In trying to digest the events of the past week — with the Supreme Court in particular — I somehow found myself thinking about Bill Barr. Barr, one might have thought, had learned a lesson about giving one man too much power. After the Trump Administration was over, Barr was widely quoted as saying that Trump was a terrible human being who shouldn’t be allowed near the Oval Office. But now he’s endorsed Trump again.

This was at CNN:

“I think that Biden is unfit for office,” Barr said on “The Source” in a wide-ranging interview. “I think Trump would do less damage than Biden, and I think all this stuff about a threat to democracy – I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration.”

Collins pressed Barr – who has been highly critical of his former boss – “Just to be clear, you’re voting for someone who you believe tried to subvert the peaceful transfer of power, that can’t even achieve his own policies, that lied about the election even after his attorney general told him that the election wasn’t stolen … you’re going to vote for someone who is facing 88 criminal counts?”

Barr began, “Look, the 88 criminal counts, a lot of those are-“

“Even if ten of them are accurate?” Collins interjected.

“The answer to the question is yes,” Barr countered. “I’m supporting the Republican ticket,” he said.

Pressed further on whether he would vote for Trump specifically, Barr said, “Between Biden and Trump, I will vote for Trump because I believe he will do less damage over the four years.”

Barr went on to describe the difference between both parties in stark terms, insisting that the “the threat to freedom and democracy has always been on the left.”

“I think the real threat to democracy is the progressive movement and the Biden administration,” he said.

Let us speak plainly: This is irrational. First, Joe Biden himself for years stayed within the lines of what was acceptably not radical in Washington, however arbitratily those lines were drawn. As POTUS he has leaned more toward his party’s New Deal heritage than he did as senator, but he hasn’t proposed anything unparalleled in American history that I’ve noticed. And even the feared and much ridiculed Squad of the House hasn’t proposed anythng I can think of that puts a gun to the head of American democracy. Not even close.

One can’t say the same for Trump, can one?

I found a story from 2000 that says Barr called the states’ coronavirus restrictions the greatest civil liberties violation in the nation’s history since slavery. This tells me Barr has no concept of what oppression is. To this day I don’t get the hysteria over mask wearing. I can understand people being peeved by store, church, and office closings, but the greatest civil liberties violations since slavery? There was a bleeping deadly pandemic, people. And everyone was subject to the rules. They weren’t just applied to white male pickup truck owners named Bubba. As I kept writing in 2000, in U.S. history there have been similar restrictions applied at local levels many times during epidemics, even if there aren’t many people old enough to remember them.

The conservatives on the current Supreme Court have often expressed concern about executive overreach. Such overreach in their minds includes environmental regulations and student loan forgiveness. But trying to overturn an election is, apparently, just what you do on any given Wednesday. And it’s interesting to me that the right-wing justices wouldn’t listen to the details. This was true in both the abortion and the immunity hearings this week.

Kate Riga wrote at TPM this week that during the Idaho abortion law hearing, the court’s conservatives relentlessly tried to steer the discussion away from real-world examples as the three liberal women on the court kept bringing them up.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor flipped through her notes and told the story of a woman in Florida. 

The woman had experienced a gush of liquid in her second trimester and went to the emergency room.

“The doctors believe that a medical intervention to terminate her pregnancy is needed to reduce the real medical possibility of experiencing sepsis and uncontrolled hemorrhage from the broken sac,” Sotomayor said. “This is the story of a real woman — she was discharged in Florida.” 

Not under imminent threat of death, the woman went home, Sotomayor said. The next day, she started bleeding and passed out. She was brought back to the emergency room where she’d been turned away. 

“There she received an abortion because she was about to die,” she said. 

Sotomayor and Solicitor General Elizabeth Prelogar peppered the arguments with similar, real anecdotes, leaving the conservatives to squirm and sigh with palpable and growing anger. 

The conservatives were angry. Where was that anger coming from, and to whom was it directed? Idaho medical personnel kept testifying that these days they often helicoptered women out of state for treatment to save their lives, because of the ambiguity of the Idaho law. That would make me angry too, but clearly the anger of the conservatives was coming from somewhere else.

