Trump has perfected the "accuse your enemies of what you're doing ahead of time so that when you get accused you can just nyeah nyeah at them and nothing gets traction" strategy. Every accusation is a confession. It's been 8 years of gaslighting America and I am so sick of it.
Sorry for being earnest here. I find Trump repulsive. Is that derangement? No. He's deranged. The emperor doesn't just have no clothes, he smears himself in shit and demands you say it smells like roses.
Biden screwing up on immigration was almost certainly an example of TDS. Trump did this and that can’t possibly be right, so let’s do the exact opposite. Revoke Trump’s executive order and refuse to do anything about it till it’s time to check the polls for the reelection.
I used to think of this as the 180 Degrees From Trump fallacy. Sometimes the truth is just 40 degrees from something Trump said, or 90 degrees, but whenever Trump said something a host of people would decide that the exact opposite must be true.
Yascha Mounk actually has a fantastic article on “180ism”, to this point; I’ve always thought that should be the term people adopt to describe this phenomenon. Either way, it’s a useful concept and it pops up quite a bit in American politics.
Didn't that happen because the courts were about to shut down the executive action that closed the border during Covid? And then all that happened was a backlog of post-Covid asylum seekers came through. But that has largely dropped back to normal levels *already*-- it was a backlog after a period of low immigration, not a persistent increase.
Like what if Galactus was coming to Earth, devouring planets as he went, and instead of being united half of humanity was all "you say you want me to support professor X to help stop Galactus, but why are you so obsessed with Galactus instead of making a positive case for professor X??"
From the perspective of modeling the skeptics, one feels that maybe this is more like a scenario where Professor X is out of commission because plot reasons and instead you’re asking them to support Magneto to help stop Galactus, so their skepticism / demand for the affirmative case is a little easier to sympathize with.
That said: yes, you support Magneto even absent a convincing affirmative case because the alternative is Galactus eating the Earth!
Look, I want to agree with your comment, but I must say, this is a bad plan for Earth. Professor X is obviously the right person to defend Earth against humanoid threats and inspire us with his innate moral sense, but Galactus is a uniquely bad enemy for him to contest! If he tries to use his powers, there's almost no way for him to "understand" a mind as immense and ancient as Galactus, and he's probably far more likely to die or be taken over himself in the attempt. Yes, he has access to a large team of mutants, but again, their powers are not necessarily going to line up well. Reed Richards or Dr. Strange are much better candidates for saving Earth from a cosmic entity like Galactus.
But, if neither of them is available, I think Dr. Doom is the best Dark Horse savior. "Lesser of Two Evils" is the perfect rallying cry for this situation!
Please do not apologize for being earnest. The world (and the internet) would, IMO, be better places with a little more earnestness and less cynicism/snark.
Earnestly-expressed concern about Trump is not a commodity in short supply on the Internet, and can get tiresome to read *whether or not it’s well-founded* (the fact that some of it isn’t, despite the essentially infinite well of good-faith reasons to throw the vile scumbag on the midden of history where he belongs, also unfortunately has the effect of poisoning the well.) The Orange Man is bad — terrible, in fact - but I appreciate Casey’s approach to judiciousness in sincere public expression of that fact because I think it’s instrumentally a good idea.
The term "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is gaslighting because the people that parrot it often were the ones frothing over Obama's tan suit and Dijon mustard.
I usually just retort to those people "I guess I am sorry that I still have some human decency."
Rep Peter King (IRA-NY), leading Congressional expert on terrorist financing (because he has personal experience), is an asshole. Why am I not surprised.
If they had gone after him immediately on the classified documents I would take this seriously, but they gave him plenty of opportunities to return the documents _before_ getting the courts involved(other presidents have done the same thing he did, but returned the documents immediately upon being asked rather than doubling down)
I think Trump clearly and illegally refused to turn over classified documents and also conspired to destroy evidence. That doesn't mean the courts have not also been weaponized against him in other cases.
