Daily Archives: September 20, 2022

Donald Trump is privately raging at fellow Republican Ron DeSantis over the governors decision to authorise flights carrying roughly 50 migrants last week from the southern border to Marthas Vineyard, Rolling Stone reported.

The Florida governor patted himself on the back over the weekend while delivering a speech in Wisconsin to stump for GOP candidates, announcing that he intended to tap every penny from the $12m Freedom First budget allocated to the Florida Department of Transportations efforts to transport unauthorised aliens.

And though both Mr DeSantis and anti-immigration sympathisers on Fox News and within the Republican party celebrated the firebrand politicians actions with Texas Senator Ted Cruz even calling for governors to increase their controversial relocation programs and send half a million undocumented migrants on to Washington DC not everyone in right-wing circles was happy with last weeks headlines.

Namely, former president Donald Trump found himself scowling at how his potential rival for the Republican ticket in the 2024 presidential election was dominating the headlines and drawing attention away from his own antics.

Rolling Stone reported that two inside sources close to the twice-impeached president had heard him vent about the Republican governor taking the limelight off Trump and accused him of using the migrant flights to prop up his national profile ahead of a potential bid for the White House.

Neither Mr DeSantis nor Mr Trump have made public commitments to run in 2024, though both men are considered to be frontrunners to challenge President Joe Biden for the Oval Office.

Mr Trump also reportedly raged at his aides in the wake of Mr DeSantiss highly publicised stunt, noting that the Florida governor had taken a page from his own playbook as he contended that flying migrants on planes from the southern border was his idea.

Rolling Stones report on Mr Trump privately seething at Mr DeSantiss rising star is just the latest slight in an ongoing Cold War between two of the most outspoken and divisive figures in US politics.

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When polls last summer began to point to the Florida governors potential to outpace the man who had once endorsed his campaign, Mr Trump seemed to begin to walk back his full-throated support for the Republican he credits himself as being responsible for landing in the governors office.

In June, the University of New Hampshire shared the results of a survey which showed a shocking change of fortune for the former president who for the first time began to trail the Florida governor among likely primary voters in the state.

On the same day those results were shared, the former president took to his own social media platform Truth Social to post the results of a separate poll from the right-leaning pollster Zogby. In those results, unlike the University of New Hampshires, it indicated that he was the clear favourite for winning the 2024 GOP presidential nomination, 42 points ahead of Mr DeSantis in a survey of GOP voters nationally.

The former president has even struck out at his once-avowed network of preference, Fox News, for airing what he viewed as inaccurate polling results during one of their morning news programs.

@foxandfriends just botched my poll numbers, no doubt on purpose, the one-term president wrote on Truth Social back in July, calling out a segment where hosts had presented the findings from both the University of New Hampshire survey and Blueprint in Florida that showed Mr DeSantis being the favourite of the two. That show has been terrible gone to the dark side, he added.

One of the pillars of Trumps 2016 platform zeroed in on the countrys southern border policies, with his build the wall tagline becoming nearly as synonymous with his campaign as the make America great again slogan.

Though he pledged on the campaign trail that he would build a great, great wall on our southern border that the Mexican government would pay for, by the end of his presidency his administration had constructed 452 miles in total, according to the latest US Customs and Border Protection (CBP).

Most of those 452 miles, however, were reinforcing walls that had been built during previous US administrations as only 80 miles of new structures were erected where there had previously been nothing.

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Donald Trump rages that Ron DeSantiss Marthas Vineyard stunt was his ...

But even this was just part of the build-up to what ended up being a full QAnon passion play, as the rally culminated with Trump fulminatingreciting a series of grievances over swelling strings. His followers, commanded to raise their fingers in salute, did soresulting in a scene that looked like it was freshly plucked from Leni Riefenstahls back catalogue. The swelling music over which he ranted was eerily similar to the QAnon anthem Wwg1wgaa reference to the conspiracy theorys slogan Where we go one, we go all. The one finger salute was also a nod to the title of that song. Two other speakers at the rally, including Marjorie Taylor Greene, have promoted QAnon over the last several years. Trump himself has recently posted or reposted several QAnon-linked images on his Truth Social platform.

Now we are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation, Trump said, riffing on what has become a familiar theme in his speechesreferencing high inflation and energy costs and the need for more domestic energy production. It was very much akin to traditional fascist myth-making: Only one man can restore the glory and wealth and prestige of the motherland and that person is a real estate developer/con man turned insurrectionist.

That Trumps eventual embrace of QAnon was pretty much fore-ordained, its still disturbing. The conspiracy theory is propped up by his most devoted followers, who believe, among other things, that he will be reinstated as president of the United States and that the Democratic Party is run by a cabal of child sex traffickers. That combination of extreme loyalty to himself and an extraordinary antipathy to his rivals is what he has always promoted among his supporters. As Trump has become more and more obsessed with the investigations engulfing himinto the attempt to overturn the 2020 election, into his apparent theft of hundreds of classified documents, into his corrupt businessesit only grows more necessary to play more directly to those most willing to believe his claims of victimhood.

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Donald Trump Is More Deranged Than Ever - The New Republic

Former President Donald Trump and Hope Hicks on March 29, 2018.MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty Images

Longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks didn't buy into his false claims that he won the 2020 election.

She told him to move on, according to the book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."

"Trump responded bitterly. "Well, Hope doesn't believe in me," he'd say in meetings," they wrote.

After the 2020 presidential election, Donald Trump's longtime aide Hope Hicks told him what he didn't want to hear: He lost.

The close aide was preparing to leave the White House and stayed away from Trump's 2020 election challenges, even as he brooded and "talked of little else" in the aftermath of the race being called for President Joe Biden, wrote New York Times chief White House correspondent Peter Baker and New Yorker staff writer and CNN global affairs analyst Susan Glasser in their new book "The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021."

Hicks told Trump it was time to move on, according to the book set to publish Tuesday.

"Trump responded bitterly. 'Well, Hope doesn't believe in me,' he would say in meetings," they wrote. "'No, I don't,' she would reply. 'Nobody's convinced me otherwise.' She concluded any further efforts to try to steer Trump would simply be, as she told an associate, 'a waste of time.'"

Hicks worked for the Trump Organization and campaign before serving on the White House communications team and then, after some time at Fox Corporation, as counselor to Trump. But she was "marginalized" after telling Trump his election challenge was wrong and "did not even bother to go into the office" on January 6, 2021, the day of the Capitol insurrection, according to the authors.

Some advisors thought Trump "wavered" on the big lie in the first few days after his loss and that he understood he had come up short. Once, the authors wrote, when seeing Biden on television, he said, "'Can you believe I lost to this fucking guy?'"

"But the kind of advisers who might have steered him toward acceptance were no longer around the brooding president, who remained cloistered for days after the election and talked of little else," the authors wrote.

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Alyssa Farah, Trump's strategic communications director, soon resigned "out of disgust."

Trump's daughter Ivanka Trump and son-in-law Jared Kushner "surrendered the field" when they saw the outgoing president was empowering his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who they blamed for his first impeachment, the authors wrote.

"'Obviously, I support you, but I can't help you on that,'" Kushner told Trump, as he related the story to another Republican at the time," the authors wrote.

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Hope Hicks told Donald Trump he lost the 2020 election and that 'nobody's convinced me otherwise," book says - Yahoo News

A book that names Donald Trump as the son of man and the Christ was promoted by its author at multiple rallies for the former U.S. president.

Author Helgard Mller said that he believes there are two Christs, with Jesus being the son of God who was betrayed by Judas, and Trump being the son of man who was betrayed by [former U.S. Vice President Mike] Pence. He also claimed that his book, President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man The Christ, was not satire.

