A USA Today poll shows that support for legal abortion has gone up since the Dobbs decision. This is not surprising. The disturbing stories of what nonsense women have had to endure to get medical care have probably surprised a lot of people. The hard-core forced birth crowd is very certain there is never any medically justifiable reason to terminate a pregnancy, of course. But there are a lot of people out there who probably never gave it much thought before.

One of the things I’ve been working on this weekend is a post about the Temperance movement. There’s very little living memory of it left, of course. If we think of it at all, we think of shrewish old ladies breaking up saloons with axes. But for more than a century, from the 1820s to the 1930s, the Temperance movement was a big deal, and it had a big impact on U.S. politics. And, boy howdy, did it succeed! They set out to abolish liquor, and they got a Constitutional amendment passed that did exactly that.

The more I looked up stuff about the Temperance movement, the more parallels I found with abortion criminalization. There was no scientific polling in those days, unfortunately. But particularly from about the 1890s on, a lot of politicians were afraid to speak out in favor of saloons and legal drinking. It’s a bit like where Democrats were for a long time on abortion; it was considered suicidal to come out and say you wanted to keep abortion legal. It was more politically expedient to be “dry” than “wet.” All deference was given to the “anti” side, because their voters were more likely to be single-issue and driven to the point of fanaticism.

And what killed the Temperance movement, of course, was Prohibition. They got what they wanted, and people realized they didn’t like it. It wasn’t just that people missed being able to enjoy a drink now and then. The organized crime wave that came after was pretty nasty. And state tax revenues dropped like a rock. There was not much of an upside, in fact. Maybe people drank a lot less, but the unintended consequences weren’t worth it.

I thought this was interesting: Prohibition began in 1920. In their 1928 party platforms, both the Democrats and the Republicans pledged to support and enforce the Eighteenth Amendment but did not elaborate. Bur in 1932, the Republicans committed considerable verbiage to Prohibition in the platform. In all this verbiage they didn’t clearly come out and say that maybe it was a bad idea and should be repealed, but they did, very gingerly, suggest that maybe the states could be given more say on the matter of liquor sales.

But the Democrats in 1932 just plainly said “We advocate the repeal of the Eighteenth Amendment.” They hadn’t had the nerve to say that in 1928. Franklin Roosevelt’s landslide election very effectively killed Prohibition.

As with banning liquor, the Dobbs decision is showing people why criminalizing abortion is a really bad idea with a lot of harmful, unintended consequences. And, once again, the Republicans are on the wrong side of public opinion and history and don’t know what to do about it. You can find all kinds of advice on the Right, such as this article in the Federalist that calls for “positive pro-life messaging.” Yeah, they just need better messaging. That’s the ticket. All this horror about women nearly bleeding to death because their doctors don’t want to go to jail just needs to be framed in a better light, right?

What we’re going through now is nasty, but maybe it will kill the forced birth movement once and for all. Let’s hope.

Also, too: Remember when the Taliban dynamited those ancient standing Buddhas in Bamiyan, Afghanistan? Now the Taliban is selling ticket to the rubble. They need the money.

Andrew Weissman made an interesting point on MSNBC last night, that Trump keeps saying things that amount to admissions of guilt. Philip Bump writes,

As he was rolling along in the comments he offered outside his golf club in Bedminster, N.J., on Tuesday evening, former federal prosecutor Andrew Weissmann (and veteran of special counsel Robert S. Mueller III’s probe) noticed something.

“Whatever documents the president decides to take with him, he has the right to do so,” Trump said in his speech. “It’s an absolute right. This is the law. And that is something that people have now seen.”

In an interview on MSNBC, Weissmann (who can be trusted to have a firmer grasp on the legal issues at play) pointed out that this undermines his case rather than proving it.

“When you are charged with the illegal retention, the illegal possession of the documents,” Weissmann said, “it is not a good idea to say, ‘Hey, you want to know why I took these? Because I could.’ That is not a defense to that charge. That is an admission to the charge.”

