It may or may not be significant that this week I’ve begun seeing ads for Trump’s Westchester golk club in my Facebook feed. Coincidence? Or is this Trump squeezing every revenue source he’s got? Wikipedia says annual dues are $19,400 a year, which is kind of a budget buster for me, even though it’s a short drive from where I’m living. But he owes the state of New York $454 million, which is racking up an additional $87,502 a day in interest until he pays. He’s gonna have to sell a lot of golf club memberships to cover that. See also ‘Who’s going to do that?’: Trump faces hurdles in securing appeal bond for fraud case.

Update: Actually, the interest is more than $100,000 a day. CBS News this evening:

The judgment in his civil fraud trial was officially entered with the court today — $454,156,783.05 for him alone, plus Trump is now accruing over $100,000 of post-judgment interest each day. 

This is on top of the recent $83.3 million verdict against him in the E. Jean Carroll defamation trial.

Judge Arthur Engoron had already denied Trump’s request to delay the judgment for a month to give Trump more time. I’m beginning to think Trump is not going to be able to pay up without liquidating assests.

The Daily Beast has noticed that Trump may be playing fast and loose with campaign finance laws again. He’s stopped refunding most donations that are in excess of allowable limits. “On paper, Trump’s refund rate is virtually impossible. His campaign has not solved this persistent problem of overpayments. His donors are, in fact, breaking the donation limits—dozens and dozens of them, according to the notices that the FEC sent his campaign after every 2023 filing.”

Trump campaign treasurer Bradley Crate acknowledges the excessive donations. He states that the money has since been “returned” to an affiliated committee, which will be “reflected on a subsequent [campaign] report.”

Crate’s answer, it seems, is that the Trump campaign is forwarding the excessive amounts to other political accounts, potentially raising a host of other issues.

But Crate’s explanation, as written, doesn’t seem explicitly true—at least not at the moment.

According to FEC data, the 2024 Trump campaign has never reported sending any money to that affiliated committee, a joint fundraising committee (JFC) called “Trump Save America.” And that committee’s refund rate also appears low—a total $150,000 out of $129 million raised. By comparison, Haley’s JFC refunded roughly $115,000 while raising $20 million. (In 2022, Trump’s JFC returned $42,000, and just $2,500 the year before.)

You’ll need to read the whole article for the details, but it seens the Trump campaign is using creative accounting to just make the excess donations disappear, or at least they are no longer counted as excess donations. He seems to be trying to sneak them past the FEC as new donations.

In Wisconsin, the state ethics commission has asked that Donald Trump’s joint fundraising committee and some Wisconsin state politicians be prosecuted for campaign violation felonies for things done in relation to the 2022 midterms. Trump can’t even stay out of trouble when he’s not running.

And the Associated Press reports that Trump faces warning signs that his fundraising prowess may have limits in 2024 campaign.

Campaign finance reports released this week flashed bright warning lights, showing two key committees in his political operation raised an anemic $13.8 million in January while collectively spending more than they took in. A major driver of those costs was millions of dollars in legal fees from Trump’s myriad of court cases.

The latest numbers offer only a partial snapshot of the Trump operation’s finances because other branches won’t have to disclose their numbers until April. But Trump’s diminished cashflow presents an alarming picture of the overwhelming favorite to be the GOP’s presidential nominee, particularly to would-be donors who aren’t eager to subsidize Trump’s legal challenges.

Trump’s campaign is turning into the Bottomless Money Pit of campaigns. If he gets his way he’s going to drain the RNC of funds as well. Heh.

In other news: House Republicans have scrubbed the Biden impeachment website of all “evidence” obtained from the Russian operative Alexander Smirnov. Which leaves them with, um, nothing. The Biden impeachment effort has pretty much collapsed. There doesn’t appear to be anywhere close to enough votes to pass a bill of impeachment.

In more other news:  Republicans are scrambling to let America know they aren’t really opposed to In Vitro Fertilization (IVF). Once again, it’s obvious none of these people ever thought out the real-world effects of “embryonic personhood.” Planned Parenthood explains:

A handful of state abortion bans define life as beginning at fertilization, though they don’t specifically target the process of IVF. Other states are attempting to pass legislation that would grant embryos, fetuses and fertilized eggs personhood rights and in some cases constitutional rights.