In September 2022, a Twitter user posted that flyers were available at an Ohio rally held for former U.S. President Donald Trump that named him as the son of man and the Christ. It was true that the flyers showed the cover of a real, published book from author Helgard Mller, titled, President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man The Christ. The rally took place on Sept. 17 at the Covelli Centre arena in Youngstown.

Mller confirmed to us via the Messenger app that he personally handed the flyers out at the Youngstown Trump rally. I did hand the flyers out. I gave them to the people in line. Some were sitting, he said. We also asked him if anyone with Trumps campaign or team had ever handed out the flyers in any official capacity. No, he answered.

Posts on Mllers Facebook page showed that he traveled with a trailer (the small one below) and some signage to help promote his book at Trump rallies. The books release appeared to have been around March 2022.

Is this satire?, a Facebook commenter asked. Nope, Mller answered. The real deal.

Another Facebook commenter asked for an explanation, posting, What!!?? TrumpThe Christ? Are you pulling our leg? Mller provided an answer by pointing to his interpretation of Bible verses, saying he believed the son of God to be Jesus Christ, and the son of man to be Trump, meaning he believed there to be two Christs:

You know that Jesus, the Son of God always spoke about the Son of MAN in a third person?

For whosoever shall be ashamed of me and of my words (Jesus, the Son of God), of him shall the Son of man be ashamed, when he shall come in his ownglory, and in his Fathers, and of the holy angels.

Have you not notice how Jesus, the Son of God spoke in the first person about himself and always referred to the Son of MAN in the third person?

Mller also told us that he believed there to be a comparison between Jesus being betrayed by Judas and Trump purportedly being betrayed by Pence, purportedly referring to the former U.S. vice presidents decision to follow the U.S. Constitution rather than overturning the results of the 2020 U.S. presidential election based on conspiracy theories. (In reality, no credible evidence of massive voter fraud has ever been produced to show that the election was stolen, as Trump often claimed.)

Following the Ohio rally, Mller uploaded a video that provided a longer explanation as to why he believed Trump to be the son of man and the Christ, as mentioned on the cover of his book. Dont get offended. Dont say, Ew, thats blasphemous,' he said. Jesus is the king of the Jews. Trump is the king of kings.

In sum, yes, its true that flyers were being handed out at a Trump rally for a book that called Trump the son of God and the Christ.

Sources:

Article IIExecutive Branch. Constitution Annotated, https://constitution.congress.gov/browse/article-2/section-1/.

@HelgardMullerShow. Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/HelgardMullerShow/.

Howie, Craig. Trump Rallies for Vance and Himself in Ohio. POLITICO, 17 Sept. 2022, https://www.politico.com/news/2022/09/17/trump-rally-vance-ohio-midterms-00057341.

Luke 22 New International Version.Bible Gateway, https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%2022&version=NIV.

Mller, Helgard.President Donald J. Trump, The Son of Man The Christ. Outskirts Press, Incorporated, 2022.

@nothoodlum. Twitter, 19 Sept. 2022, https://twitter.com/nothoodlum/status/1571904092720746502.

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Does a Book Call Trump 'The Son of Man, The Christ'? - Snopes.com

President Trump often complained about the deep state of career civil servants who, he asserted, were determined to undermine his presidency. He promised to drain the swamp, and his aide Steve Bannon predicted the deconstruction of the administrative state.

But it was his own presidential appointees who most visibly resisted his directives. Political appointees are expected to be the most loyal advocates of a presidents policy agenda, riding herd on the many bureaucracies of the executive branch. Yet Trumps appointees in the White House, cabinet, military, and intelligence community refused to carry out many of the presidents directives to an extent unprecedented in the modern presidency. President Trumps appointees went well beyond the normal disagreements about policy that are typical in every administration; they resorted to slow walking orders, refusing to comply with directives, and even outright sabotage. Leadership is central to the presidency. The resistance to President Trump by his highest level officials illustrates how his own appointees judged his leadership.

Senior members of the White House staff often tried to thwart Trumps instincts. For example, Staff Secretary Rob Porter considered Trumps desire to withdraw from the Paris Climate Accord unwise. So, Porter took a draft statement off Trumps desk. Similarly, National Economic Council Director Gary Cohn and Porter decided to slow-walk an order to withdraw from the NAFTA free trade agreement. Cohn told Porter: I can stop this. Ill just take the paper off his desk before I leave. If hes going to sign it, hes going to need another piece of paper. Later, after multiple reviews, Trump got his way on the Paris Accord and NAFTA.

In August 2017, Trump wanted to fulfill a campaign promise to withdraw from the U.S. free trade agreement with South Korea, and a letter was prepared to that effect. Cohn thought that if Trump saw the letter, he would sign it; so Cohn quietly removed it from Trumps desk. Eventually Secretary of Defense James Mattis talked the president out of abandoning the agreement.

During the Mueller investigation about possible Trump campaign coordination with Russia, Trump ordered White House Counsel Donald McGahn and Chief of Staff Reince Priebus to have Mueller removed, but they refused. Trumps counsel, Pat Cipollone, refused Trumps order to take a 2020 election case to the Supreme Court.

Reflecting on his White House service, Staff Secretary Rob Porter recalled: A third of my job was trying to react to some of the really dangerous ideas that he had and try to give him reasons to believe that maybe they werent such good ideas. When top economic adviser Gary Cohn recalled how he removed decision papers from the presidents desk, he said: Its not what we did for the country. Its what we saved him from doing.

Though White House staffers are powerful, cabinet secretaries are officers of the United States and hold the most authority in the executive branch, short of the president. Yet Trumps appointees often refused to do his bidding. When Secretary of Homeland Security Kirstjen Nielson refused to implement a White House plan to arrest thousands of immigrants in major cities across the country and deport them, Trump fired her.

For all of his posturing about the military power of the United States, President Trump did not respect the norms of military leadership. President Trump demonstrated his attitude toward his secretaries of state and defense as well as military leaders. In a meeting with them in July 2017 at the Pentagon, after Trump had been briefed on the status of U.S. forces, Trump lashed out at his top civilian and military leaders: Youre all losers. . .. Youre a bunch of dopes and babies. No commander in chief had ever spoken to his top national security appointees in that manner.

In the spring of 2017, Trump ordered the removal from South Korea of the U.S. radar installation, that was essential for detecting any missiles coming from North Korea. Secretary of Defense Mattis refused to carry out the direct order until he was able to talk the President out of his decision. Secretary Mattis also rejected Trumps desire to Kill Bashar al-Assad

On July 26, 2017 President Trump tweeted that, contrary to then current policy, the military would not allow any transgender individuals to enter the armed forces. Mattis slow walked the order until the Supreme Court allowed it to go into effect. On November 11, 2020, General Mark Milley was given a memo, signed by President Trump, stating: I hereby direct you to withdraw all U.S forces from Afghanistan. General Milley and Acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller went to the White House and Trump was convinced to rescind the memo.

In line with President Trumps distrust of the career services, he considered the intelligence community to be part of the deep state. After meeting with President Putin, Trump took him at his word that Russia did not try to affect the 2016 election. In doing so, he ignored the unanimous consensus among the DNI, CIA, NSA, and FBI.

Trump was not the only president to have conflicts in his White House staff or who requested the resignations of cabinet secretaries. But his administration set records in turnover in Executive Office of the President (EOP) and the cabinet.

At the White House level, Trump had four chiefs of staff, four national security advisors, five directors of National Intelligence, four press secretaries, and six communications advisors (including acting officials). Likewise, the turnover in Trumps cabinet (14) exceeded by far the first term turnover of all other modern presidents. Trump had four secretaries of defense, four attorneys general, and four secretaries of homeland security (including acting secretaries). When Trump decided to replace his officials, he often insultingly fired them by tweet (for example, Priebus, Esper, Nielsen, Tillerson, and Coats, among others).

