Getting Away With It, Yet Again
The attempt to defeat Trump with legal prosecutions has ground to a halt.
I really don’t want to be a Debbie Downer yet again, but it seems pretty clear to me at this point that the legal resistance to Donald Trump’s deep corruption, pathological recklessness, managerial incompetence, and outrageous attempts to steal an election and then prevent a peaceful transfer of power ... have, well, failed.
By “failed” I don’t mean, of course, that Trump will definitely not be convicted in his current trial, or that the other cases — from the January 6 insurrection to the classified documents to the Georgia pressure campaign — won’t proceed at some point. I mean something more salient: none of this is likely to happen or seriously dent Trump’s popularity before the looming election this November. His antagonists had four years to prosecute and delegitimize him, and it wasn’t enough time. (Bill Maher chiefly blames Merrick Garland for preternatural dithering — “Attorney General Barney Fife.”)
Judge Cannon has now indefinitely postponed the Florida trial for Trump’s grotesque and dumb mishandling of classified documents. It looks fishy to me, but her pre-trial shenanigans do not appear outside her judicial prerogatives. If the DOJ had wanted to prosecute Trump in this complicated case — involving national security, executive privilege, the limits of discovery with classified information — they might have begun a little sooner than last year.
The Georgia case just got upended by Fani Willis’ hubris, as her romantic relationship with one of her prosecutors gave Trump’s lawyers a chance to delay the trial by asking the Georgia Appeals Court to rule on whether Willis should be disqualified. The federal January 6 case is suspended mid-air as SCOTUS ruminates on the question of presidential immunity.
Which leaves us with one case likely to be decided before the November election: the current, patently political prosecution of Trump for alleged violations of federal campaign law in concealing hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Technically, it seems pretty clear to me that Trump is guilty as sin, and may even be convicted by a New York City jury. Michael Cohen, after all, went to jail for the same crime. But the case itself is a stretch by Alvin Bragg, straining to elevate state financial misdemeanors into multiple federal felonies. Worse, the coverage this week is likely, if it has any political impact, to help Trump in his framing of the prosecution as personal persecution.
Remember the agonizing deposition of Bill Clinton in 1998? He was a sleaze and an abuser, but even abusers gain some modicum of sympathy if they are forced publicly to admit to an extra-marital affair, especially one with sordid, salacious, personally humiliating details. I won’t easily forget the footnote where Ken Starr informed me of “anal-oral contact” between Monica and Bill. The excess of prurience was crucial to Clinton’s political survival.
So did Trump wear a condom? Boxer shorts? Was the fucking fully consensual? Yes, some of this was necessary because Trump, absurdly, is still denying he ever met the broad alone. But icky is icky, and humiliating people with the details of sexual encounters, even if they are scummy people like Trump, tends to backfire. And it’s hard to see how he politically loses from this trial. If the jury hangs, Trump wins. If he is convicted, he has an obvious appeal option, especially given the racy irrelevance of some of the testimony allowed by the judge this week. If he’s acquitted, we’ll never hear the last of it.
What about the polling that suggests a conviction in the hush-money case could prompt a critical sliver of Trump supporters to reconsider? That’s certainly possible. But an appeal would presumably put that on hold. And it seems unlikely to me that an electorate that breezed past “grab ‘em by the pussy” is going to stop short at a federal financial fiddle. A recent poll found that 45 percent of Americans believe that the Stormy case is irrelevant to Trump’s fitness for the presidency — up a bit from 39 percent last summer. The slippage seems to come mainly from one demo:
[A]mong independents who lean Republican, the share calling those charges not relevant to Trump’s fitness has climbed from 57 percent to 73 percent, and the share of true independents saying the same has risen from 29 percent to 45.
The trial is unpredictable of course — and so is Trump’s response to it. He disgusts me in every way. But in the grand scheme of things, covering up an affair is not a crime, and allowance of exactly this kind of evidence just got Harvey Weinstein off the hook in New York. And all of it helps Trump’s narrative of victimization.
The way to beat Trump is to offer a saner, smarter, less chaotic vision of America’s future than he does, while neutralizing his appeal on immigration and trade. He can only be defeated politically. Anything else is a dumb distraction.
New On The Dishcast: Adam Moss
Adam is the best magazine editor of my generation, and an old friend. From 2004 to 2019, he was the editor-in-chief of New York Magazine, and before that he edited the New York Times Magazine, and 7 Days — a weekly news magazine covering art and culture in NYC. His first book is The Work of Art: How Something Comes from Nothing.