Such laws would “pose a concrete threat to the routine practice of IVF,” says Daar. The concern is that these laws deem a frozen embryo a human life and that doing things like genetic testing on it during the IVF process, or discarding it, could become illegal.

“If an early embryo is deemed a person for purposes of legal rights and protections, any action short of transfer to the uterus could be seen as violating its right to life under these new laws,” Daar says.

I understand that it’s standard procedure to genetically test the fertilized eggs before transfering them to a uturus, and the eggs that can’t be used are discarded. And do watch Tommy Tuberville being an idiot.

Speaking of not thinking things through, in Texas a woman with an ectopic pregnancy was denied treatment by a hospital. Another hospital was able to save her life, although barely, after the fallopian tube began to rupture.

(WiFi update: I’m not going to say my wifi problems are fixed, because if I say that the wifi gremlins will know and make it go off again. But I haven’t had any glitches so far today.)

Let’s start with something cheerful. Ewan Palmer writes at Newsweek that Jim Jordan is in deep trouble.

A number of legal experts and Democratic figures have now suggested Jordan and other Republicans could face consequences if it is found Russian intelligence was the source of the alleged false bribery claims they said justified the impeachment of Biden.

Jordan’s office has been contacted for comment via email.

Tristan Snell, a lawyer and former assistant attorney general for New York state, claimed on X, formerly Twitter: “Jim Jordan, Chuck Grassley, and James Comer were either duped by Smirnov and the Kremlin—or they were in on it.

I’m gong to guess “duped,” becase we are not exactly talking about the sharpest crayons in the box. See also Jim Jordan fact-checked on live TV at Raw Story.

The story thus far, if you missed it, is that (as we learned last week) the Burisma bribery allegations against Joe Biden were entirely false; the informant, Alexander Smirnov, was lying. And now we know that Smirnov was being fed the allegations by Russian intelligence.

David Kurtz, TPM:

The implications of this Russian operation are staggering, especially for the willing Republicans and right-wing media stooges who were the useful idiots propagating the disinformation for years. The James Comers, Chuck Grassleys, Jim Jordans of the world have been trafficking in this stuff as the purported basis for a Biden impeachment, which is itself tightly yoked to Trump’s campaign for re-election. Right-wing outlets, most notably Fox News, have been amplifying the claims not dozens or hundreds but thousands of times over the past several months.

Everywhere you turn, it’s Russia either helping Trump directly or indirectly by damaging Trump’s foes. The pattern is clear and persistent but also so sweeping and far-reaching that it really requires taking a step back to grasp the full scope of it all. It has dominated right-wing media, become an accepted “fact” among MAGA adherents, and allowed elected Republicans to play mainstream media like a cheap fiddle. All those breathless Biden impeachment process stories? They’re an outgrowth of this disinformation campaign.

Useful idiots, indeed.

There’s more going on, but my wifi has been on again, off again for several hours. I’ve got a techie comng tomorrow. I’m going to post this while it’s working.

You may be amused to know that some Trump supporters have started a GoFundMe to help pay for Trump’s half billion in fines.

Elena Cardone, the wife of real estate investor and influencer Grant Cardone, announced a short time later on X, formerly Twitter, that she had started a GoFundMe page to foot the bill. According to Forbes, Trump had a net worth of about $2.6 billion as of September.

The page, titled “Stand with Trump; Fund the $355M Unjust Judgment,” had raised over $18,000 of the $355 million about five hours after it was launched. More than 400 donors contributed between $5 and $1,500 each.

I bet some of those donors need that money more than Trump does.

Digby writes about yesterday’s fraud decision:

This man’s con has been going his whole life. His companies declared bankruptcy 6 times. He’s settled numerous fraud trials before this one, notably the Trump University case. He and his spawn have already been barred from ever running another “charity” in New York after he defrauded little kids with cancer. All of his is well known.