Can you make a coherent argument in support of this sarcastic take? The NYC case is the only one that I think you can even argue was not overwhelmingly legitimate, but even there the argument boils down to "yes, he clearly broke the law, but if it wasn't Trump then they wouldn't have brought charges". So Dems are weaponizing the courts to...prosecute people for legitimate violations of law? Like, what is the actual, rational argument that there's an issue here?
And not just that one case was questionable, but rather that Dems as a whole, and Biden specifically, are weaponizing the courts in the ways that Trump a) claims is happening, and b) has promised to do himself if elected?
The NYC case was amazing because right after the ruling, you could read people in Vox, NYMag, and NYT all give lucid reasons why the first felony conviction of an American president and major presidential candidate actually isn't on very solid legal ground. It was surreal. The tone was at direct odds with the content of what they were arguing. Like someone informing you that your childhood pet just died with an enormous grin.
The indoor voice went "yes, it could be this is just not all that sound of an application of obscure New York law whose reading could have easily put Hillary Clinton in jail for her mislabeled campaign spending, but who can say for sure!" And then because it was in an indoor voice, they didn't worry too much about it. No, sorry, if you think this ruling is suspect, that is kind of an enormous deal like the January 6th legislature riot in *precisely the heuristic* of "we can't keep having this sort of thing happen again and have free and fair elections."
Maybe it's one weird event and we'll move on. I am quite open to that read of both Jan 6 and the NYC ruling. It's entirely possible. But the alternative is we're having regular violence at the transfer of power and regular felony prosecution of controversial politicians using ambiguous state laws. Neither are sustainable under the terms of what we call a republic.
Even if you think both are bad, I don't see how you compare the storming of the US Capitol to try and retain power for a man who lost a democratic election to a single state DA using a legitimate law to go after conduct that was actually committed and violated the law, even if the targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence. They didn't manufacture the facts to prosecute him. They took genuinely corrupt activity and applied the law to a highly publicized corrupt act.
I will forever be upset at the NYC DA for bringing the case, if only because it's caused such an enormous distraction.
Using a dubious legal reasoning of the variety Trump could've attempted to convict Hillary Clinton with in 2017 for her mislabled Fusion GPS spending or mishandling of classified information on a private email server is actually bad. One could just as easily say "they didn't manufacture facts about Hillary" or there was "genuinely corrupt activity" for prosecuting either of those two things. It's entirely plausible to read it that way. But convicting Hillary would be wrong. "The targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence." Well what a relief, the Lord almighty has stepped in and He has decided America will never again have a controversial prominent politician. I guess we don't have to worry about a thing.
Because it's a high-stakes election and a Democratic DA did it after promising people in his campaign to do something like this, the very same logic Democrats rightly used against "Lock Her Up" in 2016 is just forgotten. The problem isn't any "enormous distraction"; most voters have forgotten about it right now. The problem is the precedent for controversial national politicians running for office in the future. It's telling major liberal outlets were running pieces talking about the sheer oddity of combining an obscure NY state law with misdemeanor document charges to produce this outcome. If you can't imagine any random Republican DA trying this stunt, you have more faith in Republicans than I do!
"Using a dubious legal reasoning of the variety Trump could've attempted to convict Hillary Clinton with in 2017 for her mislabled Fusion GPS spending or mishandling of classified information on a private email server is actually bad. One could just as easily say "they didn't manufacture facts about Hillary" or there was "genuinely corrupt activity" for prosecuting either of those two things. It's entirely plausible to read it that way. But convicting Hillary would be wrong."
If HRC was responsible for that reporting and it could be shown that it was reported that way for a corrupt purpose then I'm not sure what the issue would be. I see this a lot with Republican defenses of Trump's corruption- "they'll come for your folks too if you let this happen!" If HRC committed criminal or corrupt actions then she should be subject to prosecution. I don't have any issues with that. My familiarity with the facts of Fusion GPS vs. Trump's behavior makes her connection to the criminal conduct feel much more tenuous than Trump's was, but that's for a prosecutor to decide.
