and Johnson is a legal insurrectionist who has deeply tied himself into networks of Christian extremists whose rhetoric, leadership, and warfare theology fueled a literal insurrection.

Johnson is part of a growing cohort of far-right Republican lawmakers who have embraced Dutch Sheets’ Appeal to Heaven campaign, but unlike most of these lawmakers, Johnson is not a fringe or sideshow figure. He has leapt from the ranks of congressional back-benchers to second in line to the presidency of the United States. His elevation is the apogee (to date) of the normalization of the Jan. 6 riot, its legal façade, and its spiritual diffusion into Republican and Christian communities.

It would be one thing if Johnson was a run of the mill Evangelical who just got a flag from somebody and only vague knowledge of the flag and its association with the insurrection. But he knows exactly what it means and he is a committed theocrat with a long-standing agenda so I don’t think it’s a stretch to assume that he knows exactly what he’s doing by displaying that flag. This is not ok. Extremists like Johnson should never be second in line to the presidency. It’s terrifying.

Maybe, maybe not.

I’m not happy about No Labels. for obvious reasons. First, they are nothing but a sabotage operation designed to stop the Democrats from winning the presidency in 2024. Joe Lieberman is one of their leaders. They aren’t trying to hide it. The question is whether or not it would turn out the way they think it will.

Since Manchin is (nominally) a Democrat I think most of us assume it would hurt Biden. But Michael Tomasky has a different idea:

Everybody is in a tizzy about Joe Manchin’s retirement announcement. And maybe they should be. The conventional wisdom for months, or even for a couple years, has been that a presidential candidacy by the West Virginia senator under the “centrist” No Labels banner would mean the end for Joe Biden, and that’s the take in most of the insta-analyses I’ve read over the last 24 hours.

It’s also what I’ve always thought, and it stands to reason. Not because Manchin is a Democrat. But because it has been assumed that he splits the anti-Trump vote. But lately, even before this announcement, I’ve begun to wonder: What if Manchin is more likely to split the anti-Biden vote? In a moment, I’ll get to that case.

But first, let’s address the ramifications of Manchin’s announcement for control of the Senate. This, not the presidential implications, was what the media focused on first—that his decision imperils Democratic control of the Senate.

That’s a kind of base-covering or box-checking journalism that I suppose mainstream outlets feel they have a need to do, but it’s silly. Manchin had zero chance of holding his seat against GOP Governor Jim Justice. Not 10 percent. Not 5 percent. Zero. Justice has been consistently ahead by double digits in recent polls. One outlier poll—conducted, interestingly, for a GOP super PAC—had it at 6; but the most recent public polls pegged Justice’s lead at 12, 13, 22, and 14 percent.

The Democratic Party is all but dead in West Virginia. I say this with sadness, as a native of the state who remembers a day when everyone, from every member of Congress on down to the agriculture commissioner (Gus Douglass!), was a Democrat. The place was never a liberal nirvana, but there were a number of progressives in office, notably Ken Hechler, one of those longtime members of Congress, who’d been a Truman speechwriter and was the only member of the House to march with Martin Luther King Jr. from Selma to Montgomery.

Today? Three of the 34 state senators are Democrats. Three! They could hold their caucus meetings in a closet. And only 10 of the 98 state delegates are Dems (there are two vacancies). The three state senators are from the university towns of Morgantown and Huntington. Everywhere else, the party barely exists.

So that Manchin’s seat was lost was already a foregone conclusion, and anyone who argued otherwise was wasting time.

Now let’s get to a possible Manchin presidential candidacy. First of all, I don’t think it’s certain that he’ll run. I’d call it likely but not preordained. No Labels officials have said repeatedly that they don’t want to help reelect Trump. There is of course no reason to take those avowals at face value. But they can be leveraged by an effective Democratic opposition into pressure to force No Labels to stand down if polling shows consistently that it’d be doing exactly that. So I think there is still a chance that No Labels doesn’t field a candidate, or can’t get anyone of Manchin’s stature to agree to accept its nod, and ends up with a Howard Schultz–level figure.

Second, even if Manchin does run, it is no longer manifestly obvious that he hurts Biden more than he hurts Trump. Here’s the case, which rests on three points.

One: Manchin is basically against abortion rights. His ratings record from the pro-life groups is mixed, but that’s because he has a history of voting for larger Democratic bills that contain some language about abortion that those groups don’t like. And he did criticize the Supreme Court’s Dobbs decision. But on stand-alone abortion bills, he’s been consistently against choice.