Despite President Trumps complaints about the deep state, the above examples illustrate the willingness of top-level White House aides and cabinet secretaries to actively undermine his wishes.The danger is that in a second term Trump would not make the mistake of appointing officials with integrity and courage.

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President Trump and the shallow state - Brookings Institution

In February 1992, a small, graying man in a slightly wrinkled suit eased himself into a seat across from the television host Larry King. Larry King Live was the hottest show on cable newsmostly because it was the top-rated show on CNN, the only cable-news channel widely available in the U.S. at the time. And so it was there that a reedy-voiced Texan announced that he would run for president if and only if his supporters got him on the ballot in all 50 states.

Thus began the improbable rise of Ross Perot, the billionaire presidential candidate who threw the 1992 presidential campaign into disarray, first by entering as an independent, then by dropping out just a few months before the election, and finally by jumping back in with only a month left to go. Despite his erratic campaign, he captured nearly 20 percent of the vote: the best showing for a third-party presidential candidate in 80 years.

From the May 1993 issue: Ross is boss

The Perot phenomenon was more than a curiosity of the 1992 campaign. It revealed a political culture in crisis, one reeling from the end of the Cold War, profound economic shifts, a rapidly transforming media landscape, and a newly empowered generation of women and nonwhite Americans. It also revealed a frustrated and malleable electorate with loose ties to the major parties and their platforms.

It was a moment that mattered because of both the discontent and the possibilities it highlighted. And although Perot was an independent, his run sheds light on the current state of the Republican Party. People curious about the dramatic changes in the party over the past several years often start with the 2016 election, but they would do better to look back to 1992. In that election, as well as in the years that followed, the party sketched out a path designed to attract disillusioned voters not through the flexible, heterodox politics of the Perot campaign but through a hard-right, reactionary politics made palatable by a new style of political entertainment and a deepening anti-establishment posture. That path led to the election of Donald Trump, which by the 2010s was not only a possible outcome of the choices the right had made in the 1990s, but one that had been a long time coming.

The 1992 election, the first after the end of the Cold War, came after a decade of Republican successes. Ronald Reagan won two terms as president in back-to-back landslides, and his vice president, George H. W. Bush, won in 1988 in a landslide of his own. But by the early 1990s, the electorate was frustrated, if not furious. The adrenaline spike of the Gulf War, which sent Bushs approval rating into record-high territory, vanished as the economy stuttered into a recession.

That recession was compounded by broader domestic shifts and the new geopolitical reality of the postCold War world. California, which had been particularly reliant on the Cold War to fuel its universities and aerospace industry, felt the collapse the hardest. But the pain was also felt by factory workers, who were caught in a decades-long shift to service and information-sector work. Added to the frustrations of the recession was genuine uncertainty about what role, if any, the U.S. should play in the world now that the Cold War was over. The Gulf War had been a short, triumphal affair, but as it faded from the headlines, it offered few answers about what should follow.

But Pat Buchanan did have answers. Buchanan, a former communications director in the Reagan White House and a popular television personality, felt unconstrained by party orthodoxies. He had long professed his belief that the biggest vacuum in American politics today is to the right of Ronald Reagan, and he set out to prove that in his 1992 campaign for the Republican nomination. He ran well to the right of Bush, not just taking hard-line positions on issues such as immigration (he called for a Buchanan fence at the border) and affirmative action but also resurrecting themes of the Old Right of the 1930s and 40s: a closed, cramped vision of an America that needed to be protected from foreign trade, foreign people, and foreign entanglements. He carried out an America First campaign that argued against U.S. involvement abroad and denounced free-trade deals such as the newly negotiated North American Free Trade Agreement.

From the February 1996 issue: Right-wing populist

He also brought a dark note to the campaign, calling for a revolution against a whole slew of enemies: liberals, feminists, immigrants, even Republicans such as George Bush. Running against Bush for the nomination, Buchanan took to calling him King George, promising that his supporters, the Buchanan brigade, would lead a new American revolution if Buchanan won. Even Buchanan was stunned by how well his message resonated. When reports came in on the day of the New Hampshire primary that he and Bush were neck and neck, Buchanan, who was in the middle of typing his speech withdrawing from the race, looked around his hotel room and asked, What the fuck do we do now?

Buchanan lost that night, but his unexpectedly strong showing suggested two things: first, that an incumbent president could be vulnerable to a challenger, and second, that the challenger didnt need to be a political insider. Buchanan had never held elected office before, and neither had the man who, two days later, sat down on Larry King Live to announce that he would welcome efforts to draft him into the 1992 race.

That outsider, anti-establishment ethos coursed through the 1992 campaign. It was most obviously present in Perots independent runthe first efforts to draft him came from a group called THRO, Throw the Hypocritical Rascals Outbut it was also part of the Buchanan campaign. Bill Clinton, the young Arkansas governor running for the Democratic nomination, also tapped into the outsider aesthetic, playing the saxophone on The Arsenio Hall Show and fielding questions from an MTV audience on everything from his youthful drug use to his underwear preferences. But for Clinton, this shake-things-up approach was mostly superficial, playing into the sentiment of the moment without offering much of substance to address it and not as novel as it appeared: Presidential candidates had been dabbling in those sorts of cameos for decades, including Richard Nixon, who popped up on the sketch-comedy show Laugh-In during the 1968 race.

The real media innovators on the trail in 1992 were Buchanan and Perot. Neither man had ever held elected office; both built their following through regular media appearances. Buchanan, who had been an editorial writer for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch before he joined Nixons 1968 campaign, rose to national fame as the host of CNNs Crossfire and a regular panelist on PBSs The McLaughlin Group. Perots path was more deliberately plotted: He sold himself as a swashbuckling billionaire, and his antics, including a daring rescue mission to pluck hostages out of Iran, became the stuff of legendand of the 1986 miniseries On Wings of Eagles (starring Richard Crenna as Perot). He then transformed himself into a political figure through frequent ratings-spiking appearances on Larry King Live.

Politics in the United States had always been full of artifice, but presidential candidates had nevertheless found it necessary to construct their personas around experiencetime spent in elected office or military leadership. For Buchanan and Perot, the new age of interactive media (both Crossfire and Larry King Live started as call-in radio shows) infused their candidacies with a sense of novelty and authenticity. And the potent anti-establishment anger coursing through the country meant that they wore their inexperience as a feature, not a flaw.

Neither Perot nor Buchanan won in 1992, but they left a lasting impact on politics. At first, Perots vision appeared to be winning out. As the 1994 midterms approached two years later, both Democrats and Republicans fretted over how to capture the Perot vote. It was a hard segment of the electorate to pin down. Perots personality was mercurial, his leadership style authoritarian, and his views heterodox. He opposed free trade and abortion restrictions and supported gun regulation and balanced budgets. Unlocking the key to his appeal, which attracted Republicans and Democrats in roughly equal numbers, would not be easy.

Todd S. Purdum: Were all living in the world Ross Perot made

On the Republican side, House Minority Whip Newt Gingrich leaned into the challenge. He brought aboard Frank Luntz, who had worked as a pollster first for Buchanan and then for Perot, to crack the Perot code. Luntz argued that Perot appealed to so many people because he was explicitly nonpartisan and devoted to reining in the excesses and privileges of political elites. If Republicans wanted to win over his voters, they would have to focus less on attacking Democrats and more on developing a robust reform agenda.

That advice was an awkward fit for Gingrich. He had built his reputation by weaponizing ethics charges, which left an air of scandal around Democratic Speaker of the House Jim Wright that eventually led to his resignation. He had also spent the past few years using the organization GOPAC to train Republicans in rhetorical tricks for demonizing Democratspart of an ongoing effort to polarize the parties.

