Martin Pengelly/The Guardian:
Trump’s indictment and the return of his biggest concern: ‘the women’
To the New York writer Molly Jong-Fast, host of the Fast Politics podcast, there is a some sense of poetic justice in Trump finally facing a legal reckoning in cases arising from his treatment of women.
But, Jong-Fast says: “The thing I’m sort of struck by is, like, how much women continually are dismissed, even in this situation.
“There’s so much talk about the Stormy Daniels case, there was so little talk about actually what happened, right? There was almost nothing about how he was married to his third wife [Melania Trump], and she had just had a child [Barron Trump], and he had this affair. He denies the affair but the affair is pretty much documented.
“That’s as close to truth in Trumpworld as possible. But we’re discussing the nuances of who paid the hush money and whether or not that’s a campaign contribution, and whether that rises to a federal crime.
“That can be argued, but I was surprised at how little focus women had in it. How nobody was talking about like, this is a serial philanderer who has the kind of problems that serial philanderers have.
“The filing talked about how he had paid off this doorman, about the illegitimate child. I guess that may have been not true … but like, you don’t pay off somebody unless you have a sense that this could actually be true.
How much are women continually dismissed, even in this situation? See the wins in Kansas and Wisconsin (and the 2020 midterms) that the pundits didn’t see coming, somehow.
Still, the ethics of the situation really do take a back seat to the practical aspects of it because the sleaze factor is built in. Everyone knows he’s a sleaze. It’s not news.
Here’s two pieces from the conservative point of view:
Andrew C McCarthy/National Review Opinion:
GOP Beware: Bragg’s Case Is Just the Start of Trump’s Legal Jeopardy
Don’t be fooled by snapshot polls showing Trump beating Biden — which Democrats are hyping because, for now, they want us to think he can win. He can’t. Don’t allow the intensity of Trump’s base supporters to mask how deeply unpopular he is with the country writ large. He had consistently low job-approval ratings as president — reaching 49 percent a couple of times but generally staying in the low 40s and going down to 34 by the time he left office (which actually seemed high under the circumstances). It was a statistical miracle that he won in 2016 — with just 46 percent of the vote in, substantially, a two-candidate race. Trump could never again win a national election after the 2020 coup attempt, the Capitol riot, and his continued delusional insistence that reelection was stolen from him.
Moreover, the demagogic riffs that make MAGA crowds swoon — and that Trump doubled down on at this week’s Mar-a-Lago rally (because why wouldn’t an arraignment be the occasion for a rally?) — are exactly what most Americans find deeply disturbing about him. If he’s the nominee, the Democrats will retain the White House by ten points or more, with the tide sweeping the Senate and the House their way, too. Trump would have you believe he’s your crusader against wokeness. Down here on Planet Earth, he’s wokeness’s big chance to cement its reign.
Jonah Goldberg/The Dispatch:
The Ties That Blind
With no other frame of reference, young conservatives are starting to think it’s normal to be jerks.
Which brings me back to those stupid ties. Everywhere I look these days, I see young conservatives believing they should behave like jerks or like the body parts they cover with those red ties. Because they have no frame of reference, no meaningful political experience or memory of politics prior to this shabby era, they think being shabby is normal and smart. Last week, the New York Republican Club issued a moronic and monstrous statement in solidarity with Donald Trump. In response to my criticism these domestic birds of prey behaved monstrously and moronically. (I won’t link to it because attention is the currency they covet.) I’ve since learned that the D.C. chapter of the Young Republicans is equally asinine, embracing the goons and dupes who stormed the Capitol as martyrs and political prisoners.
Indeed, they’ve literally ditched the Republican elephant in favor of a silhouette of Donald Trump.
It’s a tribal thing. Young conservatives mimic their elders, and in this case as in others, to no good end. But it’s remarkable that we are hearing about it so frequently from conservatives.
This, at a time they are complaining that young people don’t like them. Well, who would, when your role models are Donald Trump (especially), Govs. Greg Abbott and Ron DeSantis, the Tennessee House, and Scott Walker?
Greg Sargent/The Washington Post:
The ‘Tennessee 3’ saga highlights the GOP retreat into Fortress MAGA
At bottom, this hysterical GOP overreaction was triggered, as it were, by mass citizen dissent over the ugly realities of right-wing rule. Before the shooting, Tennessee Republicans had been weakening gun laws every which way. After it, one Republican went viral for declaring that “we’re not going to fix” the problem, which for many protesters typified GOP pro-gun mania and helped inspire their response to it.
All of this mirrors a larger story. Red states are sinking deeper into virulent far-right culture-warring — banning books, limiting classroom discussion of race and gender and prohibiting gender-affirming care for transgender youth. GOP legislatures passing these things were of course legitimately elected by majorities, though in some cases gerrymanders increase their power.
POLITICO Playbook:
The GOP’s week of woes
1. Is DONALD TRUMP rebounding? The former president is deeply unpopular and has led his party to three losses in a row after barely winning in 2016. Absent a reinvention that drastically improves his popularity among the small but crucial swing voters who have abandoned the Trumpified GOP, his strength in the GOP primary likely correlates with GOP disappointment next November.