The Court’s conservative wing tried with increasing and atextual persistence to convince listeners that Idaho’s strict ban still allows emergency room doctors to provide abortions to women in varying states of medical distress, and not just when doctors are sure the patient is facing death. They crafted a kind of anti-abortion fantasyland where not only do exceptions work, but that the narrowest ones will amenably stretch to cover all the sympathetic cases. 

They pushed this vision, even while hospital systems in Idaho attest that they are airlifting pregnant women in crisis across state lines, or waiting for them to painfully “deteriorate” before treatment, cowed by the fact that prosecutors could come after them with punishments including mandatory prison time for violating the state ban. 

Clearly, the conservatives have made up their minds that laws such as the Idaho abortion ban must be fair and just, and if those laws are not working it somehow must be the fault of those pesky women and their messy pregnancies. And don’t bother us with the details. You are disrespecting our superior wisdom with the details.

Likewise, in the immunity hearing the conservative justices refused to consider the narrow question in front of them and instead went off on lah-dee-dah discussions of ridiculous hypotheticals. So, sure, in some contexts having a political opponent assasinated or staging a coup to keep yourself in power past your expiration date could be part of a president’s official duties. Seems perfectly reasonable. 

Indeed, Sam Alito actually proposed that a broad immunity might make it more likely that a president at the end of his term would peacefully step aside and not try to stage a coup.

So the same conservative justices who call themselves “originalists” and “textualists” seem poised to create new law unrelated to the Constitution based on their ideas of what’s good for the country. Right.

And what makes it all even more astonishing is that all of this consideration is being given to Donald Trump. It would be one thing if the person being benefited by the court’s concern were some kind of political mastermind, or at least someone with inspiring leadership skills. But it isn’t. It’s Trump. He is nothing but bile and ignorance. He’s a cartoon. This is the guy that all those powerful and allegedly smart men — and it’s mostly men — are trashing their institutions and reputations and principles to defend.

And they seem determined to do this because the alternative is to turn the nation over to … progressives? The real danger to the country? History tells us that the real danger to the U.S. is nearly always from the Right, not the Left, sorry. See Rachel Maddow, Prequel. The plantation owners who gave us the Confederacy were hardly progressive. Nor was the Ku Klux Klan. Any disruptions from left wingers pales in comparision to the real world historical examples.

Does it really come down to privileged White men who can’t stand to have their authority questioned? Even by reality? Because that’s what it looks like.

Dahlia Litchwick:

On Thursday, during oral arguments in Trump v. United States, the Republican-appointed justices shattered those illusions. This was the case we had been waiting for, and all was made clear—brutally so. These justices donned the attitude of cynical partisans, repeatedly lending legitimacy to the former president’s outrageous claims of immunity from criminal prosecution. To at least five of the conservatives, the real threat to democracy wasn’t Trump’s attempt to overturn the election—but the Justice Department’s efforts to prosecute him for the act. These justices fear that it is Trump’s prosecution for election subversion that will “destabilize” democracy, requiring them to read a brand-new principle of presidential immunity into a Constitution that guarantees nothing of the sort. They evinced virtually no concern for our ability to continue holding free and fair elections that culminate in a peaceful transfer of power. They instead offered endless solicitude for the former president who fought that transfer of power.

Posting will be a challenge today because I spilled coffee on the mouse and now it’s not working, and trying to format anything without it is making me crazy. And there’s no place handy to get another one. I’ve got my fingers crossed that Amazon can deliver a replacement tomorrow.

Update: The mouse is working a bit better now; maybe it just needed to dry out more.

I didn’t listen to yesterday’s Supreme Court hearings on Trump’s immunity, but the reviews have been devastating. Josh Marshall writes The Court is Corrupt. Say It With Me.

Everything comes into conceptual alignment if we understand the Court’s corruption: corrupt in its construction, corrupt in its jurisprudence, venally corrupt as well, though that is the least of its problems.

On this show I still saw people saying things like, “I hope this isn’t the case.” “I hope I’m wrong.” Don’t hope you’re wrong. This just leaves us still in some hunt for the silver lining in the Court’s corruption. Or even worse, this undermines faith in the Court. No. We don’t want to shore up faith in a corrupt institution.

