Donald Trump at the F1 Grand Prix of Miami car race on May 5. (Clive Mason/Getty)
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.
(Note to readers: This is an excerpt of The Weekly Dish. If you’re already a subscriber, click here to read the full version. This week’s issue also includes: my take on Biden withholding weapons for Rafah; a convo with Adam Moss about art and editing; a ton of listener commentary on recent episodes; reader dissents over my latest piece on Trump and the woke left; nine notable quotes from the week in news; 18 pieces on Substack we recommend on a variety of topics; a hilarious Hathos Alert on Brian Stelter; a Mental Health Break of a cool music video; a vibrant window from Vietnam; and, of course, the results of the View From Your Window contest — with a new challenge. Subscribe for the full Dish experience!)
From a new subscriber: “Your article on How to Re-Elect Donald Trump was the best analysis I have seen, and I am looking forward to follow your perspective as we push into this election year.” One of Substack’s co-founders, Chris Best, is also a subscriber, and he wrote on Notes this week:
The Dish was one for our inspirations for starting Substack, and it’s been a tremendous thrill seeing it succeed here (and being a happy subscriber). Congrats Andrew Sullivan and Chris Bodenner!
Best was responding to this note:
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.
(Read the rest of that piece here, for paid subscribers)
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.
And browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy (the first 102 are free in their entirety — subscribe to get everything else). Coming up: Oren Cass on Republicans moving left on class, Noah Smith on the economy, Bill Maher on everything, George Will on Trump and conservatism, Lionel Shriver on her new novel, Elizabeth Corey on Oakeshott, and the great Van Jones! Send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com. From a subscriber:
I hope you and Chris had a good spring break, but I missed the Dish. Right before I went to bed on Friday, I felt that something was off, and then I realized that it was an inbox and podcast list devoid of the Dish! Now my Fridays are back to normal, thank goodness.
I especially like the guests you have on the Dishcast to discuss religion and faith, because nobody in my coastal elite world seems to talk much about these things. And as a recovering atheist (the tribal instinct came back with a ferocious roar after October 7), I enjoy listening to you discuss God and faith in earnest with your guests, even if the conversation is not about my religion. The other week when you had Abigail Shrier on and she was talking about the things that are missing in young people’s lives, I thought to myself, “What about religion?” And then two seconds later you said, “What about religion?” Mind meld!
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.
Three more dissents are here, with my replies. More dissents on different topics are on the pod page. As always, keep the criticism coming: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
This is a feature in the paid version of the Dish spotlighting about 20 of our favorite pieces from other Substackers every week. This week’s selection covers subjects such as the rescheduling of weed, the Antisemitism Awareness Act, and insolvency of Social Security. Below is one example from a new substack, followed by two other newcomers:
The great Nick Hornby launches a ‘stack. And the creators of The Witch Trials of J.K. Rowlinghave a new show on “the strange experience of being human.”
A reader writes:
Thanks for referencing the post about Ken Klippenstein’s resignation from The Intercept. I just became one of his subscribers and probably would not have seen it otherwise.
You can also browse all the substacks we follow and read on a regular basis here — a combination of our favorite writers and new ones we’re checking out. It’s a blogroll of sorts. If you have any recommendations for “In the ‘Stacks,” especially ones from emerging writers, please let us know: dish@andrewsullivan.com.
The View From Your Window Contest
Where do you think it’s located? Email your guess to contest@andrewsullivan.com. Please put the location — city and/or state first, then country — in the subject line. Proximity counts if no one gets the exact spot. Bonus points for fun facts and stories. The deadline for entries is Wednesday night at midnight (PST). The winner gets the choice of a VFYW book or two annual Dish subscriptions. If you are not a subscriber, please indicate that status in your entry and we will give you a free month subscription if we select your entry for the contest results (example here if you’re new to the contest). Happy sleuthing!
The results for this week’s window are coming in a separate email to paid subscribers later today. Below is part of the entry from our resident biologist that inspired last week’s headline, “Conjoined Fish Orgies”:
What excites ichthyologists most about Ceratioid anglers is that some of them practice real conjugal attachment:
The free-swimming tiny male anglerfish can sniff the female’s waterborne pheromones and latch itself onto the female with its sharp teeth ... [T]he male releases enzymes that dissolve the female’s tissue around his mouth, leading to anatomical joining of the male and female tissues ... Thereafter, the male loses its eyes, fins, and internal organs, except for its testes. Its blood system fuses with that of the female host, and from that point on it receives all its nutrients via the joined circulatory system ...
The parasitic anglerfish male remains attached to the female throughout her lifetime, stays reproductively functional, and participates in multiple spawnings. Furthermore, to increase the fertilization probability, females of some anglerfish species form simultaneous parabiosis with multiple males. A report by Saruwatari revealed eight males that were attached to a single Cryptopsaras couesii female.
The males don’t even mature until they have latched on to a female. Here’s a National Geographic photo of a female with two consorts:
Why doesn’t her body reject them? Recent research shows that the anglerfishes with this mating system have a weakened immune system. Long story short, some of the cells that kill off infected or abnormal tissues in you and me are absent from these fishes and their antibodies are weaker (but don’t tell my immunology students, to whom I just assigned this topic).