Eager to build a coalition that would put Republicans in the majority and himself in the speakers office, Gingrich worked with Luntz to create the Contract With America, a document that made no reference to President Clinton or either political party, and that was ostensibly designed to promote only 60 percent issuespolicies that polled with at least 60 percent support.

Gingrich, the Contract, and Republicans all won in 1994, a historic victory that ushered in a new freshman class further to the right than that of any other House in modern U.S. history. Yet if pursuit of the Perot vote shaped Gingrichs rise to the speakers office, he quickly abandoned it for his preferred path of polarization. Under pressure from the True Believers, as the right-wing hard-liners in his caucus dubbed themselves, he shifted focus from reform to a series of innovative obstructionist maneuvers, including endless investigations, lengthy government shutdowns, and an unpopular impeachment effortnone of which spoke to the frustrations and angers of postCold War Americans.

As Perots popularity suggests, those frustrations and angers could have attached themselves to any of a number of political figures and agendas. But the agenda that the right built over the course of the 1990s would be far more Buchanan than Perot. When an anti-government militia movement gained power in the early 90s, the right saw it as an opportunity, not a warning. Republicans such as Representative Helen Chenoweth of Idaho embraced the causes and conspiracies of her militia constituents, and the NRA played into attacks on federal agents in fundraising letters that called the agents jack-booted government thugs. (After the Oklahoma City bombing, George H. W. Bush resigned from the NRA in response to those comments.)

On other issues, too, the party lurched to the right. Republicans and Democrats both took a hard turn toward restricting immigration, opening the door for Buchananite calls to build a border wall, end birthright citizenship, restrict nonwhite immigration, and cut off nearly all nonemergency public services, including education, to undocumented migrants. And although the party had been moving toward a more hard-line position on abortion for two decades, there still seemed to be room to maneuver: After a significant number of Republicans voted for Perot, they then briefly flocked to Colin Powell, who also supported abortion rights, in the lead-up to the 1996 presidential primaries. But the party ultimately chose a hardline position on reproductive rights.

On issue after issue, the right developed a politics of resentment. Feminism was to blame for flooding the workplace with women who not only competed for wages but raised complaints about harassment and unequal treatment. Immigrants were to blame for overcrowded schools, high housing costs, and lower wages. Government agents were coming for your guns, your land, your money, and your rights, using immigration policy and affirmative action to ensure that white men would not have the resources or the power they once enjoyed.

These were not popular politics in the 1990s. Outsider candidates such as Perot and even Clinton offered an alternative vision to the exclusionary populism of Buchanan. But voters who subscribed to these politics were always there, and the party chose them and cultivated them, slowly over the next decade and then very quickly once Barack Obama took office. That choice gave us the politics of white-male resentment and the new generation of pundit-politicians we have today.

In that sense, the party had been preparing for a quarter century for a figure like Donald Trump: a bombastic television personality whose solutions to voter frustrations involved pointing at the very same groups that Buchanan once had. Trump was not an exception; he was simply the next step on a path the right had started down almost three decades before.

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The Republican Party Was Trumpy Long Before Trump - The Atlantic

Heres the kicker. Cannon says, Plaintiff has claimed injury from the threat of future prosecution and the serious, often indelible stigma associated therewith. Well, yes, Trump may be harmedbecause there is probable cause to believe crimes have been committed and the FBI may have evidence of it. Trump is in a world of legal trouble because of his own actions and for no other reason than that, period.

The same week that the Justice Department appeals Cannons decision, we have learned that the DOJ sent dozens of subpoenas to high-level Trump operatives and advisers, now making clear that virtually all of Trumps efforts to remain in office are under investigation. We do not know of, nor have we seen any evidence that directly links the Mar-a-Lago national security investigation with the fake electors, Trump campaign financing, or the violence that erupted on January 6, 2021. But one thing is clear. Trumps attorneys are also receiving subpoenas.

Sadly, this is not surprising. Since the 2020 election, Trump lawyers have been in the news for efforts to overturn the results. Four Trump attorneys in particularRudy Giuliani, Sydney Powell, Jenna Ellis, and Boris Epshteynhave been in the sights of the January 6 committee for months. All had played some role, according to the committee chair, Representative Bennie Thompson; the attorneys spread the Big Lie, and at least two, Giuliani and Epshteyn, participated in the fake elector scheme. News reports state that federal agents seized Epshteyns phone pursuant to a warrant. A judge in the Michigan 2020 election case called for Trump attorneys, including Powell and others, to be investigated for ethics violations. The judge said it was about undermining the Peoples faith in our democracy and debasing the judicial process to do so.

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Judge Aileen Cannon Thinks Poor Donald Trump May Be Stigmatized - The New Republic

WASHINGTON Former President Donald Trump has set up his office on the second floor of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida as part replica of the Oval Office and part homage to his time in the real White House.

On the wall during a visit last year were six favorite photographs, including ones with Queen Elizabeth II and Kim Jong Un. On display were challenge coins, a plaque commemorating his border wall and a portrait of the former president fashioned out of bullet casings, a present from Jair Bolsonaro, the so-called Trump of Brazil.

This has become Trumps fortress in exile and his war room, the headquarters for the wide-ranging and rapidly escalating conflict with investigators that has come to consume his post-presidency. It is a multifront war, with battlefields in New York, Georgia and the nations capital, featuring a shifting roster of lawyers and a blizzard of allegations of wrongdoing that are hard to keep straight.

Never before has a former president faced an array of federal, state and congressional investigations as extensive as Trump has, the cumulative consequences of a career in business and eventually politics lived on the edge, or perhaps over the edge. Whether it be his misleading business practices or his efforts to overturn a democratic election or his refusal to hand over sensitive government documents that did not belong to him, Trumps disparate legal troubles stem from the same sense that rules constraining others did not apply to him.

The story of how he got to this point is historically unique and eminently predictable. Trump has been fending off investigators and legal troubles for a half century, since the Justice Department sued his family business for racial discrimination and through the myriad inquiries that followed over the years. He has a remarkable track record of sidestepping the worst outcomes, but even he may now find so many inquiries pointing in his direction that escape is uncertain.

His view of the legal system has always been transactional; it is a weapon to be used, by him or against him, and he has rarely been intimidated by the kinds of subpoenas and affidavits that would chill a less litigious character. On the civil side, he has been involved in thousands of lawsuits with business partners, vendors and others, many of them suing him because he refused to pay his bills.

While president, he once explained his view of the legal system to some aides, saying that he would go to court to intimidate adversaries because just threatening to sue was not enough.

When you threaten to sue, they dont do anything, Trump told aides. They say, Psshh! he waved his hand in the air and keep doing what they want. But when you sue them, they go, Oooh! here he made a cringing face and they settle. Its as easy as that.

When he began losing legal battles as president with regularity, he lashed out. At one point when the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, a traditionally liberal bench based in California, ruled against one of his policies, he demanded that aides get rid of the court altogether. Lets just cancel it, he said, as if it were a campaign event, not a court system established under law. If it required legislation, then draft a bill to get rid of the judges, he said, using an expletive.

But his aides ignored him and now he finds himself without the power of the presidency, staring at a host of prosecutors and lawyers who have him and his associates in their sights. Some of the issues at hand go back years, but many of the seeds for his current legal jeopardy were planted in those frenetic final days in office when he sought to overturn the will of the voters and hold onto power through a series of lies about election fraud that did not exist.

Many Americans could be forgiven if they have lost the thread of all the investigations amid the blizzard of motions and hearings and rulings of recent weeks. But they essentially break down this way.