We are where we should know we are. The Roberts Court is a corrupt institution which operates in concert with and on behalf of the Republican Party and to an ambiguous degree right-wing anti-regulatory ideology. If we believe in a different set of policies or even democratic self-governance we will have to succeed at that with the Supreme Court acting as a consistent adversary.

That’s the challenge in front of us. It sucks. But things become more clear cut once we take the plunge and accept that fact. Swallow it whole.

And, of course, Steve M. is right here:

If the Supreme Court gives Trump partial immunity, which seems very likely, he’ll say he was given “absolute immunity.” He’ll say this over and over again, often in all caps, the way he used to repeat “no collusion,” and at least 45% of the country will believe it’s true.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Apr 26, 2024 at 7:03 AM

This underscores both the absolute necessity to win in November and then for Congress to add at least four to six justices to the Court. After that they can begin impeachment of Clarence Thomas and Sam Alito. If this isn’t done, even if Trump disappears we’re still going to be in a hard fight to keep our democracy.

Update: Jonathan Last, The Bulwark: Conservative Legal Theory Was All a Lie, Too.

It’s a bit ironic that, the day before the Supreme Court immunity hearing, Arizona issued iindictments of the Arizona fake electors and some of their national-level handlers — Mark Meadows, Rudy Giuliani, John Eastman, Boris Epshteyn, Mike Roman, Jenna Ellis, and Christina Bobb. Philip Bump at WaPo points out that Bobb was recently put in charge of the Trump campaign’s “election integrity division,” or maybe it’s the RNC’s election integrity division; it’s hard to tell.

It was either an odd or a fitting appointment, depending on how you look at it. Bobb wrote a book — “Stealing Your Vote: The Inside Story of the 2020 Election and What It Means for 2024” — elevating various debunked allegations about the election, particularly centered on Arizona, where she went to college. Putting Bobb in charge of “election integrity” was a bit like putting the guy who runs the Loch Ness souvenir shop in charge of finding the monster.

At this point, it’s obvious that there was a very real effort coordinated by Trump’s people to throw to use the slates of fake electors to stop Joe Biden from being declared 46th President of the United States on January 6. And then, either by the legislatures of the “contested” states or in the U.S. House of Representatives, Donald Trump would be declared the winner of the election instead. The amount of public evidence for this is overwhelming. This is much worse than Nixon’s Watergate conspiracy.

Even so, as near as I can tell from following live commentary, the conservative justices on the SCOTUS are diddling around and will probably cause the J6 trial to be delayed until after the election. The verdict at WaPo:

Today’s our day off. The Manhattan trial resumes tomorrow. Tomorrow is also when the SCOTUS will hear Trump’s immunity argument. Yesterday the Senate signed off on the aid packages for Ukraine, Israel, et al., and today President Biden signed them. There are other things going on today, but for now I want to look at Congress.

It appears this is Let’s Take Marjorie Taylor Greene Down a Few Pegs Week for congressional Republicans. This is from The Hill:

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-N.C.) took a shot at Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) on Tuesday, saying she is “dragging our brand down.”

“She is a horrible leader,” Tillis said of Greene, according to audio played on CNN’s “Erin Burnett OutFront.” “She is dragging our brand down. She — not the Democrats — are the biggest risk to us getting back to a majority.”

Michelle Cottle writes at the New York Times,

It’s not simply that Ms. Greene has taken such a Putin-pleasing approach to Russia’s war in Ukraine (Ukrainian Nazis? Really?) that the term “useful idiot” feels unavoidable. She has, in very little time, undermined the influence of her party’s entire right flank, driving less unhinged Republicans — most notably the House speaker, Mike Johnson — to brush back her and her ilk like the poo-flinging chaos monkeys they are.

Just look at what has come to pass in the House in the past several days: Mr. Johnson, a proud ultraconservative, pushed through a $95 billion foreign aid package, including $60 billion for Ukraine, with more Democratic votes than Republican ones. He is now counting on Democrats to save him from the Greene-led extremists’ plan to defenestrate him and install yet another Republican as speaker. There is much buzz about the emergence of a bipartisan governing coalition in the House, albeit one born of desperation. Squint hard, and Congress almost looks to be functioning as intended, with a majority of members coming together to advance vital legislation. With her special brand of MAGA extremism, Ms. Greene has shifted the House in a bipartisan direction (at least for now) in exactly the way her base loathes. 