He’s a con artist who is so narcissistic he thought he could become president and nobody would ever be able to stop him. But he lost 66 cases stemming from his bogus claims of voter fraud after the 2020 election. Two women, E. Jean Carroll and Leticia James have now obtained half a billion dollars in damages from his lies, defamation and fraud. Next month we will have the first of several criminal trials that may catch up with him as well.

He’s crying and whining about being persecuted. And his hardcore followers are all Trump sin-eaters who so identify with him that they cannot admit to error either. They voted for him, they supported him they cannot possibly be wrong.

But there must be a few people who are starting to see that they’ve been conned. I hope so anyway or e are living in a country with so many deluded,brainwashed people that even without Trump it’s hard to imagine this country can survive.

Let us reflect on how much the entire political Right of the United States has been a con for a long time. Richard Hofstadter was writing great stuff about this in the 1950s and 1960s. Politicians of both parties do engage in demagoguery, of course. The Republican Party was the party of Joe McCarthy, but back in the day politicians of both parties won elections by stoking fears of Communism and promising to be “tough” on it, although Republicans tended to be worse on that point. But as time has gone on, the Republicans were the ones who won elections by stoking racism, misogyny, and homophobia and running against Affirmative Action and Voting Rights, the Equal Rights Amendment, and same-sex marriage, while the real goal was cutting taxes on the rich and protecting the wealth of the wealthy.

Back in 2012 Rick Pearlstein wrote a piece called The Long Con that pointed to all the grifts associated with right-wing publications and websites.

Subscriber lists to ideological organs are pure gold to the third-party interests who rent them as catchments for potential customers. Who better suits a marketing strategy than a group that voluntarily organizes itself according to their most passionately shared beliefs? That’s why, for instance, the other day I (and probably you) got an advertisement by way of liberal magazine The American Prospect seeking donations to Mercy Corps, a charity that helps starving children in the Third World. But back when I was getting emails every day from Newsmax and Townhall, the come-ons were a little bit different.

Dear Reader, I’m going to tell you something, but you must promise to keep it quiet. You have to understand that the “elite” would not be at all happy with me if they knew what I was about to tell you. That’s why we have to tread carefully. You see, while most people are paying attention to the stock market, the banks, brokerages and big institutions have their money somewhere else . . . [in] what I call the hidden money mountain . . . All you have to know is the insider’s code (which I’ll tell you) and you could make an extra $6,000 every single month.

Soon after reading that, I learned of the “23-Cent Heart Miracle,” the one “Washington, the medical industry, and drug companies REFUSE to tell you about.” (Why would they? They’d just be leaving money on the table: “I was scheduled for open heart surgery when I read about your product,” read one of the testimonials. “I started taking it and now six months have passed and I haven’t had open-heart surgery.”) Then came news of the oilfield in the placenta.

An Israeli entrepreneur was selling shares in his company that must have been promising some miracle cure products made with stem cells in placentas. As you might remember, back then stem cell research was wildly controversial because the most useful stem cells were found in fetal tissue, which smacked into the abortion issue. But this guy had an abortion-free way to harvest stem cells, and a mere $10,000 investment in his company “could bring you a profit of more than a quarter of a million dollars.”  Of course, in 2012 a lot of scientists were already harvesting stem cells from placentas for use in therapies. The Israeli entrepreneur probably was counting on readers of Newsmax and Townhall not knowing that.

Advertisers have long favored right-wing media for snake-oil cures and dubious get-rich-quick and investment schemes like “collector” gold coins. (Survivalist “preppers” are also big consumers of similar dubious merchanise.) Alex Jones by himself made tons of money on nutty conspiracy theories.  There is no left-wing equivalent to this I can think of. See also “On Trump’s Social Network: Ads for Miracle Cures, Scams and Fake Merchandise.” And Thom Hartmann, The GOP Is the Part of Grift.

Back in 2013 I wrote a post called Live by the Grift; Die by the Grift.

Indeed, there is a whole class of grifters on the Right whose incomes depend on keeping the crazy well fed. I’m thinking of Ann Coulter, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Sarah Palin, Fox News et al. No doubt Michele Bachmann will become a full-time gifter as soon as she’s out of the House. But there are tons of second- and third-tier gifters, all cashing in nicely.