Long before he became president, by many accounts, Trump played it fast and loose in business. The question is whether any of that violated the law. For years, according to his own associates, he inflated the value of his various properties to obtain loans.

Letitia James, the New York state attorney general, has been examining his business practices for more than three years to determine if they constituted fraud. When she summoned Trump to testify in a deposition, he invoked his Fifth Amendment right not to respond to questions on the grounds that his answers might incriminate him more than 400 times.

Trump has assailed James as a partisan Democrat who is coming after him for political reasons. As a candidate in 2018, she was an outspoken critic of Trump, calling him an illegitimate president and suggesting that foreign governments channeled money to his familys real estate holdings, which she characterized as a pattern and practice of money laundering.

But Trumps lawyers recently sought to settle the case, which could indicate concern about his legal risk, only to have their bid rejected by James. Because her investigation is civil, not criminal, she would have to decide whether her findings warrant a lawsuit accusing the former president of fraud.

The Manhattan district attorneys office, now led by Alvin L. Bragg, has looked into some of the same issues as part of a criminal investigation and is about to bring the Trump Organization, the former presidents family business, to trial on charges of fraud and tax evasion starting Oct. 24.

Allen H. Weisselberg, the longtime chief financial officer of the Trump Organization, has pleaded guilty to 15 felonies, admitting that he conspired with the company to carry out a scheme to avoid paying taxes on lavish perks. Weisselberg is obliged as part of his plea agreement to testify at the upcoming trial. But Trump is not a defendant, and Weisselberg has refused to cooperate with the broader investigation.

But Bragg has indicated skepticism that there is sufficient evidence to convict Trump. The district attorneys public suggestion that Trump would probably not face charges led to the resignation of two prosecutors leading the investigation, one of whom said in a resignation letter that the former president was guilty of numerous felony violations and that it was a grave failure of justice not to hold him accountable.

Trump put himself in possible legal jeopardy in the swing state of Georgia on Jan. 2, 2021, when he called Brad Raffensperger, the secretary of state, and demanded that he find 11,780 votes, just enough to reverse the outcome and take the state away from Joe Biden. During the call, Trump warned Raffensperger, a Republican, that he faced a big risk if he failed to find those votes, an implied threat the Georgian defied.

Trumps allies likewise sought to pressure state officials to change the results and, as they did in other key states that went for his opponent, tried to orchestrate a slate of fake electors to send to Washington to cast Electoral College votes for the defeated president instead of Biden, who won Georgias popular vote.

Fani T. Willis, the Fulton County district attorney, has cast a wide net, pressing for testimony by Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., and informing Rudy Giuliani, the former presidents lawyer, that he is a target of her investigation.

Willis appears to be building a possible case of conspiracy to commit election fraud or racketeering through a coordinated effort to undermine the election. In addition to Giuliani, multiple allies of the former president have been told they are targets, including the state party chair and members of the slate of fake electors.

Trump has dismissed Willis, a Democrat who was elected in the same 2020 balloting that he lost, saying her inquiry is, in the words of a spokesperson last year, simply the Democrats latest attempt to score political points by continuing their witch hunt against President Trump.

The House committee investigating the Capitol attack of Jan. 6, 2021, composed of seven Democrats and two Republicans, has done more to lay out a possible criminal case against Trump in the public space than any of the former presidents pursuers.

Its series of hearings over the summer, which could resume Sept. 28, showcased testimony by Trumps own advisers indicating that he was repeatedly informed that the 2020 election was not stolen, that what he was telling the public was not true, that there was no basis to challenge the outcome and even that the crowd he summoned on Jan. 6 included some armed people.

The committee documented just how wide-ranging Trumps efforts to hold onto power were how he pressured not just Raffensperger but officials in multiple states to change the outcomes, how he contemplated declaring martial law and seizing voting machines, how he tried to force the Justice Department to intervene even though he was told there was no case, how he plotted with congressional allies to orchestrate fake electors and ultimately how he sought to strong-arm his own vice president into blocking Bidens victory.

The committee has no power to prosecute, but it has gone to court to enforce subpoenas to testify and prompted criminal charges of contempt of Congress by the Justice Department against Steve Bannon and Peter Navarro, two former Trump aides. Bannon has been convicted and is awaiting sentencing; Navarro has asked a court to throw out his case.

But though lawmakers cannot indict Trump, they are debating whether to make a criminal referral recommending that the Justice Department do so. That has little substantive meaning, but it would raise the stakes for Attorney General Merrick Garland.

Garland remains in some ways the biggest mystery as Trump seeks to thwart investigators. An even-tempered, widely respected former prosecutor and appellate judge, Garland has said little to tip his hand, but his department is clearly pursuing multiple strands in its investigation of what happened leading up to and on Jan. 6.

The department has interviewed or brought before a grand jury former White House aides like Pat A. Cipollone and Marc Short; seized the phones or electronic devices of Trumps allies like John Eastman, Jeffrey Clark and Mike Lindell, and even a member of Congress; and blitzed out some 40 subpoenas recently to former White House aides like Stephen Miller and Dan Scavino and others close to the former president.

After spending much of the last 18 months prosecuting hundreds of Trump supporters who stormed the Capitol, Garlands team now seems to be examining multiple angles, including the fake electors plan, Trumps fundraising operation as he promoted false claims about election fraud and the former presidents own role in seeking to overturn the election.

What remains unclear is if Garland has a theory of the case yet. While the subpoenas indicated that investigators were looking at, among other things, efforts to obstruct, influence, impede or delay the certification of the presidential election, the department has yet to charge people around Trump and therefore has not laid out any legal conclusions about the actions taken by his camp.

One person who is not known to have been subpoenaed yet is Trump, but it remains a possibility. Bracing for the day the investigators show up on his own doorstep, Trump has been busy looking for lawyers to represent him because so many of his past lawyers no longer want to be involved with him or face legal trouble of their own.

In case Trump did not expose himself to enough legal trouble in his final days in office, he made decisions as he left the White House that would come back to haunt him as well.

As it happens

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The latest threat to the former president stems from his insistence on flying home with thousands of documents owned by the government, including hundreds marked with varying classified designations, and his failure to give them all back when asked.

Garlands team has indicated in court filings that it is looking at not only criminal charges related to mishandling classified documents but also obstruction of justice. A lawyer for Trump signed a document stating that he had returned all classified papers in his possession, which proved to be false when FBI agents searched Mar-a-Lago and found boxes of them. Investigators indicated the files were probably concealed and moved rather than turned over.

Trumps legal strategy in the papers case mirrors the approach he has often taken over the years find ways to delay and throw his adversaries off balance. By persuading a federal judge he got confirmed in the last days of his presidency to block investigators from using the retrieved documents while they are examined by a special master, he has hindered prosecutors for now.

But that may not last forever. He said this past week that I cant imagine being indicted but conceded that it was always possible because prosecutors are just sick and deranged. He went on to assert that he declassified the papers he took, even though there is no known record of that.

But his real strategy was clear this is a political battle as much as a legal one, and he warned darkly that there would be big problems if he were indicted because his supporters, I just dont think theyd stand for it.

Told by radio host Hugh Hewitt that his critics would interpret that as inciting violence, Trump said: Thats not inciting. Im just saying what my opinion is. I dont think the people of this country would stand for it.

c.2022 The New York Times Company

See the rest here:

Where six investigations into Donald Trump stand - Baltimore Sun

America's democracy crisis will not end anytime soon. Donald Trump and his acolytes in the Republican-fascist party continue to incite acts of right-wing violence, including terrorism, on a nationwide scale as part of their plan to end American democracy and replace it with authoritarianism and one-party rule.