See also How Republicans Castrated Themselves at Axios and Trump’s Followers Were Asleep at the Switch at CNN.

It must be that Republican conventional wisdom is saying that going through another change in Speaker now will hurt them in November. Even Donald Trump is telling MTG to lay off Mike Johnson. Trump may love Vlad Putin, but he loves keeping his ass out of prison even more. In any event I’ve seen several opinion pieces this week saying that the Mike Johnson recall is going nowhere at the moment.

Jonathan Martin at Politico writes that Mike Johnson “is taming Trump and his party.” That’s going a bit too far, I think. My sense of things is that the smarter Republicans are realizing that Trump and his base may have peaked, and that it’s okay to begin to back away from MAGA. It’s subtle, but IMO the signs are there.

Republicans were so disciplined to march in lockstep reciting the same talking points for so long. But that’s when they were all taking marching orders from people like Lee Atwater and Karl Rove. Ruthless and smart. Now they’re all taking cues from Trump or people in his orbit. Still ruthless, but not so smart. Indeed, making the Republican Party all about Trump instead of all about some agenda is the heart of the problem, because as a political cause Trump is a void; he’s empty air. If he disappeared tomorrow, there’d be nothing cohesive to hold his “movement” together. And where would that leave the Republican Party?

Where are they now, even? Trump is trying to get his “base” to rally around him, to hold demonstrations, to get in their pickup trucks and go back to running Democrats off the roads. But they aren’t doing it. Will there be Trump trains this year as there were in 2020? I suppose it’s a bit early for that. I’m betting no, but I could be wrong.

As far as the House Republicans are concerned, the “Freedom” Caucus seems to have assumed that being in the minority doesn’t matter as long as they could intimidate everyone else. Whatever they wanted, all they had to do is throw fits and evoke the dread name “Trump,” and everyone else would fall in line. But it’s not working for them, and I’m not sure they’ve figured out why yet.

Is this an admission? I’m reading that today David Pecker of National Enquirer fame was asked why he paid $30,000 for the “illegitimate child” story, even though he believed it not to be true. And Pecker said, “If it got out to another publication, another media outlet, it would have been very embarrassing to the campaign.”

It seems to me that Bragg has a pretty good case. He’s even got the voice recording of Trump and Michael Cohen discussing how they were going to “finance” the project with “our friend David.” I don’t think Trump is going to get away with claiming he had no idea Michael Cohen was killing scandal stories for him. And I understand they have documentary evidence showing how the money was handled. But we’ll see. The whole thing might turn on whether the jury thinks what was done was really illegal.

A couple of pundits have commented that the trial has made Trump seem, well, small. Jennifer Rubin writes, “Rather than dominate the proceedings or leverage his court appearance to appear in control and demonstrate no court could corral him, Trump day by day has become smaller, more decrepit and, frankly, somewhat pathetic.” At Vanity Fair, Molly Jong Fast writes,

Week one of Donald Trump’s hush money trial could have been mundane. It entailed what the legal world refers to as voir dire, during which the judge makes evidentiary judgments to determine which jurors can rule impartially on the case. Yet the first four days of the New York criminal proceedings, which continued with opening statements Monday, painted a rather surprising portrait of a man who could no longer outrun the wheels of justice. They pierced through Trump’s armor in ways both profound and absurd, shattering the public’s perception of a man who may have seemed legally invincible. I knew that this case, compared to those of the past, would prove harder for Teflon Don to repel. But even still, I didn’t think the coating would wear off quite this quickly. …

… Bill Maher predicted last year that this trial would only rally pro-Trump voters and help him secure the presidency. “I think this is a colossal mistake if they bring these charges,” the pundit argued. “I mean, yes, [Trump’s] done a lot of bad things, and I’m sure he did this—everything they accused him of [doing], he did. But first of all, it’s not gonna work. It’s gonna be rocket fuel for his 2024 campaign.”