This, of course, is why lawyers tell their clients to keep their mouths shut. But Philip Bump makes the point that Trump’s only defense against the criminal charges is becoming POTUS again. Somehow, dimly, he may know he can’t win in court. He’s swinging for the fences. Bump continues,

This is why he may think it makes sense to frame his arraignment in the context of his campaign, to fundraise off it and to turn the attention it generates into political attention. This is why he might not care too much that the Andrew Weissmanns of the world are able to pick out incriminating details — they’re only incriminating for a competition on which Trump isn’t focusing.

I’m not even going to address why what Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden did with government records is no where in the same ball park as what Trump did. And I trust y’all know that as well as I do. Now he’s got his defenders repeating “Presidential Records Act” over and over, in the belief that the Presidential Records Act allowed him to keep whatever records he wanted. This, of course, is the exact opposite of what the Presidential Records Act actually says.

A separate defense of Mr. Trump’s actions has been offered up by the former president’s lawyers for months, and lately it has been appearing with more frequency in right-wing media: He is not guilty, the argument goes, because of a law called the Presidential Records Act. Congress passed this law in 1978, after the Watergate scandal, specifically to prevent presidents from taking papers that don’t belong to them when they leave the White House. (An earlier law stopped Richard Nixon from destroying his own papers, including the Watergate tapes, after his resignation in 1974. Mr. Nixon challenged the law but lost in the Supreme Court.)

The act says explicitly that the federal government “shall reserve and retain complete ownership, possession and control of presidential records.”

And this is how the Trump team interprets the records act: “The president can take whatever he wants when he leaves office,” said Kash Patel, a lawyer who served as a high-ranking national security adviser in the Trump administration. When the president takes a document, he went on, “it transitions from being U.S. government property to the personal, private property of the past president.” This is about as wrong as it is possible to be; it is literally the opposite of what the law says, especially when you are talking about the sort of highly sensitive documents — nuclear secrets, military strategies and so forth — that Mr. Trump is charged with illegally keeping in his possession. I would call it gaslighting, except it’s not creative enough.

“There’s no ambiguity in the law,” said Timothy Naftali, a presidential historian and former director of the Nixon Presidential Library. “The 31 documents that are listed — there’s no way you could apply the P.R.A. and determine they were personal records. Under the P.R.A., they belong to the American people. Trump stole American property.”

When dealing with Trump, of course, it’s entirely possible he believes the Presidential Records Act allowed him to take the documents. Trump’s concept of “factual” is a tad wobbly. Between his numerous personality and psychological pathologies and his profound stupidity, it’s hard to know if he knows he’s lying. What Kash Patel’s issues are, however, I do not know.

Right now we may well be in a race to see if Trump can be convicted of something before the 2024 general election. It’s also possible that Trump’s legal problems will erode his election chances. We’ll see.

I’m watching the teevee to see if anything significant happens. It appears there’s not a huge crowd at the Miami courthouse, and they’re milling around waving flags. Trump is in the courthouse getting processed. I take it there are no cameras allowed inside and that reporters in the building are now allowed “devices,” so they can’t communicate.

So what’s going to happen tomorrow? Trump is supposed to report to the federal courthouse in Miami for a 3 pm EST hearing. I am hearing on MSNBC that Judge Aileen M. Cannon will not oversee the hearing. Normally a criminal defendant would be fingerprinted, handcuffed, and photographed before such a hearing, but Trump may get a waiver on that. It’s not clear if Trump will be allowed to speak or asked to enter a plea. After the hearing Trump is expected to fly to New Jersey and delivery remarks from his golf club in Bedminster at 8:15.

Trump faces a lawyer shortage, especially lawyers admitted to the Florida bar and admitted to practice in the Southern District of Florida, There are reports some criminal defense attorneys contacted by Trump’s team have turned the job down already. One suspects they aren’t going to get the crème de la crème of available attorneys.

Trump supporters on social media and elsewhere are vowing war.

Escalating violent rhetoric in online forums, coupled with defiant statements from the former president and his political allies, have put law enforcement officials on alert for potential disruptions ahead of Trump’s court appearance. He is facing a 37-count federal indictment, 31 of which allege he willfully kept classified documents in his possession after leaving the White House. …

… Trump, during a radio interview with longtime adviser Roger Stone on Sunday afternoon, repeated his call for protests. For his part, Stone — who helped mobilize the protest movement that drew thousands to the nation’s capital on Jan. 6, 2021 — encouraged demonstrators to remain peaceful, civil and legal.