2. Are national issues trending in the GOP’s favor? The threat from MAGA and the threat to abortion rights have repeatedly proven to be winning issues for Democrats in swing races. The more they dominate the national conversation, the worse it is for Republicans.
3. Is President JOE BIDEN still hiding? Biden is also unpopular (43% approval) but the adage he has also lived by — “Don’t compare me to the almighty. Compare me to the alternative.” — has served him well since 2020. The more Biden is able to lay low and keep the spotlight elsewhere — on Trump, on MAGA, on GOP divisions in the House, on unpopular issues such as abortion bans — the more he is able to dodge scrutiny about his age and potential vulnerabilities on issues like crime, identity politics and inflation.
All three of these metrics were pushed in the wrong direction for Republicans this week.
Remember, the GOP really did have an awful week, with more awful weeks for them to come.
Brian Beutler/Big Tent Newsletter:
① Alvin Bragg's indictment of Donald Trump sent a group of liberal commentators on an embarrassing yet detrimental rush to judgment
② In truth, the indictment is mundane, a straightforward application of a niche piece of New York state law, according to people who've actually prosecuted it in the past—but by the time they spoke up, a noxious conventional wisdom had set in
③ Unless it's reversed, or overwhelmed by future prosecutions, that conventional wisdom will feed the GOP politics of vengeance, and the Democratic politics of slinking away from conflict
What these Trump loyalists could not have anticipated in their wildest dreams was the validation they’ve received from a cadre of liberal commentators who had already soured on the idea of pursuing Trump for making illegal, pre-election hush-money payments to his mistresses, and, thus, trashed the indictment as legally weak and politically motivated before they really understood it.
In so doing they’ve helped create a consensus wisdom that’s both politically noxious and (more importantly) wrong.
Elie Mystal/The Nation:
A Zealot Judge Has Ordered a Nationwide Abortion Pill Ban
Texas Judge Matthew Kacsmaryk’s ruling threw the fate of mifepristone into question. The case is likely headed to the Supreme Court within days.
To get to this ruling, Kacsmaryk didn’t just have to agree with the fake science cooked up by forced-birth activists against the drug; he also had to invent a bunch of legal gobbledygook to find a reason for the activists to challenge the FDA process in the first place. Normally, the only people who have standing to sue the government are those who are harmed by a government action. But the case against mifepristone was brought by a group called “Alliance for Hippocratic Medicine,” formed three months after the Supreme Court revoked the right to choose in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization. The Intercept found that this group is just a front for a bunch of Christian-aligned forced-birth “medical” organizations that regularly challenge abortion rights. Among its members: the Catholic Medical Association, the Christian Medical & Dental Associations, the American Association of Pro-Life Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Coptic Medical Association of North America, and the American College of Pediatricians.
Will Bunch/The Philadelphia Inquirer:
GOP wages an asymmetrical war on democracy because it can’t get the votes
The expulsion of two Black Tennessee lawmakers capped a dangerous week when Democrats won elections and the GOP waged war on democracy.
It was the highlight reel of what should have been a banner week for American democracy — scores of down vest-wearing, smartphone-gazing students at the University of Wisconsin-Eau Claire in a line that snaked around every corner of a campus building as they waited to cast a ballot for an open seat on the Wisconsin Supreme Court.
When the votes were tallied at the end of the night, some 883 people had cast ballots at the campus polling place — more than any other precinct in Eau Claire, and nearly six times as many as voted there in a similar election four years earlier. And 87% of the students had voted for Democrat Janet Protasiewicz — perhaps a rejection of her Republican opponent Dan Kelly’s lifelong opposition to abortion and his work trying to overturn Joe Biden’s 2020 election victory.
The surge in young-voter turnout was a key reason why Protasiewicz won a landslide, 11-point victory in a key swing state that Biden had only won by just over 20,000 votes three years earlier. Overall, the turnout for a race to decide the balance of power on the Badger State’s highest court set a record for a nonpresidential year, but the GOP’s Kelly wasn’t hearing the chimes of freedom. He all but called the Democrat’s victory illegitimate.
And for those who enjoy videos:
Andrew Fleischman/Ordinary Times:
Daniel Perry Is A Baffling Waste of a Pardon
This story has such narrative force right now because it confirms an important prior on the Right: the law is unfairly applied to them, and they courts have conspired to persecute them while allowing a pervasive crime wave to destroy America’s cities.
But this account has two minor problems:
- The facts
- The law
The single most important fact that conservatives come back to, again and again, is that the victim, Garrett Foster, had pointed an AK-47 at Daniel Perry’s head. And it’s not true.
Let’s start with the obvious. There were many eyewitnesses in this case. And not one of them testified that Foster had pointed his weapon at Perry. “That’s nothing,” Perry stans rely, because these people are BLM protesters totally devoid of the simple decency and kindness that marks real Americans, and they must have all agreed to lie in court, identically, to ensure that Perry would be convicted by a panel of soft-handed Soros-loving libs.
But you know who else said the weapon was not pointed at Daniel Perry? Daniel Perry. See, Perry made the classic mistake of so many people who like police. He talked to police. And he told a sympathetic officer that “I believe[d] he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” Not only did Foster not aim a weapon at Perry, he didn’t have the “chance” to.