And why not? If bank robbers rob banks because that’s where the money is, grifters infest the Right because that’s where the gullibility is. People who can be made to believe in death panels can also be sold on dubious investment schemes, survivalist kits and quack arthritis cures. It’s too easy. …

… The Republican Party set itself up for this, of course, by being willing to sell out anything that might be an actual principle in order to win elections on the cheap (and dirty). I’m sure most of you are aware of the arc of demagoguery that ran from Spiro Agnew to Lee Atwater to Karl Rove. But Frankenstein’s Monster took over the laboratory, and now Karl Rove (who is still making a lot of money, apparently, in spite of his colossal failure in 2012) can’t understand why no one is listening to him.

It’s gotten worse since, of course. Trump is the ultimate con man — so far, anyway — who has overwritten a lot of the old right-wing cons that were at least loosely tied to actual conservative policy goals. The gullible are no longer concerned about aggressive foreign dictators like Kim Jong Un or Vladimir Putin, because of Trump. The only foreign menace they care about now are the poor Latinos hoping to cross the southern border. What’s left of the “mainstream” Republicans in Congress who do understand it’s important to support Ukraine find that their own party is no longer listening to them.

The righties never seem to notice that jack-booted thugs never come to confiscate their guns or Bibles. They probably never heard that the Comet Ping Pong pizzeria in Washington, DC, didn’t even have a bsement, never mind one used by Hillary Clinton to hide trafficked children. And that brings us to QAnon. Molly Olmstead qrote a few days ago,

QAnon transformed the political landscape in the U.S., but it doesn’t have the cohesion and power it once did.

“The main accomplishment of QAnon was it got ‘the elites are sacrificing children’ codified as a big, mainstream idea on the conspiratorial right,” Jones said. “That’s firmly in there now.” But there hasn’t been a Q drop (the cryptic messages from the eponymous Q) in well over a year. And now—years into a Biden presidency in which the promises of the coming “storm” of mass arrests of Trump’s enemies failed to materialize—QAnon has been bleeding followers. “The movement has lost a lot of steam,” Jones said.

Strangely, it’s QAnon’s very success that may have made it less relevant. The ideas Q promoted in the movement’s heyday—of the powerful deep state, of the stolen election, of rampant child trafficking—have themselves become standard Republican beliefs, even if the more bizarre details haven’t succeeded beyond the core QAnon community.

“In some ways, the Q people got everyone on their team and didn’t need the trappings of QAnon anymore,” Mike Rothschild, a conspiracy theory expert and the author of Jewish Space Lasers, wrote in an email.

The Internet lets the crazy spread and evolve into new species of beasts at a lot faster rate than was true back in Richard Hofstadter’s day. And the gullible have all been trained to avoid mainstream media in favor of the likes of OAN and Townhall (Fox is now too mainstream for some of them), where they will hear only what the grifters want them to hear.

If QAnon lost credibility with some of them, maybe there’s hope. But most likely the end of one fantasy conspiracy theory will just be the beginning of several more. The best we can hope for is if Trump and Trumpism are separated from political power, the MAGAts will no longer have to be catered to by the entire Republican Party. We’ll see.

Update: A “recent grift news” link I left out — from Craig Silverman at ProPublica, Right-Wing Websites Connected to Former Trump Lawyer Are Scamming Loyal Followers With Phony Celebrity Pitches.

Enjoy the New York Times headline in all its glory:

Here’s the link; no paywall.

A New York judge on Friday handed Donald J. Trump a crushing defeat in his civil fraud case, finding the former president liable for conspiring to manipulate his net worth and ordering him to pay a penalty of $355 million that could wipe out his entire stockpile of cash. …

… Not only did Justice Engoron impose a three-year ban preventing Mr. Trump from serving in top roles at any New York company, including his own, but the judge also applied that punishment to the former president’s adult sons for two years and ordered that they pay more than $4 million each. One of the sons, Eric Trump, is the Trump Organization’s de facto chief executive, and the ruling throws into doubt whether any member of the family can run the business in the near term.