But Trump’s supporters have at times alluded to potential violence — including Kari Lake, a Republican from Arizona, who has planned a rally in support of Trump at a hotel in Palm Beach, Fla., on Monday night. During a conference of Georgia Republicans on Saturday, Lake suggested Trump’s prosecution could be met with violence, noting that she and other supporters are members of the National Rifle Association.

“The entire Trump phenomenon was, from the very beginning, about conservative fear of losing America.” — Zack Beauchamp, Vox

Now that we’ve had a few hours to digest the documents case indictments — wow, this was worse than I imagined. He had boxes containing highly classified documents stuffed all over Mar-a-Lago, including in publicly accessible bathrooms and ballrooms and whatnot. And Jack Smith has testimony that on some occasions Trump showed this stuff to random people. And he knew good and well he wasn’t supposed to have those documents, or else why go to such lengths to hide them from the National Archives and FBI?

I see that people still on Twitter are linking to a 2022 interview of Kid Rock by Tucker Carlson, in which Kid Rock seems to be saying Trump showed him a classified map of North Korea. Let that sink in.

Trump is a grotesquely warped person. We knew that all along. I’m not terribly surprised any more at anything he does. I believe I’ve said before that he makes more sense if you imagine him to be a spoiled pre-adolescent boy. But what’s frustrating is the rest of the Republican Party and its institutional support structure.

A lot of us are old enough to remember the televised Watergate and Nixon impeachment hearings, in which Republicans for the most part treated the hearings seriously, asked intelligent questions, and made intelligent comments. I don’t remember anyone gaslighting the proceedings to turn it into a clown show to protect Nixon. And we’ve all heard the story about how bleeping Barry Goldwater and other senators told Nixon he’d better just resign. In those days, Republicans knew when it was time to cut somebody loose. Not now. Even now nearly all of the Republican/right wing establishment is pushing the claim that President Biden ordered the indictments to knock Trump out of the 2024 presidential race.

The Wall Street Journal editorial board wrote today, “Americans will inevitably see this as a Garland-Biden indictment, and they are right to think so.” Seriously? WSJ continues,

Thirty-one of the counts are for violating the ancient and seldom-enforced Espionage Act for the “willful retention of national defense information.”

But it’s striking, and legally notable, that the indictment never mentions the Presidential Records Act (PRA) that allows a President access to documents, both classified and unclassified, once he leaves office. It allows for good-faith negotiation with the National Archives. Yet the indictment assumes that Mr. Trump had no right to take any classified documents.

Did they bleeping even read the indictments? At what point was Trump in any way engaging in “good faith negotiations” with the National Archives? And the thing continues with the usual whataboutism. Joe Biden had classified documents in his garage! Hillary Clinton’s emails!

The editors of the National Review, who were the original Never Trumpers as I recall, at least admit that Trump deserves to be prosecuted. But to get to that part you have to wade through verbiage about how those nefarious lefties have been twisting the law to get to Trump.

Trump fans online are calling for civil war and mass murder. We’ll see if they get off their sofas to actually do anything, though.

What’s the difference between 1974 Republicans and 2023 Republicans? It’s not as if the Republican Party hasn’t gone off the rails before. They famously were the party of Joe McCarthy some years earlier. But even then, when McCarthy was exposed for what he was in the televised Army-McCarthy hearings and Edward R. Murrow’s See It Now program, McCarthy was cut loose. In 1954 he was censured by the Senate in a bipartisan vote. And fortunately for America he didn’t live long enough after that to make a comeback.

At this point, one would have to be genuinely demented to not see that Trump is utterly unfit to be President. But we have a lot of genuinely demented people in this country.

Philip Bump had an interesting comment today —

Last week, CNN reported on the existence of a recording, taped at Donald Trump’s golf club in New Jersey, in which the former president is heard talking to writers working on a book being written by Trump’s last chief of staff. In the recording, Trump made note of a document in his possession that was classified, a significant admission, given the indictment handed up against him this week.

Hours after news of the indictment broke Thursday, CNN published excerpts of the conversation.