The 2024 election is going to be as direct a nationwide referendum on women’s reproductive rights as we’ve ever had in this country. And as we’ve been seeing since last year and saw again Tuesday, masses of voters are heading to the polls to say they want the government to do something to preserve abortion rights. Manchin’s going to be asked about this constantly if he runs. He’ll bob and weave, but if the Democrats do a good job of letting people know about the anti-choice aspects of his record—for example, he was the only Senate Democrat to join 50 Republicans in opposing a 2022 bill that sought to codify Roe v. Wade—very few pro-choice Americans will vote for him. And that category includes not just Democrats but a majority of independents and even some Republicans.

Two: He’s just not that popular. And to the extent that he is popular, he is more popular among Republicans than Democrats.

In a recent PRRI poll, Manchin was viewed favorably by 12 percent, while 41 percent viewed him unfavorably. This man who gets so much positive Beltway press was viewed very favorably by 1 percent. This by the way was Americans, not West Virginians. And there’s a recent Morning Consult poll that ranked the popularity of every senator (these were statewide polls). It found Manchin to be one of the most unpopular senators in the country. Now that’s largely because he’s a Democrat in a Republican state. There are only seven senators who are underwater in the poll, and Manchin is one of them (the only senators deeper underwater are Susan Collins, Ron Johnson, and Mitch McConnell, who is down there in Mariana Trench territory).

But here’s the good news for Manchin, according to Morning Consult. Manchin’s 42–48 numbers are actually an improvement over the last time they polled this. And that improvement has been “driven largely by Republican voters.” That echoes the PRRI poll, which breaks down that 12 percent favorable rating by party. Manchin is lowest among Democrats (7 percent), with independents in the middle (13 percent), and Republicans viewing him most favorably (18 percent).

So a surge of disaffected Democrats is going to back this guy? I don’t buy it. In fact, if we agree that somewhere around 55 percent of Republicans are MAGA and 45 percent are not, which seems about fair based on polls, that tells me that there are, at least potentially, more—far more—disaffected Republicans who might pull for Manchin. If he runs, I suspect his polls will tell him this, and he’ll go hunting where the ducks are, as Barry Goldwater put it.

Three: his unapologetic pro–fossil fuel position. Again, it will be up to the Democrats to publicize this properly if he runs. But if they do, he will perform very poorly among voters who want the United States to move away from fossil fuels—and again, that is a category that includes independents and even some Republicans.

So it’s possible the conventional wisdom is way off here. The PRRI poll data seem to support my case. In the Biden-Trump head-to-head matchup, Biden leads 48–46. When they throw in Manchin and Cornel West, Manchin garners 10 percent and West 5, but Biden still leads Trump, 41–38. If Manchin were stealing all his votes from Biden, wouldn’t Trump have been ahead in the four-way?

Manchin is a Democrat in name. But his high-profile positions are essentially Republican ones. Or at least enough of them are that an effective Democratic spin operation can convince Democratic and a majority of independent voters that Manchin just isn’t a real option for them. It would be a delightful thing if we woke up next November 6 to see that Manchin and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. cost Trump, not Biden, the White House. It would certainly be the outcome they all deserve.

I don’t pretend to know why so many Democrats hate Joe Biden but some of it’s obviously age (and now, there is real hostility among some over his support for Israel in the immediate aftermath of the terrorist attacks and inability or unwillingness to hold Netanyahu back from slaughtering innocent kids in Gaza.) But there is no one running for president who would do any better and they would all do worse so here we are.

Anyway, his logic makes some sense to me. But I really don’t think we should be taking chances with 3rd Party candidates. And if anyone votes for Trump, Manchin, Kennedy, West or Stein because of age they really should think twice. Every single one of them will be over 70 on inauguration day. Trump will be 78 and Manchin will be 78. Please.

Rep. Stefanik does some more dirty work for Dear Leader. It must be exhausting.

Trump’s lawyers in his NY Fraud trial said they planned to call for a mistrial based upon evidence they saw on Breitbart.com that the judge and his clerk are biased and have broken the campaign finance laws. I’m not kidding.

MSNBC’s Lisa Rubin filled us in on what happened:

Indeed, a Breitbart story published a day earlier aired new allegations about Engoron’s principal law clerk, who has been the subject of multiple attacks by Donald Trump and his legal team that led Engoron to impose a gag order on all of them. Specifically, Breitbart alleged, based on a review of New York State campaign finance data, that the law clerk has made contributions to individual candidates, local Democratic clubs, PACs and the New York County Democrats in amounts and at times that would appear to violate the rule Kise cited.

