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“A tricky approach” to avoiding conviction

New information in the Trump stolen documents case surfaced over the weekend. ABC News had a scoop on former Trump chief of staff Mark Meadows’ testimony to special counsel Jack Smith’s investigators. Marcy Wheeler (emptywheel) this morning summarizes key points:

• Meadows knew of no standing order to declassify documents
• He was not involved in packing boxes, didn’t see Trump doing so, and wasn’t aware Trump had taken classified documents
• Meadows offered to sort through boxes of documents after NARA inquired about them in May 2021, but Trump declined the offer
• Meadows ultimately backed his ghostwriter’s account that the Iran document that Trump described to Meadows’ ghost-writer was on the couch in front of him at the time of the exchange

Meadows asked that the part about a classified Iran war plan sitting out in plain view be edited out of an early draft of Meadows’ book, “The Chief’s Chief,” ABC reports:

Sources told ABC News that Meadows was questioned by Smith’s investigators about the changes made to the language in the draft, and Meadows claimed, according to the sources, that he personally edited it out because he didn’t believe at the time that Trump would have possessed a document like that at Bedminster.

Meadows also said that if it were true Trump did indeed have such a document, it would be “problematic” and “concerning,” sources familiar with the exchange said. Meadows said his perspective changed on whether his ghostwriter’s recollection could have been accurate, given the later revelations about the classified materials recovered from Mar-a-Lago in the months since his book was published, the sources said.

Significantly, Meadows changed his testimony on the matter, Wheeler notes. Based on his court filing asking to have his Georgia charges dismissed, he’s clearly trying to frame his actions in both the Georgia and documents cases as “just doing his job,” hoping it will help him evade convictions, Wheeler continues:

There’s an arc here. The early acts in both indictments might be deemed legal information gathering. After that, in early December, Meadows takes two actions, one alleged in Georgia and the other federally, both of which put him clearly in the role of a conspirator, neither of which explicitly involves Trump as charged in the Georgia indictment. Meadows:

• Asks Johnny McEntee for a memo on how to obstruct the vote certification
• Orders the campaign to ensure someone is coordinating the fake electors

Wheeler explains at length how Meadows is exposed both federally and in Georgia for actions taken arguably outside the scope of his COS duties and with no clear federal policy interest.

Between the overt political nature of three of his actions and the lack of any policy argument, Fani Willis should be able to mount an aggressive challenge to this effort, though the effort is not entirely frivolous and Meadows has very good lawyers even if those lawyers don’t have great facts.

[…]

The degree to which subsequent events, including the Georgia indictment, may discredit Meadows’ federal grand jury testimony likely explains why we’ve gotten the first ever leak as to the substance of Meadows’ testimony, which often serves as a way to telegraph testimony to other witnesses. Several of the things ABC describes him as testifying to — that he had no idea Trump took classified documents and that he offered to sort through everything but Trump refused — seem unlikely. But so long as whoever else could refute that (including Walt Nauta, who helped pack up the boxes) tells the same story, he might get away with improbable testimony.

Wheeler summarizes:

Meadows appears, thus far, to have succeeded with a very tricky approach. He has great lawyers and it may well succeed going forward. But with all the indictments flying, that effort gets far more difficult, particularly given the way the overt acts in the Georgia indictment discredit Meadows’ federal grand jury testimony.

Conclusion: Mark Meadows is dancing as fast as he can.

“Virtually all rainfall daily records have been broken”

For future reference, on the east coast when it’s overcast and the air feels like warm bathwater, a hurricane is on its way.

Hoping our friends kept dry on Sunday during Hilary’s visit to Palm Springs where the 911 system went down. It’s not as if tropical weather is a regular event there. (One mentioned doing some advance sandbagging.) Weather experts reported “virtually all rainfall daily records have been broken thus far” and warned of “catastrophic and life-threatening flooding.” Plenty of people seem to have insisted on driving flooded streets anyway.