Trump never understood the role of the POTUS. He had no interest in the United States and its people, except as things to exploit to glorify and enrich himself. His efforts to hang on to the position after he lost the election have done serious harm to our political institutions. This is obvious. Even the editorial board of the Wall Street Journal ought to be able to understand that. Yet they won’t. Everywhere, the Republican Party and the institutional infrastructure supporting it and their warped version of “conservatism” works to normalize and protect Trump. In a sane world they’d be cutting him loose. In a sane world they would have cut him loose a long time ago.

Awhile back I wrote a post titled The GOP: A Cornered and Wounded Animal. They’re cornered and wounded because they are on the losing end of too many causes. I wrote: “Unfortunately, they’re not going to stop acting like wounded and cornered animals in the near future. They have staked Trump, abortion, and guns as the hills they’re going to die on, and they may very well do that. So to speak.” But lately I’ve seen a lot of callouts to “paranoid style,” which recalls Richard Hofstadter’s famous essay, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” I read it again and noticed this, after a review of Famous Paranoid Episodes of American History (emphasis added):

The spokesmen of those earlier movements felt that they stood for causes and personal types that were still in possession of their country—that they were fending off threats to a still established way of life. But the modern right wing, as Daniel Bell has put it, feels dispossessed: America has been largely taken away from them and their kind, though they are determined to try to repossess it and to prevent the final destructive act of subversion. The old American virtues have already been eaten away by cosmopolitans and intellectuals; the old competitive capitalism has been gradually undermined by socialistic and communistic schemers; the old national security and independence have been destroyed by treasonous plots, having as their most powerful agents not merely outsiders and foreigners as of old but major statesmen who are at the very centers of American power. Their predecessors had discovered conspiracies; the modern radical right finds conspiracy to be betrayal from on high.

Hofstadter wrote this in bleeping 1964. Just short of 60 years ago. And the right wing has only gotten worse. It’s turned itself into a paranoia machine. Fox News and the rest of the right-wing media infrastructure, along with social media, are perpetually feeding the paranoia so much more effectively than in 1964 or 1974.

But this is truly at the heart of Trumpism and why those who support him can’t see him for what he is. He’s a moron, but he has a grifter’s instinct for giving the people what they want, what he can sell. And he has packaged himself as the last hope of the paranoids; the one who might finally slay the evil Left. It’s going to take more than some chiding words from a Joseph Welch equivalent to bring people to their senses.

Update: A couple of observations. One, from what I can see Trump supporters are either ignoring the indictments or assuming it’s all fake news. Not too surprising.

Two, I’m wondering if Trusty and Rowley, the two lawyers who resigned this morning, decided to resign when they received the text of the subpoena.

Update: Text of indicment here.

Update: The indictments are unsealed. (No paywall.) I don’t think the indictment itself is online yet, but I’ll post a link as soon as it is. I’m hearing the bobbleheads on MSNBC say that it says he did show classified documents to random people. Also,

Update: CNBC is reporting that two Trump lawyers, Jim Trusty and John Rowley, resigned from the documents case today. They aren’t saying why, except that now is a “logical time,” whatever that means. Trusty and Rowley were two of the three attorneys who met with Jack Smith earlier this week. Their joint statement:

“This morning we tendered our resignations as counsel to President Trump, and we will no longer represent him on either the indicted case or the January 6 investigation,” according to the joint statement from Jim Trusty and John Rowley.

Something happened. I’m guessing Trump threw a screaming fit at them, and they decided they didn’t have to take it any more.

^^^

Although the indictments are still sealed, Trump’s attorneys have blabbed a bit. According to Trump Attorney Jim Trusty, these charges are included:

An espionage act violation (18-USC-793) — Gathering, transmitting or losing defense information.

Also 18-USC-1519 — Destruction, alteration, or falsification of records in Federal investigations and bankruptcy.

Also 18-USC-1512 — Witness tampering / obstruction of an official proceeding.

Trusty also said there are “several obstruction-based-type charges and then false statement charges.”

There is speculation there could be additional indictments regarding the documents coming out of the Washington, D.C. grand jury. There could be two separate sets of charges and two separate trials, in other words. I’ll add to this post if I hear anything else.