In his unconventional style, Justice Engoron criticized Mr. Trump and the other defendants for refusing to admit errors for years. “Their complete lack of contrition and remorse borders on pathological,” he said.

Here’s the fun part:

Mr. Trump will appeal the financial penalty — which could climb to $400 million or more once interest is added — but will have to either come up with the money or secure a bond within 30 days. The ruling will not render him bankrupt, because most of his wealth is tied up in real estate.

It’s not clear to me that he could get a bond. Note that interest rates will be applied.

I’m watching MSNBC, and they’re explaining that Trump’s New York businesses will remain in business, but won’t be run by anybody named “Trump” or associated with Trump. The state has an interest in maintaining the value of the properties in case they have to be liquidated down the road.

Update: The amount to be paid by all Trumps collectively for the fraud case is more than $450 million, which includes “disgorgement and pre-judgment interest.” He’s yet to come up with the cash or bond to appeal the second E. Jean Carroll suit, never mind the new one. Does he have the cash available to pull this together? Doubtful. He was already on track for a cash crunch by July because of his legal fees. Could he get a bond? Questionable. If he starts selling assets and properties now, everyone is going to know why.

He’s going to try to squeeze the RNC for as much as he can get. His daughter-in-law Lara Trump, whom he wants as second-in-command of the RNC, has declared that “every single penny” of RNC funds will go to Trump if she has anything to say about it. You downballot folks are on your own .

Yesterday’s news was mostly focused on the Fani Willis hearings, which are still going on today. The crew at MSNBC last night was trying to be positive about Willis’s testimony, although some commentary today says the case is now in trouble.

However, while it’s arguable (maybe) that Willis’s conduct might justify some scrutiny by some Georgia state ethics review board, it seems it doesn’t rise to the level of her being diqaualified from the case under Georgia law. According to this article, under Georgia law Willis could only be disqualified if she has a conflict of interest with the case. For example, if she had a prior relationship with a defendant, or with a victim, or has some financial interest in how the case is decided, that would be disqualifying. But I don’t see how anything she’s being accused of is connected to the case itself, or would make any difference to its outcome.

Maybe there’s something I’m missing, as I’m not following the testimony all that much. And I do feel bad for her for having her personal life paraded in public as it is.

In other news, today Rep. James Comer must be hving a sad. His chief and possibly only “credible” source for his Burisma bribery allegations against President Biden turns out to have, um, made it all up. The source was an FBI informant, and Comer and others have been talking about this guy’s testimony and even leaking parts of it for months. That the testimony hasn’t been released is a “cover up,” they said.  So then this happened:

As it turns out, the Justice Department was working on the verifiability of the allegation. On Thursday, it unsealed an indictment: The informant who alleged that he’d been told about the bribe had allegedly made the whole thing up.

At the outset, the indictment summarizes the actions of the FBI informant, a man named Alexander Smirnov. Smirnov, it alleges, “transformed his routine and unextraordinary business contacts with Burisma in 2017 and later into bribery allegations against [Joe Biden], the presumptive nominee of one of the two major political parties for President, after expressing bias against [Biden] and his candidacy.” …

… The indictment walks through Smirnov’s communications with his FBI handler. In May 2020, Smirnov suggested to his handler that Biden would be “going to jail” over the leak of phone calls between Biden and former Ukraine president Petro Poroshenko — a leak that originated with a Ukrainian lawmaker who had provided information to Giuliani and was later sanctioned by the Trump administration as a Russian agent. Smirnov then said that the information about a bribe to Biden would “soon be in the news” and that he would try to prove it.

Giuliani’s slapdash efforts to dig up dirt on Biden in Ukraine had led then-Attorney General William P. Barr to set up a process for assessing such allegations based out of the FBI field office in Pittsburgh. In June 2020, that office contacted Smirnov about a reference he’d made in 2017 to Hunter Biden.

It was at this point, the indictment alleges, that Smirnov described conversations with Burisma executives during the Obama administration. During a 2016 meeting in Austria, Smirnov claimed, he’d been told by Zlochevsky about the alleged bribe.