People in McDonald's Drive-Thru during a hurricane. https://t.co/ge4WfRJZa5

— John Fugelsang (@JohnFugelsang) August 21, 2023

As an aside, a women in Greenville, S.C. once stepped out of her car after she stalled out in a foot of water in a low spot. She got sucked down a storm drain at the curb. They found her body in a river days later. It’s not something you forget. Don’t do that.

I-8 eastbound was shut down until Caltrans could move this huge boulder which fell on the freeway. #TropicalStormHilary pic.twitter.com/X0SYQxkhv3

— janewells (@janewells) August 20, 2023

Washington Post:

• Now a post-tropical cyclone, Hilary was traveling north through Nevada early Monday, with maximum sustained winds of 39 mph, the NHC said. “A brief tornado or two will be possible” in southeastern California, northwest Arizona, southern Nevada and southwestern Utah, the NHC said.
• Up to 10.5 inches of rain fell in Southern California, including around 2 to 3 inches in Los Angeles and San Diego, which set summer records.
• A man was killed Sunday in Mexico’s Baja California Sur, authorities said, after water swept away his car.
• A magnitude-5.1 earthquake shook parts of Southern California on Sunday afternoon, triggering an emergency mobile alert to residents in Los Angeles County and surrounding areas. The National Weather Service said a tsunami was not expected.

The Los Angeles Unified School District schools are closed.

For those of you who have never lived in L.A., this image is genuinely nuts.

The L.A. "River" is barely even a river most of the time. Usually it's either a tiny trickle of water at the bottom of a concrete bed, or just completely dry. https://t.co/oSlbIZJomv

— Matthew Chapman (@fawfulfan) August 20, 2023

Has there ever been a less self-aware person in the history of mankind?

Those were posted right after each other. He’s an idiot.

A beloved store owner in Lake Arrowhead was shot and killed during a dispute over a Pride flag, officials say.

The shooting happened around 5 p.m. Friday at the Mag Pi clothing store on Hook Creek Road in Cedar Glen.

When deputies arrived, they found 66-year-old Laura Ann Carleton with a gunshot wound. She was pronounced dead on the scene.

According to the San Bernardino Sheriff’s Department, the suspect, who has not been identified, “made several disparaging remarks about a rainbow flag that stood outside the store before shooting Carleton.”

Deputies found the suspect near Torrey and Rause Rancho Roads, armed with a handgun.

“When deputies attempted to contact the suspect, a lethal force encounter occurred and the suspect was pronounced deceased,” read an update from the sheriff’s department. No deputies were injured.

The Lake Arrowhead LGBTQ spoke out about the shooting, saying though Carleton didn’t identify as a member of the LGBTQ+ community, she spent her time helping and advocating for everyone in the community.

San Bernardino County Third District Supervisor also spoke out about the shooting, calling it “unthinkable.”

“I stand with my mountain communities as we mourn this incredible loss,” she wrote in an Instagram story. “Everyone deserves to live free of hate and discrimination and practice their constitutional right of freedom of speech. Lauri was a remarkable member of the community and I send my deepest condolences to her family in this time of grief.”

She has nine children.

We don’t know much about the man who killed her yet other than the fact that he was 27 years old. Apparently, people had pulled down the rainbow flag before. It seems it offends them. So someone decided the person who flew it had to die.

Now let’s talk about how MAGAs are losing his freedom of speech some more.

It’s what Hillary Clinton was (wrongly) accused of doing for her family’s global charity.

GDS actually auctioned off his time to big money donors. He might as well have opened up an Only Fans account:

Florida governor and 2024 Republican presidential candidate Ron DeSantis was “personally involved” in “efforts to effectively auction off leisure time” to wealthy donors who were seeking to “influence” policies in the Sunshine State — and much of it was recorded in writing by DeSantis staffers, Isaac Arnsdorf and Josh Dawsey reveal in Sunday‘s Washington Post.