Update: This is from CNN: Exclusive: Donald Trump admits on tape he didn’t declassify ‘secret information’. We already knew about this particular document, but there’s a new detail.

Former President Donald Trump acknowledged on tape in a 2021 meeting that he had retained “secret” military information that he had not declassified, according to a transcript of the audio recording obtained by CNN.

“As president, I could have declassified, but now I can’t,” Trump says, according to the transcript.

CNN obtained the transcript of a portion of the meeting where Trump is discussing a classified Pentagon document about attacking Iran. In the audio recording, which CNN previously reported was obtained by prosecutors, Trump says that he did not declassify the document he’s referencing, according to the transcript.

Update: WTF? ABC is reporting that bleeping Judge Aileen Cannon will oversee the case initially.

Trump has announced he has been indicted in the documents case.

Several Trump advisers confirmed the charges. Trump said he has been summoned to appear in federal court in Miami on Tuesday at 3 p.m. A seven-count indictment has been filed in federal court naming the former president as a criminal defendant, according to people familiar with the matter who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe a case that has yet to be unsealed.

MSNBC has a chryon saying “NBC news confirms Trump Indicment.”

Okay … I know you want it …

We know very little else because the indictment is still sealed.

And Pat Robertson died. A twofer.

So what’s with the merger of the PGA and the LIV? Not that I pay any attention to golf, but I thought they were bitter enemies. I bet golf fans are not going to be happy.

There’s a lot of speculation that Jack Smith will bring indictments this week on the documents case. One complication is that he’s had a Florida grand jury looking at the  case as well, it was revealed in the past several hours. I understand some of Trump’s Secret Service detail have testified.

Trump’s lawyers met with Jack Smith yesterday. I wonder how that went?

So that’s how well Trump’s lawyers’ meeting with the DOJ this morning went pic.twitter.com/02IUuzgWX5

— Republican Accountability (@AccountableGOP) June 5, 2023

And then there’s the one about how water from the Mar-a-Lago swimming pool was accidentally drained into the room where the surveillance videos were stored. Sure.

Mark Meadows testified to one of Jack Smith’s grand juries, the New York Times is reporting, but which grand jury and when isn’t clear.

Ron DeSantis’s Florida is still flying migrants to blue states, most recently to California.At least two chartered jets carrying migrants from Florida landed in Sacramento recently. And Gavin Newsom isn’t having it. Newsom is threatening to bring kidnapping charges against DeSantis. From the Los Angeles Times:

Documents carried by the migrants appear to show that the weekend flight was arranged through the Florida Division of Emergency Management and that it was part of the state’s program to relocate migrants, mostly from Texas, to other states, California Atty. Gen. Rob Bonta said.

He doesn’t have enough migrants in Florida so he’s still borrowing them from Texas?

Sixteen migrants from Venezuela and Colombia were transported from Texas to New Mexico and flown on a chartered jet to Sacramento, where they were dropped off Friday at a church, Newsom said.

On Monday, a plane carrying 20 migrants arrived in Sacramento. Both groups were flown by the same contractor and were carrying documents indicating that their transportation involved the state of Florida, according to officials with the California Department of Justice.

Florida’s anti-migrant efforts have had several unintended consequences. Recently Florida passed a law intended to make it harder for undocumented people to remain in Florida without getting caught. Then some Republicans realized that might be a bad idea. 

“This bill is 100 percent supposed to scare you,” said Roth. “I’m a farmer, and the farmers are mad as hell. We are losing employees. They’re already starting to move to Georgia and other states. It’s urgent that you talk to all your people and convince them that you have resources, state representatives, and other people that can explain the bill to you,” he added, essentially begging Florida’s labor force to not leave the state that cares little for them.

Yeah, who’s going to pick the oranges? Whose going to clean all those luxury resort beachfront hotel rooms? The article goes on to say that Farmer Roth is a big-time Trump supporter who also loves Ron DeSantis. But this new bill intended to drive undocumented migrants out of Florida is just to scare people, Roth says. Nobody means it.