But the indictment shows evidence that Smirnov couldn’t have had that conversation with Zlochevsky then. In fact, it alleges, Smirnov “met with officials from Burisma for the first time in 2017, after [Biden] left office in January 2017.” It documents how Smirnov informed his FBI handler about his initial contacts with the company’s executives after that point.

“The Defendant’s story to the FBI was a fabrication,” it alleges, “an amalgam of otherwise unremarkable business meetings and contacts that had actually occurred but at a later date than he claimed and for the purpose of pitching Burisma on the Defendant’s services and products, not for discussing bribes to Public Official 1 when he was in office.”

So with that “evidence” gone up in smoke, as I understand it, Comer’s got nothin’. I assume they will say that the FBI’s version of events is the cover up.

The best part, though, is that now there are calls to investigate Comer.

Also from yesterday, the last shred of “evidence” claimed for the “stolen” 2020 election presented in Dinesh D’Souza’s film 2000 Mules has gone up in smoke as well. The main claim of the film was based on data from the right-wing activist group True the Vote that claimed claimed thousands of people collect and submitted fraudulent ballots in swing states. However,

Georgia officials, who had been under relentless attack in the wake of the 2020 election, demanded that True the Vote turn over whatever evidence or information about informants it had, eventually obtaining a court order for the group to do so. This week, the group’s attorneys responded: There was no such evidence to share.

Oops!

This is not the first time that True the Vote has been caught flat-footed. Officials in Arizona recommended that the group be investigated by the FBI and IRS (given its tax-exempt status) for failing to provide evidence it claimed to have about ballot-stuffing in that state. True the Vote itself promised for months that it would release its data publicly to validate the claims made in “2000 Mules.” It never did.

Again, this is not surprising. The film features True the Vote founder Catherine Engelbrecht and investigator Gregg Phillips prominently and repeatedly, allowing them to allege that they had uncovered this network of ballot harvesters. But Phillips had already burned his credibility on vote-fraud allegations after the 2016 election, when he claimed to have found millions of illegal ballots. (Trump elevated this claim, too.) No such evidence was ever presented, obviously.

D’Souza’s argument depends entirely on True the Vote’s data, as he explained when we spoke in 2022. Much of it was immediately disproved, like the scene in the film where Phillips and Engelbrecht intimate that they had used cellphone location data to solve a murder that, it turns out, had already been solved. The movie relies heavily on video taped at ballot boxes, with Phillips and Engelbrecht providing voice-over commentary to suggest that something shady is going on. But at no point do they show a person at a ballot box matched to geolocation data, the purported evidence on which their allegations rest. In fact, only one map of an alleged ballot harvester’s path is shown in the film. In an email to The Washington Post, Phillips admitted that it was artificial.

Regarding the Kansas City Chiefs rally shooting — two juveniles are in custody. I haven’t seen how old these juveniles are. The Kansas City police are saying the juveniles started shooting because of a “dispute between several people.” The shooting had nothing to do with any ideological agenda, they say. No one has said if any of the people injured, or the one person killed, were involved in the dispute.

Of course, had these juveniles not been carrying firearms, there would have been no shooting. In Missouri, a juvenile, a person under 18 years of age, can purchase a firearm with a parent’s permission. As I understand it, to carry a concealed weapon one must be at least 19 years old, or 18 years old and a member of the armed forces. I haven’t found information on an age limit on open carry. Maybe there isn’t one.

Further, no permits or licenses are required to own and carry firearms in Missouri. One must assume a lot of people in that crowed were armed. Yet no “good guy with a gun” stopped the shooting. One juvenile was tackled to the ground and held for police by an adult attending the event, but he didn’t use a gun.

It’s a long-established fact that juvenile males tack the sense God gave potatoes. Note that it’s illegal in Missouri for people under 21 to consume, purchase, or possess alcohol. But firearms? No problem.

A lot happened today that I am too tired to address, but do feel free to discuss whatever in the comments.

I’ve been offline most of the day because my wifi likes to take time off, and I’m just now learning there was a shooting at the Kansas City Chiefs Super Bowl celebration in Kansas City. I understand one person has died, a few are critical, and three people are in custody. We know nothing about the shooters at this time. If we find out that this shooting is somehow connected to all the nonsense about Taylor Swift, examples need to be made of those shooters. Really nasty examples.