After “DeSantis took office in 2019, his political team made a list of the state’s top 40 lobbyists and about 100 of their ‘Suggested Clients to target’ for political contributions, according to a fundraising document reviewed by The Washington Post,” the correspondents write. “Next to the name of each lobbyist was a dollar figure, an ‘ask’ that the DeSantis team hoped they would raise based on their book of clients, whose names were also listed in the document and included large corporations such as Disney and Motorola, as well as sports organizations, billionaires and interest groups with extensive business before the state.”

DeSantis’ “fundraisers,” Arnsdorf and Dawsey explain, “hoped that nine lobbyists would raise at least $1 million each for DeSantis’ political action committee, the state and the Republican Governors Association, according to the document, which was drafted by Heather Barker, a top DeSantis aide and his primary fundraiser, and shared with others.”

DeSantis’ affinity for hitting the links was the bedrock of his team’s plan to woo financial contributors, whom the Post says “envisioned that some golf outings with the governor would net contributions of $75,000 or more, according to other emails among DeSantis’ political advisers.”

Golf, however, was not the only activity with the governor that was dangled in front of DeSantis’ monied supporters.

“The 2019 document detailed other avenues for securing contributions. ‘METHODS FOR FIRMS TO DELIVER SUPPORT: Golf, lunch, meetings, dinner, tours, events, etc. — Each have a threshold (ex. Golf $25k per person, which is a deal),’ reads the document, whose authenticity was confirmed by multiple people with knowledge of it,” per the Post. “Like others interviewed for this story, the people spoke on the condition of anonymity for fear of retaliation.”

Arnsdorf and Dawsey note that while legal experts told them that DeSantis’s actions may not be explicitly illegal, they “undermine his attempt to portray himself as someone who would do a better job taking on special interests than former president Donald Trump, the polling leader in the GOP race. ‘We’e drained the swamp in here,’ he said in a recent Fox News interview about his time as governor in Florida. ‘One of the things he did not do was drain the swamp.'”

He is the swamp. So is Trump. This whole “drain the swamp” thing by Republicans is absurd.

And so right on

Rosalie Silberman Abella is the Samuel and Judith Pisar visiting professor of law at Harvard Law School and is a former justice of the Supreme Court of Canada. This op-ed is adapted from her speech upon receiving the 2023 Ruth Bader Ginsburg Medal of Honor from the World Jurist Association.

The incandescent Ruth Bader Ginsburg was a jurist, a woman and a Jew. It was a defining combination that shaped her vision and her passions, transforming her from distinguished U.S. Supreme Court justice to iconic global metaphor.

When she pursued justice on the Supreme Court, she was a judicial juggernaut who was catapulted into international orbit by two forces: enthusiastic gratitude for her ever-bolder judgments, but also, as time went on, by the vituperative reaction of an increasingly regressive climate in which those progressive judgments were anathema.

Regrettably, that regressive climate is where we find ourselves today, especially about the judiciary. Critics call the good news of an independent judiciary the bad news of judicial autocracy. They call women and minorities seeking the right to be free from discrimination special interest groups seeking to jump the queue. They call efforts to reverse discrimination “reverse discrimination.” They say courts should only interpret, not make, law, thereby ignoring the entire history of common law. They call the advocates for diversity “biased” and defenders of social stagnation “impartial.” They prefer ideology to ideas, replacing the exquisite democratic choreography of checks and balances with the myopic march of majoritarianism.

All this has put us at the edge of a global era unlike any I’ve seen in my lifetime. We’re in a mean-spirited moral free-for-all, a climate polluted by bombastic insensitivity, antisemitism, racism, sexism, islamophobia, homophobia and discrimination generally. Too often, law and justice are in a dysfunctional relationship. Too often, hate kills, truth is homeless and lives don’t matter.

We need to put justice back in charge, and to do that, we need to put compassion back in the service of law and law in the service of humanity. We need the rule of justice, not just the rule of law. Otherwise, what’s the point of law? Or lawyers? What good is the rule of law if there’s no justice? And to make justice happen, we can never forget how the world looks to those who are vulnerable. It’s what I consider to be the law’s majestic purpose and the legal profession’s noble mandate.