The Big Lie continues to spread across the United States. A majority of Republicans now subscribe to the repeatedly disproven theory that the 2020 Election was somehow illegitimate, that Trump is the "real" president and Joe Biden is a pretender and usurper. "MAGA" is American neofascism; it hasfully conquered the Republican Party.

Even President Biden who is committed to political moderation and remains eager to find "unity" with "traditional" Republicans for the good of the country is finally issuing public warnings that today's Republican Party and the MAGA movement are basically enemy agents working to undermine America from within.

This moment of crisis demands bold, immediate leadership and collective action, not just from Biden and other leading Democrats but from rank-and file-Americans as well. But the urgency of stopping Trump and his forces is hamstrung by how the rule of law in a democracy operates slowly and justice often takes a very long time if it ever does arrive.

Will Donald Trump eventually be prosecuted, convicted and then imprisoned for his apparent high crimes, which may include violating the Espionage Act? Attorney and author Kenneth Foard McCallion believes that the answer is probably no.

McCallion is a former Justice Department prosecutor who also worked for the New York State Attorney General's office as a prosecutor on Trump racketeering cases. As an assistant U.S. attorney and special assistant U.S. attorney, he focused on international fraud and counterintelligence cases that often involved Russian organized crime.

McCallion is also the author of several books, including "Profiles in Cowardice in the Trump Era" and "Treason & Betrayal: The Rise and Fall of Individual-1."

In this wide-ranging conversation, he offers his view that Donald Trump, along with his inner circle and his businesses, operate like an organized crime family. McCallion saysthese attributes and behavior help to explain Trump's affinity for foreign demagogues and other corrupt elements, including Eastern European and Russian criminal organizations.

McCallion reflects on his personal experience prosecuting Trump and his organizations, and the challenges of going up against a man he describes as a likely sociopath and a skilled pathological liar.

McCallionexplains the approach that Merrick Garland and the Department of Justice will likely take in prosecuting Trump for the government documents he stored at Mar-a-Lago and the events of Jan. 6. Any such prosecution will require both overwhelming irrefutable evidence and a simple and direct story to tell a jury about Trump's misdeeds. McCallion also says that contrary to some media reports, Trump can definitely still be prosecuted even if he announces he is running for president.

Want a daily wrap-up of all the news and commentary Salon has to offer? Subscribe to our morning newsletter, Crash Course.

Toward the end of this conversation, McCallion outlines a likely scenario for the final disposition of such a prosecution. He believes that Trump may be brought down by a litany of civil lawsuits that will cripple him financially, not by a high-profile criminal case in which the former president is "perp-walked" in handcuffs and then sent to prison.

This conversation has been edited for clarity and length.

How are you feeling, given everything that's happening? With your expertise and experience, how do you process all these events? What are you seeing?

The next book I'm working on is actually titled "Civil War II," but the ending is yet to be written. Over the last few weeks, I've been shocked at the extent of what we are learning about the Espionage Act and the hiding of secret government documents by Trump at Mar-a-Lago.

Why did he do that? I don't know.But I do believe that kind of hubris, and that inability to really let go of the mantel of the presidency, may in the end be his undoing. Trump has certainly left himself open for being prosecuted for serious crimes related to espionage and various other things.

That kind of hubris, and that inability to really let go of the mantel of the presidency, may in the end be Donald Trump's undoing.

There are encouraging signs. I was quite delighted that a friend and former mentor of mine, Raymond Dearie, who is a retired district judge from the Eastern District of New York, where I was in the U.S. attorney's office, will most likely be the special master [reviewing the Mar-a-Lago documents]. I was worried that the Justice Department and the attorney general had dozed off and napped for several months, but it appears they are hard at work now.

The Jan. 6 committee really gave the Department of Justice a lot of impetus and momentum. There are also good indications that justice may actually be done with the New York attorney general's [civil] case, and perhaps the Manhattan DA's [criminal] case too.

Is there actually anything shocking about any of the things Trump and his allies have done? Donald Trump has been a public criminal for decades. Jan. 6 was in many ways a predictable event and was announced beforehand.My point of view is pretty simple. We know who Donald Trump is. There is a long pattern of his evil behavior. What is "shocking" about any of this? He is utterly predictable.

Those of us who know Donald Trump also understand that he is probably beyond reformation and may actually be psychopathic. However, I think it's important to say that Donald Trump's behavior and presidency, and what he continues to do, has been a shock to the democratic system. We cannot lose the capacity to be outraged at Trump's behavior. We need to have that sense of outrage in order to protect the country's democratic institutions, which are under attack right now.

Where are the consequences for Donald Trump and his apparent criminal acts and other wrongdoing?

I do believe that the Justice Department probably should have moved much faster with the Mar-a-Lago documents, given that we are entering an election season. However, we need to uphold the principle that no man is above the law no matter what time of year it may be, political happenings or not.

It's never a convenient season for the rich and powerful to be held accountable. It's almost a perfect storm at this point between the Department of Justice investigation, the New York attorney general's investigation and various civil suits against Trump. The pot is boiling now in several different respects. One or more of these investigations will almost certainly lead to the undoing of the Trump Organization.

There is also significant personal liability for Donald Trump for the obstruction of justice and for a long list of crimes that are now being investigated. Attorney General Garland and the Justice Department really have to follow through this investigation to its logical conclusion. The evidence is overwhelming. Any honest prosecutor is not going to want to say, "I pulled my punches," or, "I let Donald Trump go just because he's the former president."

You have a lot of experience with Donald Trump. You faced him and his organization as a prosecutor. When you saw his candidacy in 2016 and then saw him win the election, what were you most afraid of?

I worked with the organized crime section of the Justice Department when I went up against Donald Trumpand his lawyer, Roy Cohn.We were primarily investigating labor racketeering, involving unions that were dominated by various organized crime families, including the Teamsters and others. In our investigation, we found that Donald Trump and some other developers used their connections with organized crime to get immunity from strikes by entering into corrupt contracts promising "no-show" jobs, for example. These corrupt contracts gave Trump and others a competitive advantage.

It quickly occurred to us, and I think it's apparent to all of us now, that Trump and his organization are just another organized crime family. They try to maintain the code of silence, but that hasn't been entirely successful. There is a complete disregard for the law. In terms of fraudulent intent, even if they could have made money honestly, Trump and his people like many organized crime-controlled companies try to cut corners.

It quickly occurred to us [in the DOJ], and I think it's apparent to all of us now, that Trump and his organization are just another organized crime family.

They take advantage of their connections with organized crime and their connections with corrupt foreign leaders, such as Putin. Russian organized crime always had a very close connection with the Trump organization. After Trump's casinos in Atlantic City went under and the banks started pulling back their financing, Trump and his organization and his development projects have been financed through shady money from Eastern Europe and Russia, from the oligarchs.

They have been Trump's lifeblood for his financing. His worldview has always been oriented towards the countries where oligarchs and dirty money are prevalent. Donald Trump was dead set on attempting to convert the United States into a replica, to some extent, of the antidemocratic, authoritarian, oligarchical systems we see in Hungary, Russia and various other parts of Eastern Europe.

Given your experience with Trump, what did the news media and the American public fail to understand about this man? Or perhaps, what were they afraid to acknowledge?

Many people naively thought that Trump, despite his outlandish behavior, was just being hyperbolic and not seriously intentioned. What they didn't realize is that Trump bought into his own nonsensical worldview. Millions of adoring people worship Donald Trump as he has said, he really could walk down Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and his followers would still love him.

Did Trump really believe that the election was stolen from him in 2020? The frightening thing is that Trump has not only convinced many of his followers of that, he has probably convinced himself of that, which makes him the most dangerous kind of dictator or autocrat. He has lost all sense of any ability to pull back from the brink. Donald Trump is not restrained by any of the guardrails of our normal democratic processes. He and Steve Bannon and the rest of that inner circle have brought the United States to somewhere quite different than this country's ever been before.