Listen to the episode here. There you can find two clips of our convo — on the bygone power of magazines, and the birth of the great and powerful performance artist, Dina Martina. That link also takes you to commentary on last week’s hit episode with Johann Hari on weight-loss drugs. Readers also dissent over my food preferences and weed habit, and another talks about methylone — “an analogue of MDMA.” Check it out.
Biden’s Gamble On Rafah
The president of the United States did something extremely unusual this week. He actually — and I hope you’re sitting down — restricted the provision of 3,500 massive bombs to Israel, the kind that killed so many civilians in Israel’s initial frenzy. He did this on the DL to begin with, but the Israelis leaked. Biden then explained it on CNN:
Civilians have been killed in Gaza as a consequence of those bombs and other ways in which they (Israel) go after population centers ... They’re not going to get our support if in fact they go on these population centers.
This of course presents the question: if the imperative to root out Hamas justified the use of these weapons then, why is it not justified now — when the IDF finally has the remnants of Hamas cornered in Rafah? It only makes sense if a) Biden never realized just how destructive these massive bombs can be, or b) it’s entirely political because of the shifting public response to Israel’s mass civilian casualties. Neither speaks well.
In some ways, it’s the worst of both worlds. It gives Hamas some comfort in its final resistance, and removes incentives for the Nazi-inspired terrorists to hand over the hostages, dead and alive. Domestically, Biden’s vacillation won’t please his neocon donors (they are already having conniptions); and it will not be nearly enough to satisfy the left activists in his party, especially after he rightly condemned the “chaos” on many campuses this week.
If you were going to use US military aid as leverage with Israel — something I’ve argued for many times before — you should have done it in a time of relative peace, as a way to nudge the Israelis to stop the settlements in the West Bank, and return to some kind of two-state solution. What you don’t do is wait until a crucial moment in a pivotal campaign to end a war that Hamas itself began.
And Biden’s argument that he is restricting the bombs in order to pressure Israel not to enter Rafah alone is particularly mystifying. What he could have said is that in the looming battle against Hamas’ leadership and remnant, he is trying to avoid the civilian massacres of the recent past — but that he understands Israel’s rationale in finishing the job. That way, he could have kept some faith with Israel, while separating the US from the worst of the human toll.
I still think the Israelis should go in. It would be insane for Israel to stand down now; losing the war — which is how the region would view a failure of nerve in Rafah — would be a fatal blow to Israel’s policy of regional deterrence; and it’s not even clear that the campaign in Rafah would require the massive bombs Biden just withheld. Edward Luttwak writes:
To start with, Rafah has very few of the high-rise apartment houses, condo towers and mansions of Gaza City and Khan Yunis. This makes street-fighting much simpler because there are no multi-level basements from which many fighters can erupt at once, nor looming heights with firing positions for snipers. Above all, if a building must be entered and cleared room-by-room, perhaps because a high-value target is thought to be hiding there, it does not take hundreds of soldiers to search the place quickly.
You can’t wound the snake of Hamas; you have to try to kill it. It still won’t die, of course, which is why a plan to restore a sovereign government in the enclave is so important. The current chaos, like the mayhem in newly liberated Iraq, breeds more terror. But if Israel can find and kill Hamas’ leadership and remaining four battalions, and do so with far fewer civilian casualties than before, and without a huge bombing campaign, there’s still hope that this horrifying, brutalizing war might not have been in vain.
The View From Your Window
Saigon, Vietnam, 10.59 am
Money Quotes For The Week
“Mr. Trump, it’s important you understand, the last thing I want to do is put you in jail. You are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well. … [B]ut at the end of the day I have a job to do,” - Judge Merchan after Trump was held in contempt for the tenth time over a gag order.
“The military aid to Israel was already authorized by Congress. Donald Trump was impeached for a nearly identical matter when he withheld congressionally approved aid for Ukraine after Russia invaded. When Scott Jennings made this point on CNN, David Axelrod jumped to attack the comparison but wasn’t able to articulate a distinction,” - Erick Erickson.
“Can we include that the [Biden administration] put pressure on us to censor the lab leak theory?” - Mark Zuckerberg in July 2021, texting to other top officials at Facebook on how to respond to the government censorship campaign.
“Note well that the Girl Scouts are still a thing, but boys cannot be allowed to have scouting of their own, because Justice,” - Rod Dreher on the Boy Scouts of America changing its name to Scouting America.
“The reason the encampments never criticize Hamas is that they’re not allowed to criticize Hamas, because the organizers support Hamas,” - Jon Chait.