Yet last week felt like the opposite of “rocket fuel.” If anything, what we saw was a grumpy 77-year-old man who was exhausted from hours of sitting on a hard chair in a cold room, falling asleep to potential jurors talking about their (oft-negative) feelings about him. Before the trial started, Trump’s campaign sent out a fundraising email promising that it was “72 hours until all hell breaks loose.” But there was no hell to speak of. Trump supporters didn’t storm the courthouse like they did the Capitol back in January 2021. In fact, the only turnout Trump got was a smattering of his usual toadies, including Andrew Giuliani. We don’t know what the next four days of Trump’s trial will hold. But if he and his supporters are already feeling depleted, imagine how they’ll feel in June.

Yesterday he begged for more people to show up, and to take to the streets wherever they are:

Donald J. Trump was evidently not happy with what he saw out the window of his chauffeured S.U.V. as he rode through Lower Manhattan on Monday morning for the beginning of opening arguments in his first criminal trial.

The scene that confronted him as he approached the dingy courthouse at 100 Centre Street was underwhelming. Across the street, at Collect Pond Park, the designated site for protesters during the trial, only a handful of Trump supporters had gathered, and the number would not grow much throughout the morning.

Mr. Trump has portrayed his legal jeopardy as a threat to America itself, and he has suggested that the country would not put up with it. But the streets around the courthouse on Monday were chaos-free — well-patrolled and relatively quiet. As his motorcade made its way to the courthouse, the few Trump supporters gathered in the park were outnumbered by Trump detractors, who waved signs about his alleged liaison with a porn star.

Mr. Trump had tried to gin up something noisier. Shortly after 7 a.m., he posted on his social media website that “America Loving Protesters should be allowed to protest at the front steps of Courthouses” and he followed this lament with a call for his supporters to “GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY!” …

… Later in the morning, Mr. Trump sought to cast the poor turnout as more evidence of a plot against him. In a post at 8:50 a.m., he implied that would-be MAGA protesters were being discriminated against for political reasons.

I’m hearing there were maybe a dozen MAGAs hanging outside the courtroom todday. But Trump imagined something else.

Donald Trump claimed that a massive police presence has shut down traffic for blocks around the Manhattan courthouse where his hush-money trial is being held, preventing his supporters from showing their support and protesting on his behalf. But reality looks a little different.

NBC News reporter Vaughn Hillyard posted a video outside the courthouse Tuesday morning. The clip shows a pretty quiet street fully open to traffic, with only one Trump supporter there, according to Hillyard.

WTF?

This is very embarassing to the campaign, I’m sure.

I’m following the gag order hearing on the New York Times live feed. Trump’s lawyer basically is saying that everything Trump says has a political context and therefore has to be considered “free speech.”

New York Times, just now (10:22 am edt):

This is not going well for Blanch. The judge is interrupting and scolding him, the New York Times said.

From TPM:

As Blanche flails, Merchan spells it out: “You’re losing all credibility with the court.”

I believe the hearing is concluded. Judge Merchan is not going to give a ruling right away.

There is a widespread perception that the hearing went very, very badly for Trump.

The jury wasn’t present for the gag order hearing, for which Trump and his lawyers should be grateful. The trial will reconvene at 11 eastern time.

Right now there’s an overwhelming amount of commentary on the opening arguments (example) that I’m still sorting out. Here’s also a key takeaways article from WaPo. Jeremy Stahl writes at Slate that Trump seemed to be mentally checking out whenever the prosecution was presenting its arguments. The defense arguments seem wobbly to me, but all they have to do is plant reasonable doubt in just one juror’s mind.

Judge Engoron accepted the hinky appeal bond (drat) but put some conditions on it. The state of New York is never going to see that money, I fear.

I’m hearing that there were no pro-Trump protesters outside the court. Many are also noting that no member of Trump’s family — not his wife, none of his children — are in the Court with him. He’s really all alone.

Tomorrow morning is the gag order hearing. I am not going to guess what might happen.