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For me, this is not just theory. I was born in a displaced-persons camp in Germany on July 1, 1946. My parents, who got married in Poland on Sept. 3, 1939, spent most of the war in concentration camps. Their 2-year-old son and my father’s whole family were murdered at Treblinka. Miraculously, my parents survived and, after the war, ended up in Stuttgart, where my father, who was a lawyer, taught himself English and was hired by the Americans as counsel for displaced persons in southwestern Germany. When we came to Canada in 1950 as Jewish refugees, he was told he couldn’t practice law because he wasn’t a citizen.

He died a month before I finished law school and never lived to see his inspiration take flight in his daughter or the two grandsons he never met who also became lawyers, but he knew it would turn out all right because he was confident in Canada’s generosity. And how right he was.

A few years ago, my mother gave me some of my father’s papers from Germany. One of the most powerful documents I found was written by my father when he was head of the displaced-persons camp in Stuttgart. It was his introduction of Eleanor Roosevelt when she came to visit our camp in 1948. He said: “We welcome you, Mrs. Roosevelt, as the representative of a great nation, whose victorious army liberated the remnants of European Jewry from death and so highly contributed to their moral and physical rehabilitation. We shall never forget that aid rendered by the American people and army. We are not in a position of showing you many assets. The best we are able to produce are these few children. They alone are our fortune and our sole hope for the future.”

As one of those children, I am here to tell you that the gift of hope is the gift that keeps right on giving, propelling me from a displaced-persons camp in Germany all the way to the Supreme Court of Canada.

My life started in a country where there had been no democracy, no rights, no justice. No one with this history does not feel lucky to be alive and free. No one with this history takes anything for granted. And no one with this history does not feel that we have a particular duty to wear our identities with pride and to promise our children that we will do everything humanly possible to keep the world safer for them than it was for their grandparents, a world where all children, regardless of race, color, religion or gender, can wear their identity with dignity, with pride and in peace.

I am very proud to be a member of the legal profession but I’ll never forget why I joined it.

“Nuff said

And this time, it’s a fatal error:

 [A] key focus of the Trump campaign as it looks ahead to a possible rematch with Mr. Biden: getting both men onstage. Mr. Trump has repeatedly said publicly that he wants debates with Mr. Biden, and Mr. Trump’s advisers view face-offs with the incumbent president as vital to Mr. Trump’s chances of winning.

They thought that last time too. It didn’t work out the way they thought it would:

The third debate?

President Donald Trump was rated the most improved performer at Thursday’s debate, but a panel of debate experts said Joe Biden was more effective with his arguments.

The three experts all agreed that the faceoff was more informative than the chaotic first debate in Cleveland last month, but one noted, “That’s a very low bar.”

While Trump’s strategy of interrupting less and letting Biden speak more in hopes of provoking a gaffe was sound strategy, the experts said Biden didn’t make the type of major mistake Trump probably needed to change the race.

Here are their report cards.

Mitchell McKinney

Director of the Political Communication Institute at the University of Missouri

Overall: “It was more relaxed” than the first debate, with fewer interruptions, especially early on, McKinney said. Trump’s relative restraint made sense, but he added, “I don’t think it was as effective in terms of the overall dynamics of the debate.”

On Trump: “Donald Trump seemed at times certainly perturbed, but restrained himself and wasn’t going for the jugular” like he did in the first debate, McKinney said. “He learned his lesson from the polls” after that, McKinney said, but the result put him “in a box.” “He did not appear to be the authentic Donald Trump,” he said.

On Biden: Biden was prepared for Trump’s attacks on him and his family and “didn’t get rattled,” McKinney said. Biden was able to project empathy, and he took an effective page out of the Obama playbook while declaring that he’d be a president of “not red states and blue states but the United States.” Most important, he was “able to avoid any major gaffes or blunders that would have had supporters wringing their hands,” McKinney said.