“The more I learn, the more troubled I have become about giving puberty blockers to youth. Minors cannot drive, vote, join the army, get a tattoo, smoke, or drink, because we know that children do not fully understand the consequences of decisions with life-long ramifications. ... I don’t think children can genuinely consent to repurposed castration drugs (puberty blockers) and surgical mutilation, which have permanent, irreversible effects,” - Robert F Kennedy Jr.
“There is no accountability. We are living in the District of Crime,” - Denise Krepps on a DC judge granting pre-trial release to a man who emptied an AR-15 rifle into a public street.
“We’ve invented this thing called homosexuality and now everybody is conditioned into having a way of life which is either gay or straight. I mean 50 years ago I’d have been married with three children and having affairs with men on the side and frankly, I’d probably be happier … I always say, ‘I’m a homosexual. And it should be hoh-moe, because it’s Greek, not Latin,” - Neil Tennant, music legend.
“The great thing about a posthumous album is that we won’t have to do any promotion,” - Chris Lowe, on the possibility of a Pet Shop Boys album after they’ve both kicked it.
Hathos Alert
I came across this 2022 video this week and I’m still laughing:
Dissents Of The Week
From a “longtime Dishhead (since my teenage days)”:
I think you’ve gotten the student protests crashingly wrong, and precisely backwards. The illiberalism you should be worried about is coming overwhelmingly from people in power who are opposed to the protesters. Senator Cotton recklessly defamed the protesters for their “nascent pogroms.” Governor Abbot ordered police to arrest people for what he erroneously considered to be (anti-Semitic) hate speech. The huge bipartisan congressional majority just voted to amend Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act to censor anti-Zionist speech at our universities, and I was disappointed not to see a word about the appalling Antisemitism Awareness Act in last week’s Dish.
These and other mainstream figures are engaged in a massive moral panic about campus pogroms. As with 2020, this moral panic is being used for illiberal purposes of the type I mentioned above. But you ignore all this, and instead feed the moral panic by declaring the protestors “use of masks to conceal identity is reminiscent of the Klan.” Nor do you provide any credible evidence for the alleged pattern of violence by these protesters. From what I have seen reported in credible sources, the violence is mainly on the other side, including an attack on four student journalists launched by pro-Israel counter-protesters at UCLA, which followed a broader attack by the counter-protesters on the anti-war encampment.
One thing I’ll grant you is that the student protesters are mostly woke, but I fault you for myopically overstating the implications of this. The real trouble is wokeness paired with power, as in the 2020 BLM rallies fanatically supported by major corporate and academic institutions — and even for a time, the police (who stood aside and permitted the razing of a Minneapolis police station by pro-BLM rioters).
You also fail to notice is that they are noticeably less woke than the cultists of 2020. Even you notice that they are wearing keffiyehs — something that wokesters would deem cultural appropriation — but you write it off as hypocrisy rather than the mark of progress that it is. It’s a progress I daresay is inevitable when one focuses on issues of real moral import, like ending our support for war crimes and massacre in Gaza, rather than fake or woefully exaggerated woke issues.
I also must agree with you that there is anti-Americanism in the rallies. But that is because the students are protesting massive war crimes in which our country is complicit. It is not reasonable to expect these to be patriotic affairs. You have to take the bad with the good when it comes to antiwar rallies. Part of why America is worth loving is that she doesn’t coerce her citizens into a false love; I believe these protesters are lashing out against America for good reason, and most will come to love their country in time.
First, here’s where I agree with you. The counter-protestor violence at UCLA was inexcusable; the statements of Governor Abbott are repellent to a free society; the Antisemitism Awareness Act is a disgrace. I should have said so last week, and did so in a first draft, but cut my reference for space. No excuse, but I’m with you.
I’m also sure there are many protestors of good will, calling America to live up to our ideals. I said so last week. But the groups organizing the protests are explicitly anti-Semitic, the intimidation of Jewish students is real, and the case is made almost entirely in the woke “colonial-settler” rubric, in which the “liberation” of America is also touted. I think the protests are likely to strengthen support for Israel in the US. They sure have brought me back to sympathizing with the Jewish state’s predicament.
Another reader remarks on a topic that’s also relevant to this week’s column:
I’m as frustrated as you are that Trump is back in the picture — and in pole position, no less. It’s terrifying. Still, I’m begging you not to amplify the bullshit “lawfare” critique coming from the bad-faith right (is there another kind?). This is beneath you: “And despite — or rather because of — four indictments for scores of felonies, all authorized by Democratic DAs, including the attorney general, Trump is now narrowly leading in national polls and ahead in most of the swing states.”