With so much going on this week I plan to do a lot of short posts instead of a few omnibus posts. I already posted about the Sandoval ruling this morning. That’s interesting stuff by itself. In the Manhattan criminal trial, the prosecution has made opening arguments and the defense is finishing up. It’s going to be a short trial day today because one of the jurors has a medical issue that needs addressing. The best way to follow along is the New York Times live feed, IMO. No paywall.

Update: The trial had time to introduce the first witness, who is David Pecker of the National Enquirer. He’ll be brought back to the stand tomorrow.

The hearing on Trump’s appeal bond is today, but I’m not sure when. I’m not seeing any new news about it pop up yet.

I wanted to say something more about Congress and the bills passed on Saturday. Axios is reporting that many House Republicans are mightily pissed at Marjorie Taylor Greene.

A growing number of House Republicans are accusing their conservative colleagues of enabling Democratic wins, especially after this weekend’s foreign aid votes.

Why it matters: Multiple members believe they could have gotten concessions from Democrats on border policy in exchange for Ukraine funding, only to be blown up by backlash from conservatives.

My understanding is that Chuck Schumer wants the Senate to accept what the House passed as is and march it to the Oval Office to be signed. I don’t think that’s happened yet. But it’s fascinating that Greene is getting blowback for trying to stop the Ukraine bill entirely. I’ve been seeing news stories here and there over the past few days about how Senate Republicans think Moscow Marjorie needs to dial it back. She’s even getting blowback on Fox News. And now some House members are openly criticizing her also. She may be about to learn the limits of her own influence.

Update: See also All Talk Marge by Josh Marshall.

See also Vance versus McConnell defines GOP Ukraine fight at The Hill.

Good morning everybody! This is the first day of what could be a significant week. And we have a ruling on Friday’s Sandoval hearing already.

Merchan granted questioning about the following:

*The New York Attorney General verdict that Trump misstated the value of his assets for economic benefit
*That he violated a court order in attacking Judge Engoron’s clerk during that case
*That he was found to have defamed E. Jean Carroll
*That he was found another time to have defamed E. Jean Carroll
*That he stipulated to the dissolution of the Trump foundation in another NYAG case

This is from the New York Times:

Here is the prosecutor’s original request. One of the items left out is the finding that Trump did in fact “secually abuse” (i,e., rape) E. Jean Carroll.

I’m reading in Newsweek that “Prosecutors cannot ask the former president about the Trump Organization’s tax fraud conviction in 2022 nor the frivolous lawsuit against Hillary Clinton in Florida.”

It remains to be seen if Trump will insist on testifying anyway. Only a moron would testify under these circumstances, but, well, Trump IS a moron, so … Maggie Haberman wrote in the NY Times live feed,

It was always clear that Trump was going to be told to wait to see the outcome of the Sandoval hearing before deciding whether to testify. Recall that he wanted to testify in his trial in the first E. Jean Carroll case, and several advisers and lawyers told him not to. He decided that had he only done so, he would have avoided the liability in that case.

And I’m sure he’s wrong. By all accounts it was his own bad behavior in court that helped put the jury on E. Jean Carroll’s side, and apparently he remains oblivious to that.

The judge is now instructing the jury. I’ll post more stuff today if and when anything significant happens.

Update: Joyce Vance’s assessment.

There’s an article in Salon by Jonathan Larsen that sheds more light on Mike Johnson’s shift toward Ukraine funding. And it indeed has to do with reports that Russians are  targeting evangelicals in Ukraine. Larsen writes that Ukrainians have been in contact with “the Family,” the Christian cult that runs the National Prayer Breakfast.  The  American evangelicals have been mostly focused on their version of “religious liberty,” by which they mean they get to have power in government to shape policy to fit their agenda. They’re big on anti-LGBTQ legislation, for example. I get the impression that they’ve generally approved of Vladimir Putin because of his anti-LGBTQ policies in Russia. But reports of brutality against Ukrainian evangelicals may have changed things. Larsen writes,

While most mainstream news hasn’t picked up on it, religious media outlets have started to notice how Russian President Vladimir Putin is waging a war on that most sacred of right-wing cows: Religious freedom.

That message is coming — with elements of truth but also an agenda — from a small but well-connected cadre of Ukrainian and American evangelicals, including prayer-breakfast leaders.