McKinney’s report card:

Trump’s grade: B-

Biden’s grade: B+

Susan Millsap

Communications professor at Otterbein University in Ohio and adviser to the student debate team

Overall: “It started better than the first one, but it slowly devolved a bit. The last 20 minutes or so, the interruptions were increasing again, and Trump was slowly turning it into a campaign speech,” Millsap said.

“I was like, ‘Oh, no — don’t do it.’ Towards the end, Trump was back on his hyperbole and bombastic style,” she said.

On Trump: Trump was effective in hitting some of the points he wanted to make. Many of his answers were reminiscent of his rally speeches, and he managed to bring answers on a wide range of issues back to his support of businesses.

“He would fall back on businesses and how it would hurt or harm business. Even the race issue he brought back to business,” Millsap said. “If you like that, you like what he’s saying.”

On Biden: Biden presented himself as a man with plans, Millsap said. “He had a definite plan for the Covid, for the economy, health care. For race, he even laid out a plan,” she said. Trump did nail him for sidestepping some questions, painting him as a typical politician, she said, but she didn’t think it was enough to harm him. Biden also allowed Trump to divert him from some of the topics they were discussing.

Millsap’s report card:

Trump’s grade: C-

Biden’s grade: B

Jacob Thompson

Communications professor at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, and director of the debate team

Overall: “It was marked improvement from the first debate,” and moderator Kristen Welker of NBC News “gets an A-plus” for her deft handling of the event. “Both candidates behaved like adults,” he said, but he added, “I don’t think America should get too excited about clearing the lowest bar of civility.”

On Trump: “Relative to expectations, Trump won,” because his performance was so much better than it was in the first debate, Thompson said. He did a good job of reining in his temper, which will result in lower unfavorable ratings, and he was successful in trying “to muddy the waters around questions about Joe Biden’s character.”

“That’s an effective appeal to Trump’s base,” Thompson said.

But Trump failed to reach beyond his base, and his attempts at being empathetic rang hollow. “He needed an unforced error from Biden, and he didn’t get it,” Thompson said, although an answer from Biden about phasing out the oil industry came close.

On Biden: “In substance and style, Biden did better,” improving on his performance from the first debate and in comparison to Trump. “He struck an empathetic tone several different times and went back to portraying himself as a president who would unite the country,” Thompson said. He rebounded on his answer about the oil industry with an explanation of how it was a necessary transition away from fossil fuels that “was cogent enough,” although “not earth-shattering.”

Thompson’s report card:

Trump’s grade: B-

Biden’s grade: B+

Trump did not wipe the floor with Biden in either of their debates and he won’t be able to do it this time either. He certainly didn’t with Hillary:

They are believing their own hype about Biden’s age. But they’re reveling in the exaggerated clips that right wing social media puts on line instead of analyzing Biden’s actual performance before the camera. He looks old and he walks stiffly. But he speaks and sounds the way he always did. And by the way, Trump looks old and walks stiffly but sounds the way he always did too. Nothing has changed. Under those circumstances, I’ll still put my money on Biden because he isn’t a roaring asshole.

Among voters who say that honesty is “very important” to them, Trump leads 61 to 17 pic.twitter.com/K5Y4vDDxm3

— Alex Thompson (@AlexThomp) August 20, 2023

As someone who started following politics during the 1980s, this GOP primary poll feels topsy-turvy in ways I cannot explain. pic.twitter.com/UruE50WAdu

— Adam Bonin (@adambonin.bsky.social) (@adambonin) August 20, 2023

What in the hell are we going to do about this? It represents tens of millions of fellow Americans.

A constitutional crisis in progress

Legal scholars William Baude and Michael Stokes Paulsen argued a few weeks ago that Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment means “Donald Trump cannot be president — cannot run for president, cannot become president, cannot hold office — unless two-thirds of Congress decides to grant him amnesty for his conduct on Jan. 6.”

No “legislation, criminal conviction, or other judicial action” is necessary to invoke the post-Civil War amendment. It is not a dead letter. What is required of citizens at any level of government who have taken an oath to uphold the Constitution is to declare Trump ineligible when the matter of his eligibility presents itself to them.