But in the end, I do believe that the pendulum will swing back, much as it did with, for example, Sen. Joe McCarthy in the 1950s with his Red scare. I truly think the wheel will turn and we're not going to go over the cliff.

Where does that hope and belief come from? Trump has escaped responsibility for decades.

Trumphas lost all sense of any ability to pull back from the brink. He is not restrained by any of the guardrails of our normal democratic processes.

As bad as things are now, and as divided as the country is, there have been other times in our past where we have faced great difficulties. Yet somehow we survived the turmoil and the storms and got to a better place. I think it's a constant struggle. We are in the midst of one of those fundamental struggles, with Trump and his movement and the assault on democracy and the rule of law.

As you said, Merrick Garland could have moved earlier. I'm one of the people who wondered what the hell he was waiting for: Lock him up! Help me understand what the law requires, versus what political expediency demands.

The Department of Justice has to be thorough here. When I was with the Department of Justice, as a young prosecutor, I'd be anxious to bring organized crime figures to trial. But like Trump, many heads of crime families delegate the dirty work to other people. So to nail Trump and hold him responsible beyond a reasonable doubt, you really don't want to leave anything to chance. You need overwhelming evidence.

I think we're really getting to the point where we have that critical mass, especially after the Mar-a-Lago search and the documents obtained there. That was a fumble by Trump on the five-yard line. He might well have gotten away with not facing a criminal indictment for all he had done before that, but he had the audacity and the hubris to take top secret government documents with him after leaving office.

People of ambition and of monumental ego, like Donald Trump, have blind spots. Trump is bringing himself down. What I really fear is that a smarter Trump-like figure, maybe like Ron DeSantis, could actually do a lot more damage than Donald Trump.

In my view, Trump is a criminal genius. When you go up against somebody like that in court, how do you prepare?

When I did my cases, it was much like building a brick house. You have to do it from the foundation up, but there's always a moment when a prosecutor has butterflies in his stomach. When you have to cross-examine a Trump-like figure or the head of an organized crime family or someone of that type more generally, there is anxiety even when you have overwhelming evidence against them

Remember, these people are pathological liars. I'm sure that Donald Trump, if he was given a polygraph, would pass with flying colors. It's a matter of experience, plus a natural sociopathic ability to lie.

Trump's had a lot of experience with lying and the courts. He has some pretty good counsel, but I think over the next few months that most of the documents taken from Mar-a-Lago are going to be turned back over to the Justice Department. We'll see the wheels of justice continue at that point. Letitia James, the attorney general in New York, will get a very solid result against the Trump Organization, as will the DA in Manhattan, Alvin Bragg. Those cases are not against Trump personally, but against his organization. His chief lieutenants will be brought down and face very substantial fines for their economic and financial sleight of hand.

What do you think the approach to prosecuting Trump will be? The evidence seems overwhelming, but nothing's decided until you're in court.

It has to be laid out very simply for the jurors. It's basically two plus two equals four. You have Trump with these documents, some of them in a basement, but some of these top-secret documents were found by the FBI next to his passport in a private part of his desk. These documents were close to him every day. Trump certainly had knowledge and awareness of the documents; he knew they were top secret. He knew they had been taken from the White House. I think that you would just put it to a jury that you don't leave your common sense and good reason at the door when you are sworn in as a juror.

It's basically two plus two equals four. ...Trump certainly had knowledge and awareness of the documents; he knew they were top secret. He knew they had been taken from the White House.

We spend our entire lives evaluating people, separating truths from falsehoods and connecting the dots. It's much the same way that organized crime figures were brought down. Al Capone, for example, was put in prison not for the many murders he committed, but for tax fraud. With Trump, it will be the same thing. It's a very simple story you can tell. With top secret documents, the story tells itself.

What do you think Trump was doing with the top secret and other highly classified documents?

Actually, on this point, I give Trump somewhat the benefit of the doubt. I think his ego would not let him leave all the trappings of power back in the White House. In his mind, he had to take something. Now, did he foreclose the issue of selling the documents for money if necessary, or using them for political purposes? Those avenues were available to him as well, but I doubt Trump had a clear-cut plan. He knew they were top secret documents and he took them. It is not a requirement that the prosecution establish his intent, other than an intent and a willfulness to keep top secret documents out of the government archives and in his own personal possession. Mar-a-Lago is a place that is crawling with potential spies, Chinese and otherwise.

Donald Trump engaged in a flagrant violation of his national duty. That willfulness and intent and recklessness is, I believe, sufficient for a criminal conviction.

So how do you approach finding a jury where you won't have one person who is going to nullify in Trump's favor. That's the practical problem. Is it possible to find an honest jury that is not tainted by Trumpists?

In jury selection, I always tell a client: You're never going to get the jury that you want, but you want a jury that's going to call the balls and strikes the way they really are. You don't want jurors who are dead set against you and supporting the opposition. Through your jury challenges, you can just weed out those people as best you can. You have to keep in mind that a lot of people underestimate jurors. For example, in the Paul Manafort trial some of those jurors were actually predisposed to be favorable to Donald Trump's worldview. Yet they found that Paul Manafort had violated the law on several counts and should be held liable under the criminal laws.

The jury system is a risky one. It's somewhat of a mystery, even to me, with all my decades of experience. But by and large, the guilty are convicted and the innocent can go free in our system, with some notable exceptions of course. Some jurors are reached by external forces, organized crime, political or otherwise. But by and large, I think the system is more or less equitable. It will be a great day for the justice system when Trump and some of his chief lieutenants are held accountable.

How do you explain to the average person what a RICO case is? How would you approach that type of prosecution in the case of Trump?

The racketeering laws are extremely flexible. It is much like describing an organized crime family that has a certain structure. The person at the top is calling the shots and the other members may not know what each of the others are doing. However, they subscribe to and agree with the overarching principles and goals of the organized crime family. In this case, that is to keep Donald Trump and his minions in power, to hold onto the White House through means fair and foul primarily foul. Trump and his minions reject the basic norms of democracy.

They've used mail and wire fraud and engaged in various other violations of federal and state law over an extended period of time as well. That is really the informal definition of a racketeering conspiracy. Trump and his minions have engaged in that behavior.

But I think that Garland and the Justice Department may well steer clear of an extremely complex RICO-type case and just go with some very pointed, targeted violations. These violations are clear: espionage and various other laws. There are the facts and evidence to support racketeering and conspiracy charges. But the problem is that the more you complexify a case, the more likely it is to run on for weeks. Jurors are human beings; you can start losing some of them.

In my opinion, the Garland Justice Department learned a lot from the Jan. 6 committee hearings. It's probably going to follow that more simplified, direct, powerful route in bringing its prosecutions.

What can the Department of Justice prove conclusively about Donald Trump in order to hold him criminally accountable? It is easy to list all of Trump's acts of perfidy, immortality and wrongdoing, but that may not be enough to prosecute and convict him. It may all be wrong, but is it clearly illegal?

I think the Justice Department is going to focus on two scenarios. One will be the events leading up to Jan. 6. The coordinating and fundraising, the attack on the Capitol, the attempted election subversion and related happenings. The Justice Department has built a pretty strong case that Trump was the lead instigator of that demonstration and the assault on Congress. The other focus will be on the Espionage Act and related charges regarding the documents at Mar-a-Lago.

What does the Department of Justice do if and when Trump announces that he is running for president? Do they have to hold off for another four years if he wins?

It is conceivable that Donald Trump might do some time. But I would not put the odds on him being handcuffed and perp-walked, with the press photographing him.