By Monday, the same day Donald Trump testified, Team Trump went further, telling Engoron that as soon as the AG’s team rested, they intended to move for a mistrial based on unspecified issues that Trump’s lawyers represented would be covered by the gag order but did not relate to their usual complaint: the notes Engoron and his clerk have exchanged. The judge then ordered them to present him with the motion in writing, with a proposed briefing schedule and hearing time, and pledged to return it quickly. Yet no such motion appears on the docket, and a source familiar with the litigation tells me that if such a motion was made under seal or through a similar process, it has not been served on the state.

Nonetheless, the arguments I expected would end up in the promised mistrial motion surfaced on Friday in a different form: a five-page letter to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct from House GOP conference chair Elise Stefanik. And although the letter begins with some partial and misleading quotations from a 2022 hearing and a trial day last week, the thrust of Stefanik’s charges of judicial intemperance and partisan bias come from the same Breitbart article initially floated by Kise on Nov. 3. Citing that piece, she accuses both Engoron and his principal law clerk of flouting the rules against partisan political contributions.

Perhaps most interestingly, while Stefanik is many things — a Harvard alumna, a former White House aide, and most recently, a mom — she is not a lawyer. But her letter is heavily footnoted, including with cites to New York cases, including some concerning the statute of limitations, and conforms with conventions of legal citation, including the telltale ibid., a fancy, lawyerly way of citing to the immediately prior source. 

That doesn’t mean, much less prove, Stefanik’s letter was authored by Trump lawyers. But it bears note that the particular method of her complaint and the use of her voice offer some tactical advantages. (Neither Stefanik’s office nor a representative for Trump immediately responded to NBC News’ requests for comment.)

First and foremost, to the extent that the principal law clerk’s alleged campaign contributions, which we have independently viewed, violate one or more New York rules governing judges and their personal appointees, one lawyer familiar with these rules and their implementation says the remedy for such misconduct would be discipline, not the overturning or invalidation of any decision in the case or even the removal of the presiding judge. Team Trump might have reached the same conclusion and decided against moving for a mistrial.

Second, Stefanik is not only arguably Trump’s most reliable and prominent Republican backer in New York State; she is also a member of Congress who is not subject to the federal Freedom of Information Act. As a result, if her letter was drafted or edited by anyone affiliated with the defense, journalists have no way of uncovering that through the kind of public records requests that, for example, have revealed political machinations between and among executive agencies.

And third, unlike a mistrial motion that Engoron himself could deny virtually on receipt and that would take months if not longer to appeal, a complaint to the state’s judicial conduct commission cannot be dismissed “without authorization by the Commission,” which meets “several times a year.” That means the allegations in Stefanik’s letter could swirl, without any resolution, for some time before the commission can determine whether it warrants investigation or should be dismissed.

Whether, in fact, Engoron and/or his clerk have, in fact, run afoul of the rules on the basis of their contributions remains to be seen. The rules not only allow candidates for judicial office greater latitude in the months before and after their runs, but also pertain only to contributions to political campaigns and “other partisan political activity,” a term that according to my source familiar with the ethics rules, might not include donations to local Democratic clubs, depending on their purpose. 

In the meantime, a spokesman for the New York court system told The New York Times that “Engoron’s actions and rulings in this matter are all part of the public record and speak for themselves. It is inappropriate to comment further.”

Will Stefanik’s letter lead to an investigation or even discipline? Or will it simply fuel the MAGA movement’s ire toward an elected judge and his law clerk? Watch this space.

Elisa Stefanik wants to be the VP choice. I’m not sure Trump thinks she’s glamorous enough (she needs to up her garish make-up and hairspray game) but I guess you never know.

As for whether this will go anywhere, I suppose it could. Why they think it makes sense that a member of congress makes the complaint is beyond me.

Meanwhile:

FEC Commissioner Ellen Weintraub on Thursday said her Republican colleagues have effectively put former President Donald Trump “in [a] category by himself” by refusing to investigate at least 28 instances where the agency’s professional staff determined that Trump or his family members likely violated regulations. In a statement, Weintraub revealed that there are at least 58 instances where the Federal Election Commission heard allegations against Trump. In at least 28 of those, staff at the Office of General Counsel determined that a criminal investigation was warranted—all of which went overlooked by Republican commissioners, who refused to approve any of Counsel’s recommendations against Trump. “My colleagues purport to be treating the former President and the current President alike, but the data is clear: At the FEC, Mr. Trump is in category by himself,” Weintraub said.