I understand Jack Smith has filed his response to Donald Trump at the Supreme Court already. The gist of it is to get the SCOTUS to act without delay.

I’m going to go ahead and hit the publish button while the wifi is working. More later, maybe.

Republicans’ slim lead in the House got a little slimmer last night with the election of Tom Suozzi to the seat vacated by George Santos. Note that most polls and punditry had predicted a close election, but with 93 percent of votes counted Suozzi is ahead 53.9 percent to 46.1 percent. A comfortable lead. Once again, the Democrat “overperformed.”

Some writers at Politico said,

Unlike most other suburbs across the country, Long Island and the outer boroughs of New York City have raced to the right since former President Donald Trump left office. Between 2021 and 2023, Republicans won the Island’s four congressional seats and almost every major local office, and the GOP gubernatorial nominee won both of Long Island’s counties by double digits in 2022.

Aaron Blake at WaPo says that Republicans tried to make the election about immigration, which I would have thought would have worked in a district that is mostly in Long Island. But it didn’t.

This is disappointing.

Chief Justice John Roberts is giving prosecutors a week to respond to former President Donald Trump’s request to keep his federal criminal election-subversion trial on hold while he tries to persuade the Supreme Court to scuttle it entirely on the grounds of presidential immunity.

A brief docket entry from the court Tuesday morning said special counsel Jack Smith has until next Tuesday at 5 p.m. to address the emergency application Trump’s lawyers filed at the high court Monday.

I really was hoping the Court would just deny certiorari and be done with this crap. I guess not.

Why is this important, anyway? Here’s something at Talking Points Memo that isn’t getting enough attention — Josh Kovensky, Two Weeks of Chaos.

Donald Trump’s months-long effort to overturn his defeat in the 2020 election culminated on a single, now-infamous day: Jan. 6.

But there was an alternate scenario gamed out by Trump’s lawyers — one that would have expanded the hours of indecision caused by the Trump campaign’s efforts and stretched out the process for weeks, all the way until Jan. 20, 2021, the Constitution’s ironclad deadline for the transfer of power. If their scheme succeeded, these lawyers hoped, Joe Biden would never take office.

The details of this scheme are being revealed here for the first time. They are drawn from a trove of documents provided to Michigan prosecutors by Trump attorney Kenneth Chesebro, including thousands of pages of emails among Trump’s lawyers, some containing information that has never before been published.

The plan would have seen the Trump campaign pushing Republican lawmakers to prevent Congress from certifying Joe Biden’s win not just on Jan. 6, but for days afterwards. GOP legislators would have feigned confusion over competing slates of electors, paralyzing Congress as the Trump campaign brought increasing pressure on the Supreme Court to step in and resolve the election in their favor. 

To do this, Chesebro formulated various ways to invalidate the Electoral Count Act, the law laying out the procedures for Congress to certify the election on Jan. 6. Critically, the law places tight limits on how long individual lawmakers can debate disputed electoral votes — nullifying or inflating those limits, capped at five minutes per member and two hours total, could make Jan. 6 go on indefinitely. 

Kovensky followed this with The Ideas Man: How Chesebro’s Most Radical Theories Entered Trump Campaign Planning for Pence and Jan. 6. And I see that this is a three-part (so far) series. The first installment is The Legal Coup.

While at TPM see also David Kurtz, Candidate Trump Keeps Doing Putin’s Bidding And No One Bats An Eye.

There are a lot of other good commentaries today to link to. In no particular order —

Jamelle Bouie, The New York Times, Trump Is Losing It. No paywall. Just read it.

Paul Krugman, The New York Times, Why I Am Now Deeply Worried for America. No paywall.

Greg Sargent, The New Republic, An Infuriating Poll Finding About Trump Should Galvanize Democrats

In other news: The Senate very early today passed a $95.3 billion aid package for Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan. Twenty-two Republicans voted with nearly all Democrats. The three Dems who voted against it were Peter Welch of Vermont, Jeff Merkley of Oregon, and Bernie Sanders of Vermont. They were protesting the $14 billion for Israel.