""The targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence." Well what a relief, the Lord almighty has stepped in and He has decided America will never again have a controversial prominent politician. I guess we don't have to worry about a thing."
Again, I'm not sure why the prospect of a future controversial politician who engages in corrupt and arguably criminal conduct being subject to potential criminal prosecution is something that we should fear- we should welcome the notion that no one is above the law. My comment about his prominence highlighted a relatively basic and uncontroversial fact, which is that criminal activity that takes place in the public eye raises the possibility of prosecution. Just this past week, there was a guy arrested for fighting outside the Ravens game because the video of the assault went viral. Fights outside of football stadiums happen all the time, but the prominence of this one in the public consciousness meant that he lost his job and was arrested. Is that "fair" since other people do the same thing and don't get arrested? Maybe not, but I have a hard time feeling that bad for people who engage in legitimate criminal conduct and are prosecuted for it, even if they wouldn't have been charged if they hadn't spent so much time in the public eye.
"The problem is the precedent for controversial national politicians running for office in the future."
Won't someone PLEASE think of the future politicians?!?!?! Any future politician who is ethical isn't worried about the precedent this sets. Any individual who engages in rampant corrupt activities, such as Trump, who was thinking about engaging in a political life may now think twice about subjecting their behavior to this level of criminal scrutiny. That doesn't trouble me.
"If you can't imagine any random Republican DA trying this stunt, you have more faith in Republicans than I do!"
I certainly can! But I imagine they'll be tethered, at least ostensibly, to the law in the same way that Bragg's case was. You seem to be worried than non-criminal conduct, perhaps even non-corrupt conduct, will be prosecuted for made up reasons just to go after political opponents. I have less concern about that since, again, the charges here were based on a real law and the facts were what actually happened. Doesn't mean that Trump won't win on a variety of technical legal grounds on appeal (that's why appeals exist- because not everything goes perfectly and mistakes and misinterpretations in the lower court do happen), but that doesn't make the existence of the charges outrageous.
The charges were filed a year and a half ago. If DAs were going to turn around and manufacture charges as retaliation against this case they've certainly had plenty of time to do so. The fact they haven't is telling.
Again, I wish this case hadn't been brought, but that's because it's so easy to caricature and use for political gain, not because the underlying facts and issues are out of bounds or corrupt.
Except there is a strong argument in Hillary's defense that doesn't apply to Trump. What she did was not illegal (or perhaps, not prosecutable if that's more palatable to you.)
While I can't speak to the Fusion GPS spending situation as I have done no research on the topic. I did listen to 16 hours of Comey (A lifelong republican) testifying before congress regarding her email server, and the man made a very compelling case that the email scandal was driven by politics rather than fact.
In his words "I know this is hard for some people to hear, but this was not a close call."
Mens Rea requires that an individual be aware they are committing a crime (beyond reasonable doubt) before you can convict them. While you don't need to know EXACTLY what crime you are committing, you DO need to have some awareness that you are doing something wrong.
Recall that the state department had a standing policy that NO classified information be transmitted electronically. Also recall that many members of congress use their personal emails for work purposes. Now recall that Hillary was ~68 years old at the time.
In other words, in Clinton's mind, she told her staff to not send anything classified through email, and that she could just keep working on non-classified documents on this "server thing" that she probably didn't fully understand but trusted was secure enough for non-classified information.
This is obviously terribly irresponsible. She should have known some classified information would inevitably pass through her server, policy or not, and it's certainly a good argument for firing her, but it is feasible she had no idea she was breaking policy, and that's what the FBI decided "unanimously" (according to Comey).
To sum up, one could NOT say there was "genuinely corrupt activity", regarding the email scandal. The legal facts were truly just different.