And right-wing Ukrainian evangelicals with strong ties to American counterparts just won an important ask from Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, right as House Republicans are considering whether to help him.

The “agenda” is that the Ukraine evangelicals also favor anti-LGBTQ politics and are promising to promote those policies in Ukraine if Ukraine prevails. They’re like 4 percent of the population of Ukraine, but they have big plans.

Still, if this causes a real shift in evangelical views about Putin, it could be huge. It might even cause some of them to think twice about Trump. And Marjorie Taylor Greene, too, if she doesn’t get the memo.

David Frum writes,

On aid to Ukraine, Trump got his way for 16 months. When Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, they approved four separate aid requests for Ukraine, totaling $74 billion. As soon as Trump’s party took control of the House, in January 2023, the aid stopped. Every Republican officeholder understood: Those who wished to show loyalty to Trump must side against Ukraine.

At the beginning of this year, Trump was able even to blow up the toughest immigration bill seen in decades—simply to deny President Joe Biden a bipartisan win. Individual Senate Republicans might grumble, but with Trump opposed, the border-security deal disintegrated.

Three months later, Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine.

The anti-Trump, pro-Ukraine rebellion started in the Senate. Twenty-two Republicans joined Democrats to approve aid to Ukraine in February. Dissident House Republicans then threatened to force a vote if the Republican speaker would not schedule one. Speaker Mike Johnson declared himself in favor of Ukraine aid. This weekend, House Republicans split between pro-Ukraine and anti-Ukraine factions. On Friday, the House voted 316–94 in favor of the rule on the aid vote. On Saturday, the aid to Ukraine measure passed the House by 311–112. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer said the Senate will adopt the House-approved aid measures unamended and speed them to President Biden for signature.

As defeat loomed for his anti-Ukraine allies, Trump shifted his message a little. On April 18, he posted on Truth Social claiming that he, too, favored helping Ukraine. “As everyone agrees, Ukrainian Survival and Strength should be much more important to Europe than to us, but it is also important to us!” But that was after-the-fact face-saving, jumping to the winning side after his side was about to lose.

Still, 112 House Republicans voted against aid to Ukraine. So this doesn’t amount to a significant rebellion against Trump. But maybe it’s a little one. Frum also points to Trump’s badly lagging fundraising numbers and the minority of primary voters who continue to vote for Nikki Haley. There are cracks in the facade. Maybe more traditional Republicans are realizing they don’t have to be afraid of Trump. We can hope.

In other news: There’s an NBC poll showing that a third-party RFK Jr. candidacy hurts Trump more than Biden. As near as I can tell, RFK Jr. has adopted most of Trump’s positions on just about everything, so that would make sense.

The New York Post reports that Michael Avenatti — yeah, that guy — says he’s talking to Trump’s legal team — and would testify for the ex-prez. Michael Avenatti is currently locked up in a federal prison near Los Angeles, so testifying for anybody would be a nice break, I guess. Ari Melber on MSNBC interviewed Avenatti via Zoom a few days ago, and it was a waste of time. Avenatti just wanted to talk about himself. And he had nothing insider-y or original to say about the Manhattan trial.

At the Atlantic, see Boeing and the Dark Age of American Manufacturing. It puts the Boeing debacle into a larger context. Nice bit of writing.

One more thing: This just popped up at Salon — A prehistory of MAGA: “Mainstream” conservatives never really purged the fascists. Paul Rosenberg interviews David Austin Walsh, who is the author of a new book titled Taking America Back: The Conservative Movement and the Far Right, As I understand it, very briefly, the book chronicles that American conservativism tried to put up a wall between “principled,” “normie” conservatism and the fascist/racist Right (see Rachel Maddow, Prequel) , but it didn’t really.  In the struggle between the normies and the Nazis, the normies needed the Nazis to win elections and otherwise get anything accomplished. It seems to me the normies got way too comfortable with dog-whistling and otherwise pandering to the Nazis to keep them in the tent. And that  takes us from Reaganism to Newt Gingrich to Karl Rove and George W. Bush to Donald Trump. At some point the Nazis got the upper hand and decided they didn’t need the normies.