Here is the fun part: House Speaker Mike Johnson is already saying he won’t let the House vote on it because, get this, because it lacks the tougher border security measures the House asked for months ago. Um, dude, seriously? We did this already. There was such a bill a few days ago, and you let it be known the House wouldn’t pass it on orders from Donald Trump. Chuck Schumer says nope. This is the bill that’s going to the House. Pass it, or reject it and face the consequences.

Do read Will Bunch’s column at the Philadelphia Inquirer, ‘But His Memory’ and the slow train wreck of American democracy.  It begins,

Some night around the year 2064, when the ragtag children of the last historians huddle around a cave fire and mix up some berries and the blood of their groundhog dinner to paint crude images of what the heck ever happened to the United States of America, they will probably render a depiction of Feb. 8, 2024 — a date which will live in infamy.

There are so many images to choose from — a corrupt and contented black-robed Supreme Court putting the last rubber stamp of cowardice on a nation’s failure to hold a coup leader accountable, or a White House press corps shouting like a pack of wild hyenas at President Joe Biden about his 81-year-old brain while ignoring the orange blob of Donald Trump as he plots the betrayal of Europe and a kind of American Kristallnacht against immigrants.

To see last Thursday unfold in real time was like watching the wreck of a slow-moving train, with democracy heading like Wile E. Coyote toward a cliff and nobody — not a Supreme Court bought and paid for by billionaires, nor a judiciary too easily gamed by inertia, nor a Congress engineered to produce only gridlock and gibberish, nor a gullible news media lacking backbone — throwing the switch to stop it. And the American people?

No one bothered to get off the couch.

Just go ahead and read the rest of it. The Inquirer usually lets you read one thing  before it puts up a paywall, but I suggest using an incognito or private window to be safe. And then see David Kurtz at TPM, On The Road To Fascism, A Pit Stop To Fuel Up On Stupid. And Judd Legum, Popular Information, Media creates Biden “fitness” crisis / And lets Trump off easy.

By now everyone in America has heard some variation of the “Biden is senile” story. How many have heard the “Trump ready to abandon our NATO allies to Russia” story? News reporting is hard work, so you’d think those at the peak of the profession would have more skill than this. But a Biden “gotcha” to the White House Press Corps is like a squirrel to a dog.

Michael Tomasky at The New Republic, The Only Mental Acuity I’m Questioning These Days Is the Mainstream Media’s.

I have written what I’m about to write here probably 20 times in the last couple years, and I’ll write it 20 more or 200 more until I see people starting to get the point. In terms of how the American political media works, we have recently crossed a dark Rubicon. We now live in a world, which I believe we entered after January 6, 2021, in which the right-wing media sets the national agenda. The mainstream media follows.

Going way back in time, we had only a mainstream media—the Times and the Post and the Associated Press and the major networks. In the 1970s, after the famous Powell Memo, wealthy conservatives began funding their own media. For most of the last 50 years, even as the right-wing media grew, it remained clear that the mainstream media set the agenda—that is, it determined what we all talked about every day.

Speaking of Trump and NATO, see Emptywheel, Call and Response: Putin Demanded Greater Russia and Trump Agreed. “Over the weekend, Putin and Donald Trump seem to have come to public agreement that, if elected in November, Trump would help Putin pursue Greater Russia.” Marcy is saying that Trump’s babbling about NATO over the weekend is a response to Tucker “Axis Sally” Carlson’s Putin interview.  I do think that most of Trump’s “ideas” about NATO came from Putin. Perhaps not directly, but Trump doesn’t have enough brain any more to think his own thoughts. Putin planted nonsense about NATO in Trump’s head at some point, and that’s what’s coming out of Trump’s mouth.

Today’s Trump’s lawyers should be filing his appeal of the “immunity” decision to the Supreme Court, but I haven’t heard yet that they have done so. It would be fun if they missed the deadline.

Update: JD Vance is a craven poser. I haven’t liked him since he wrote that book about his loser malfunctioning family and framed it as portrait of all “hillbillies.” He don’t know squat about hillbillies, but I’ll put that aside. Just look at this crap he wrote for the American Conservative.