If the Department of Justice gets an indictment, it should happen sometime later this year. They wouldn't do it in the window from now to November, the political season, but maybe the end of this year or early next year. One of the things people don't realize, and maybe Trump doesn't realize, is that once he declares for the presidency he will not have the Republican National Committee and other groups paying for his legal defense at that particular point. Trump is an extremely cheap individual who will have to pay out of pocket for millions of dollars in legal fees.

The Justice Department will not stop or pause, except for the political season in the midterms. They will not stand down just because Trump is a presidential candidate. Whether he is a presidential candidate or not, Trump and his supporters are still going to say it's a political prosecution.

The best defense for Trump is to attack the prosecutors. The prosecutors have to take a few punches and be vilified in the press, as they were after the Mar-a-Lago search. Although he waited too long, Merrick Garland did hold a press conference, as well he should have. The Justice Department is not a punching bag. It's entitled to protect itself and its reputation.

Many observers are claiming that if Trump announces his candidacy, the Department of Justice will not proceed with prosecuting him because of some type of informal rule or guideline. Garland and the DOJ will pause everything at that point, and perhaps drop it entirely, because to prosecute a presidential candidate would look too "political."

Absolutely not. If they did such a thing, they would be violating their oaths and professional ethics. The rest of the country would be wondering why there's one set of laws for us and another set of law for Trump and his kind.

What happens if Donald Trump is prosecuted and not convicted? What are the next steps, as a legal matter?

I can see the O.J. Simpson scenario playing out here. O.J. beat the criminal rap, but he was done in by the civil cases. Although there's a focus on the Department of Justice investigation, there are a host of civil cases out there against Trump. Trump will be involved in litigation for years, whether or not he beats a criminal rap.

Many people with public platforms keep proclaiming that Donald Trump is going to jail. That it's inevitable and we are eventually going to see Trump do a perp walk.Is he going to jail, in any version of this universe? What are the real range of practical or realistic consequences for him?

If I were a betting man, I would not put the odds on Donald Trump being handcuffed and perp-walked with the press photographing him on the way to a jail cell. The Justice Department has to pursue the investigation to an indictment and then prosecute it. As you know, not every case reaches trial. There is always the possibility of plea deals. Yes, it is conceivable that Donald Trump might do some time. But it's more likely that there would be some sort of plea deal to some of these offenses, in order for Trump to avoid a jail sentence. Trump would have to allow himself to actually admit guilt for some of these crimes.

In the real world, yes, some of the guilty do escape justice. But with the focus on Trump and the evidence that's available, I believe there will be a day of reckoning. Exactly what the consequences are after that is anybody's guess.

Here is my best-case scenario. Donald Trump takes a plea offer. There are some fines and he agrees to not run for public office again. But he then continues to be a public menace, agitating for right-wing terrorism, threatening democracy, repeating Jan. 6 and inciting other unrest. But what message is sent if the Department of Justice makes a deal with him? If Trump is not convicted and put in jail, what does that mean for the future of the country?

Keeping Trump from the White House again is a real benefit to the country. He'd have to agree to that in any plea deal. Trump would have to explicitly promise not to run for public office again. Will he continue to agitate and attempt to grab press headlines? Of course, but the Republican Party and his followers, at some point, have to move on. Donald Trump has had his moment. In the end, the country will get past Donald Trump.

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about the endless Trump drama

Read more from the original source:

Former federal prosecutor: A "day of reckoning" is coming for Trump but he's not going to jail - Salon

The line between imagination and delusion is thin, as Donald Trumps initial reaction to an FBI search at Mar-a-Lago in August demonstrated. In the first days afterward, the former president saw the search as a political gift, not a blow: a chance to rally his base, put would-be challengers like Ron DeSantis in their place, and reconsolidate his eroding position as the leader of the Republican Party.

Over time, it has become clear that the FBI finding reams of top-secret documents at his club is not, in fact, a boon to Trump. Even with the presidential-records investigation slowed down by a sympathetic judge, the probe has exacted costs both political and monetary, including a $3 million prepayment to a lawyer aware of Trumps tendency to stiff people who provide services. Nearly every Trump adviser youve ever heard of, plus a few you havent, has been subpoenaed by the Justice Department in an investigation into election subversion, and the House committee looking into the same matter will return to public hearings later this month. The New York attorney general just rejected a settlement offer in an investigation into Trumps business.

David A. Graham: Trump opened Pandoras prosecutorial box

No single strategy can handle the range of problems Trump faces. With some clever forum-shopping, he managed to get the FBI investigation into the hands of a judge whom he appointed late in his termshe was confirmed after the 2020 electionand whose rulings have baffled and appalled legal experts. But this is a stalling tactic, not a solution, and not every judge draw will be so lucky. A second strategy is to cry political persecution, which is good at rallying the minority of the population who already stands behind him but unlikely to win over those who dont, especially because the claims are so unpersuasive.

This brings us to a third gambit: threats. If the people pursuing these criminal investigations into his conduct dont back off, he warns, someonenot him, mind youmight do something dangerous. In this heads-I-win, tails-you-lose logic, the justice system can either exempt Trump from the rule of law or risk someone destroying it by other means. Nice democracy youve got here. Shame if someone tried to make it great again, again.

In an interview yesterday, the conservative radio host Hugh Hewitt, a Trump critic turned flatterer, asked whether being criminally indicted would dissuade Trump from running for president in 2024. Trump took the answer in a dark direction.

Jeffrey Goldberg: Donald Trumps mafia mind-set

I dont think the people of the United States would stand for it, he said. I think if it happened, I think youd have problems in this country the likes of which perhaps weve never seen before. I dont think the people of the United States would stand for it.

The implication was clear enough that Hewitt felt the need to throw Trump a preemptive lifeline: You know that the legacy media will say youre attempting to incite violence with that statement.

Thats not inciting, Trump replied. Im just saying what my opinion is. I dont think the people of this country would stand for it.

But theres no need to believe hes merely making an analytical judgment. Anyone else can see as clearly as Hewitt what Trump is doing. As The Atlantics editor in chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, has noted, Trump commonly uses this mob-boss-derived method: He speaks in fluent innuendo and implication, making his desires clear while leaving himself just enough vagueness to be able to smirkingly deny it.

Read: The lurking menace of a Trump rally

Like a Mafia dons warnings, this Dons warnings serve as a kind of intimidation, trying to make authorities who care a great deal about the government, civil peace, and the reputations of their agencies (as Attorney General Merrick Garland clearly does) wonder whether its really worth enforcing the law against this particular would-be defendant.

These threats might also actually occasion violence. By now, everyoneTrump, Hewitt, you, mehas seen this happen. Sometimes, the violence comes from mentally disturbed individuals who think theyre doing what Trump wants, such as Cesar Sayoc, who sent bombs to Trump critics shortly before the 2018 midterms, or Ricky Walter Shiffer, who was killed after attempting to attack an FBI office in Cincinnati just days after the Mar-a-Lago search.

Other times, the violence comes from Trump backers who simply listen to what he says: the kinds of people who slugged protesters at campaign rallies after he waxed nostalgic for the good old days of rough treatment and offered to pay legal bills, or who stormed the Capitol on January 6, 2021, after Trump called on them to fight like hell.

If there was a time when Trump didnt know how people would respond when he makes these veiled threats, it has passed. He understands now, and does it anyway. His persistence also helps show why his claims that his exhortations on January 6 were not incitement are not to be believed.

This very real menace also makes Trumps threats ultimately self-defeating. When he speaks this wayor when he embraces QAnon, or whatever fringe view he happens to be espousing at the momentit riles up his backers, but it also drives away voters he needs to be a viable political force. This means the threats are unlikely to be Trumps salvation, even as they could inflict real harm on American democracy. He seems not to care.

See the rest here:

Trump's Threats of Violence - The Atlantic