First of all, Merrick Garland did not “authorize” the Jan. 6 and MAL-documents investigations or prosecutions. That was the entire point of naming a special prosecutor. Under the special-counsel regulations, Jack Smith is not supervised by Garland or anyone else in Main Justice, and he can only be removed for good cause. The regulatory language isn’t explicit on this, but it sure reads as though Garland is empowered to shut down an “inappropriate” prosecution but not to demand that one be started. This is how you keep law enforcement from being politicized.
More broadly, it’s true that both Willis and Bragg got elected on a Democratic ticket, but so what? They still have to take their prosecutions before a judge and a jury. I wish we did not have partisan DAs, but we do, and it’s not their fault. It certainly doesn’t mean we call into question any prosecution they undertake that may have a political element to it. Many other DAs are, of course, Republicans. Do we doubt their prosecutions too as politically motivated? Clearly if people like you are doing it, then tens of millions less thoughtful people are too.
Finally, I find unhelpful your repeated references to Trump’s popularity growing “because of” the indictments. To the extent that is true at all (and polling is not at all clear that his current lead is the direct result of his indictments), again I ask, so what? What alternative would you suggest? I know you don't want law-breaking presidents to be able to act with impunity. Perhaps you throw in with those who like to say, beat him the old-fashioned way ... at the polls! Well guess what? Americans did just that — by a very healthy margin — and yet Trump refused to accept his loss and resorted to subterfuge and violence, which is precisely why two of these four prosecutions were initiated in the first place.
To clarify: I did not write that Garland is directly running the Smith investigation; by “authorizing”, I meant naming a special prosecutor in the first place. And I’m sorry but I think the Bragg indictment is plainly political. Willis? A vital investigation — which Willis, not Trump, has derailed. And if the point of the prosecutions is to prevent Trump abusing power yet again, they might have been started with expedition. They haven’t been.
Another reader quotes me:
“It is of a piece with his administration’s full-on support for the sex reassignment of children despite no solid evidence for its medical effectiveness or safety.” I’m not sure I’ve heard Biden talk about this in any way. Maybe I missed it — if so, show me. But that comment seems a bit over the top if he hasn’t stated so.
I said the administration, not Biden specifically. But this video from Biden himself captures his absolute certainty that there is no debate. He has described restrictions on transing children — the kind now being enacted across Europe — as “hateful.” His trans spokesperson, Rachel Levine, has not responded to the Cass Review, and is still lying about these treatments by calling them “life-saving.” Biden is captured by the transqueer lobby.
Another reader looks to November:
I could not disagree more about Biden’s reelection chances. Incumbent presidents are almost always re-elected, unless there is a major crisis unfolding, such as the Great Depression, massive layoffs, or a global pandemic. Since the early 2010s, US elections have been decided in suburbs. You’re living in a fantasy land if you think a candidate who is on trial for criminal financial fraud has a chance of winning America’s suburbs. Combine that with an unemployment rate under four percent, growing consumer spending and GDP, and unpopular abortion bans caused by Trump’s presidency. I would give Biden an 85 percent chance of winning.
The pro-Palestine protest have been ugly in some cases, but they don’t pose a threat to democracy the way Trump’s Jan 6 terrorists do. Biden isn’t being blamed for them.
In David Frum’s words: the “Biden blowout” is coming. Well, we’ll see.
As always, keep the dissents coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
Mental Health Break
A music video with eye-catching collage:
In The ‘Stacks
Rescheduling marijuana is great news, but Biden needs to step up for full legalization.
Three cheers to the NYT’s Joe Kahn for clapping back at Biden partisans.
Noah Smith does his best to make “the positive case for Joe Biden.”
Bob Wright picks apart the Antisemitism Awareness Act.
Greenwald and Ilya Shapiro debate the campus protests and free speech.
Social Security is still on the path to insolvency — what to do?
Tim Mak investigates “the dizzying pace of Ukrainian drone innovation.”
Global warming and Putin’s war are posing a security threat in the Arctic.
Havana Syndrome has the intel community divided.
Noah Smith insists, “The common trope that Japan is a xenophobic country that doesn’t want immigrants is just provably false.”
Shashi Tharoor describes Hindus as “natural liberals.”
Restaurants should charge more for reservations, argues Yglesias.
A cool history of drinking straws.
Verse lovers should check out the substack “Poems Ancient and Modern.”
The great Nick Hornby launches a ‘stack. And the creators of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowling have a new show on “the strange experience of being human.”
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think? Email your entry to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. Proximity counts. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a View From Your Window book or two annual Dish subscriptions.
See you next Friday.