What made the Baude-Paulsen analysis more impactful was that it came from scholars associated with the conservative Federalist Society.

Now, J. Michael Luttig and Laurence H. Tribe, a respected conservative former federal appeals judge and an emeritus Harvard constitutional law professor, concur in The Atlantic:

Having thought long and deeply about the text, history, and purpose of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause for much of our professional careers, both of us concluded some years ago that, in fact, a conviction would be beside the point. The disqualification clause operates independently of any such criminal proceedings and, indeed, also independently of impeachment proceedings and of congressional legislation. The clause was designed to operate directly and immediately upon those who betray their oaths to the Constitution, whether by taking up arms to overturn our government or by waging war on our government by attempting to overturn a presidential election through a bloodless coup.

The former president’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election, and the resulting attack on the U.S. Capitol, place him squarely within the ambit of the disqualification clause, and he is therefore ineligible to serve as president ever again. The most pressing constitutional question facing our country at this moment, then, is whether we will abide by this clear command of the Fourteenth Amendment’s disqualification clause.

Any attempt to disqualify Trump or others associated with the plot to overturn the 2020 election will face not only the famously litigious Trump in court but also his violence-prone supporters in the streets.

This is a constitutional crisis in progress. Or it may be.

As a practical matter, the processes of adversary hearing and appeal will be invoked almost immediately upon the execution and enforcement of Section 3 by a responsible election officer—or, for that matter, upon the failure to enforce Section 3 as required. When a secretary of state or other state official charged with the responsibility of approving the placement of a candidate’s name on an official ballot either disqualifies Trump from appearing on a ballot or declares him eligible, that determination will assuredly be challenged in court by someone with the standing to do so, whether another candidate or an eligible voter in the relevant jurisdiction. Given the urgent importance of the question, such a case will inevitably land before the Supreme Court, where it will in turn test the judiciary’s ability to disentangle constitutional interpretation from political temptation. (Additionally, with or without court action, the second sentence of Section 3 contains a protection against abuse of this extraordinary power by these elections officers: Congress’s ability to remove an egregious disqualification by a supermajority of each House.)

The entire process, with all its sometimes frail but thus far essentially effective constitutional guardrails, will frame the effort to determine whether the threshold of “insurrection” or “rebellion” was reached and which officials, executive or legislative, were responsible for the January 6 insurrection and the broader efforts to reverse the election’s results.

The process that will play out over the coming year could give rise to momentary social unrest and even violence. But so could the failure to engage in this constitutionally mandated process. For our part, we would pray for neither unrest nor violence from the American people during a process of faithful application and enforcement of their Constitution.

May whatever being(s) has the power to answer such a prayer be responsive.

This is a constitutional crisis in progress. Or it will be if any official empowered to declare Trump ineligible has the spine to say so.

Luttig and Tribe observe, “As recently as last December, the former president posted on Truth Social his persistent view that the last presidential election was a ‘Massive Fraud,’ one that ‘allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.’” They ask, “How could any citizen trust that [Trump] would uphold the oath of office he would take upon his inauguration?”

A little late for that question, isn’t it? I wrote in March 2016, “Next January, if Trump raises his right hand and swears to defend the Constitution, how can his left hand go on the Bible with his fingers crossed behind his back?”

The world has since seen what anyone paying attention then already knew: Trump is an inveterate liar, cheat, and criminal devoid of morals or character. He was then and is now unfit to “hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State.” Even without Section 3.

I wish I had faith that someone in authority has strength of their own character to declare Trump ineligible outside the pages of a newspaper or magazine, but in an elections office where it counts.

Update: Missed this segment on Saturday.

8.19.23 4:40 PM ET Absolutely True Legal Expertise to the nth degree on Full Display as Jim Acosta @acosta Hosts J. Michael Luttig, Former Judge of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit @judgeluttig and Constitutional Scholar & Harvard Law Professor Laurence… pic.twitter.com/IBx956pu2e

— Jeff Storobinsky (@jeffstorobinsky) August 19, 2023

Hate speech has consequences

After months of Republicans vilifying gay and transgender people, and after they pass laws in multiple states targeting them, teachers, and drag queens, guess what?