The pleading by Republicans who are reaping what they sowed comes after Latin American truck drivers began rallying behind calls to strike and not enter Florida, while thousands of workers and families have marched across the state protesting the bill and threatening to leave the state.

Oh, and remember the flight that was arranged by Florida that took migrants from Texas to Martha’s Vinyard? A Texas sheriff wants to file criminal charges about that.

I agree with Charles Pierce that these little stunts cry out for federal intervention. We really shouldn’t have the governor of one state filing charges against the governor of another state.

I’m in the new place, and I think it will be fine, although right now it’s all boxes and chaos. But now I have wifi! I’m in business!

The most intriguing thing in the news today is that Jack Smith’s documents case grand jury is expected to meet this week after a hiatus. Are they getting close to deciding indictments?

Chuck Todd is leaving Meet the Press. Best comment so far:

I’d ask a follow up question about why Chuck Todd is leaving Meet the Press, but in his honor, I won’t. #ChuckTodd https://t.co/HlmcVnLjEH pic.twitter.com/ErWT1rheuO

— Damon ?????? (@DamonMast) June 4, 2023

He’ll be replaced by Kristen Welker. I don’t recall watching her enough to know if she’ll be an improvement or just another squish.

Speaking of lame journalism, do see the article by Tim Alberta at The Atlantic, Inside the Meltdown at CNN. There’s a paywall, but they let you read a freebie every so often. Then read Nicholas Carlson at Yahoo News, ‘It’s like watching a snuff film’: Media elites shocked by The Atlantic’s surgical dismantling of CNN boss Chris Licht. The Atlantic’s portrayal of Licht was brutal, and it’s being speculated he’ll be replaced soon. From the Yahoo article, my favorite quote it this:

“Let’s get real. The problem isn’t Licht, it’s his paymasters. The American billionaire class has convinced themselves that the way to save journalism is to make it as bland and as both-sidesy as possible. They chose Licht as their latest champion of harmless vanilla inoffensiveness. The problem is, no one wants vanilla. Not even a tasting spoon of it.”

Bland, both-sidesy, harmless vanilla inoffensiveness, thy name also is Chuck Todd. And see also Could Jeff Zucker Fix CNN? He Seems to Think So. (no paywall) at the New York Times. Zucker’s approach wasn’t exactly what journalism needs either, of course.

In other news: There’s also a paywall at The Telegraph that’s keeping me from reading Anglo-Saxons aren’t real, Cambridge tells students in effort to fight ‘nationalism’. And I really wish I could read it, because it has mightily pissed off the crew at Breitbart. They are “erasing the English”! Breitbart says. But I covered all this a couple of years ago in The Truth About Anglo-Saxons. There really were no Anglo-Saxons, exactly. The term “Anglo-Saxon” didn’t become common until long after the Angles and Saxons, who were two separate tribes, had been displaced by the Normans in 1066. And most of the cultural and political attributes we think of as “English” come from the Normans, not the Angles or Saxons.

The Breitbart article only mentions the Normans once:

It comes amid a wider movement in academia to link the historical group of Germanic Angles, Jutes, and Saxon peoples who arrived after the end of Roman controlled Britain and the conquest of the Normans with alleged racism, which many claim has been fostered in America.

I read that about six times. Is it saying that the Germanic Angles and Saxons arrived after the “conquest” of the Normans, who in fact conquered the Angles and Saxons? It may just be sloppy writing, or it may mean that the writer honestly didn’t know the Anglo-Saxons got their asses whupped and lost control of their territory on the island of Britain almost a thousand years ago. They were shupped by Norman invaders from France. And the “Anglo-Saxons” didn’t become romanticized as the epitome of civilized white people until the 1700s, when British imperialists were trying to normalize the colonization of many brown people by their own white selves. And of course the construction “Anglo-Saxon” came to be adopted here across the pond as a synonym for the higher grade of white people who are not Irish, Italian or Polish. This also is a construction that a Swedish friend of mind finds weird; I had to explain it to him.

So now white racists in England are thumping their chests and saying “We English exist”! Yes, and thank the Normans for that. But to the nutjob who complained that denigrating the Anglo-Saxons is like “saying the same thing about, say, Aboriginal Australians, Maoris or Native Americans” — um, the Celts would like a word.