Shop owner shot, killed over rainbow flag outside clothing store near Lake Arrowhead

San Bernardino Sun:

The owner of a clothing shop in Cedar Glen was shot and killed Friday night, Aug. 18, after a person made several disparaging comments about a rainbow flag displayed outside the store, authorities said.

The suspect was found nearby by arriving deputies, who shot and killed him, San Bernardino County sheriff’s officials said.

Deputies responded to the Magpi clothing store on Hook Creek Road around 5 p.m. and found the victim, identified as Laura Ann Carleton, 66, outside the store suffering from a gunshot wound.

Carleton was pronounced dead at the scene.

Footwear News describes Carleton as “a fashion and footwear industry veteran“:

According to the Magpi website, Lauri Carleton’s career in fashion began early in her teens, working in the family business at Fred Segal Feet in Los Angeles while attending Art Center School of Design. From there, she oversaw the shoe floor at Joseph Magnin Century City. Carleton later joined Kenneth Cole. During her 15 years as an executive at the company, she worked with factories and design teams in Italy and Spain, and was often on the road for 200 days a year, according to the Magpi site.

Carleton was a beloved member of her California communities, and friends and partners mourned her death on Saturday.

Members from the Mountain Provisions Cooperative wrote on Instagram:

“Laura was a pillar in our community, an immovable force in her values for equality, love and justice. If you knew Lauri, you know she loved hard, laughed often, and nurtured and protected those who she cared about,” the post read. It went on to praise Lauri and her husband Bort for being pivotal in organizing the group’s “Free Store,” which provided free food and supplies for four months after a blizzard.

Donald Trump and his merry coupsters spend months baselessly alleging that massive fraud cost him the 2020 election and them their rightful king. He invites his overwrought subjects to a “wild” rally on Jan. 6. Some arrive with weapons, tactical and communications gear, and a plan. After Trump tells them they must “fight like hell” or “you’re not going to have a country anymore,” they storm and ransack the U.S. Capitol.

Donald Trump baselessly accuses the FBI of planting the documents he proudly declared his. A man who was present at the Capitol riot attempts to breach a Cincinnati FBI field office the next day and is shot and killed after a standoff with police.

Sometimes the effect is more delayed. Sometimes individual assaults and killings receive no press.

The Department of Homeland Security in May warned that threats of violence against the LGBTQIA+ community were on the rise and intensifying. saying, “These issues include actions linked to drag-themed events, gender-affirming care, and LGBTQIA+ curricula in schools.”

A report in June from the Anti-Defamation League cited “at least 356 anti-LGBTQ+ extremist and non-extremist incidents” in 46 states between June 2022 and April 2023.

“From demonstrations aiming to intimidate organizers and attendees at drag shows, to bomb threats against hospitals that offer health care for LGBTQ+ people to a mass shooting that took the lives of five people in Colorado, incidents of anti-LGBTQ+ hate and extremism are an important part of a larger story about the heightened threats facing the LGBTQ+ community in the United States today.”

The Human Rights Campaign reported last November at least “32 transgender and gender-nonconforming people” killed in the U.S. in 2022. Based on what little press there is about Carleton, she was neither, but an advocate.

Nobody is fooled by thinly disguised Trump threats and intimidation aimed at his perceived enemies. Nor by his social media tirades rendered in all-caps that he believes as immaturely as Bart Simpson provide him plausible deniability when followers act on them. His words have consequences. He bears responsibility, if not in this life perhaps in the next.

Nobody is fooled — I’m looking at you, Ron DeSantis, and at GOP state legislators — that hate speech and discriminatory legislation directed at LGBTQ+ Americans does not carry deadly consequences for them or, in Carleton’s case, for their allies.

Nobody is fooled by the smirking, social media celebrities who make their dirty livings peddling this shit.

You, all of you, know who you are.