I do not actually believe the main problem with our democracy is politicians mislabeling campaign payments from time to time. It's not great, but it's far from the biggest issue with our politicians, including Trump.
Should we only do things if they're addressing the main problems with our democracy? If it's not "the biggest issue" with our politicians we should just move along? This seems like a walk-and-chew-gum scenario.
Why is that? I mean it has been mismanaged in a ridiculous way but that isn’t the same thing as being caught in a recorded phone call pushing a sitting governor to illegally halt an election or make some votes appear.
I don't agree, and you've not presented any reason why I should, even though you had responded to a comment whose sole purpose was to see if anyone could lay out a coherent rationale for the claim that the courts are being weaponized against Trump.
I'd genuinely like to see someone make that argument to see what folks on here believe justifies the claim.
I don't consider the classified documents case as weaponizing courts against him. All of the other ones I do. Look into the details of the recent Jack Smith filing. The procedural rules were bent in order for him to drop a filing out-of-turn for the purpose of influencing an election.
Can you articulate specifically what rules you think were being bent? I'd appreciate a direct source.
But more directly, I'm not sure "a procedural rule was bent" is a great case to support the claim "The courts are being weaponized against Trump." Most court cases have some level of procedural fuzziness. If there wasn't, we could replace judges with a computer program!
I'm sorry are you talking about the highly classified documents that Trump himself said he took knowing he shouldn't have them or the Jan 6 case where Trump lead a violent mob to our capitol? Which of those behaviors do you think politicians should be immune from prosecution from? For that matter, at what matter is a politician so important that they we shouldn't try to keep them accountable for anything.
Well said, Casey, but I think that there's nothing interesting to say about Trump anymore. There's no new information and we spend too much time parsing the entrails of his every blurp.
No, the only interesting subject is Trump's supporters and voters. They see everything there is to know about Trump and they conclude, "yes, I definitely want four years of that."
"No, the only interesting subject is Trump's supporters and voters. They see everything there is to know about Trump and they conclude, "yes, I definitely want four years of that."
I think this is a mistake. Most people vote against the other party. Harris will be getting more votes because she is *not* Trump/Republican than because belief that she is somehow uniquely good for president. Similarly, Trump will be getting a lot of votes who pick him because he is *not* Harris/Democrat. Are there exceptions - sure, swing voters exist. But they are a very small (but important!) segment of the population.
Yeah, not enough electoral analysis takes this attitude into account. I have not always voted *for* Democrats but I have voted *against* Republicans 100% of the time so far. Sometimes it’s like a choice between being slapped across the mouth or kicked in the crotch, and those are the only choices. My vote doesn’t indicate that I love being slapped across the mouth.
The "first" under Trump was that anybody took the idea seriously. In all previous instances it was a fringe conspiracy theory that caused nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle to roll their eyes.
To be fair to LBJ, that was just how Texas politics was done at that time. He had previously lost the special election for senate in 41 precisely because he wasn’t as ruthless in rigging the precincts he controlled that time around, an error he did not make in 48.
Yes, the Democrats probably did steal the 1960 election. And it's to Nixon's credit that for the good of the country he didn't fight it, not unlike Gore's gracious concession in 2000.
Which suggests that the Democrats in Illinois may have acted shadily but it didn't end up stealing the election for Kennedy. (ALSO lowers my opinion of Kennedy)
That _is_ to Nixon's credit though - he had grounds to keep fighting and didn't. (And as it turns out it looks like he would have been wrong, even if justifiably so)
"But successful investors and entrepreneurs have no excuse for ignoring the extent to which integrity and the rule of law provide the necessary backstop for everything good that comes out of a capitalist economy."
1000000 times this! It boggles my mind that Dems aren't out there making this particular case over and over and over. The squishy Rs that I'm trying to convince actually respond to this argument!
(I know this article was about the positive case for Kamala -- which I appreciate and was well argued! -- but I didn't want to let that Trump point slide. Go out and say this to anyone who will listen!)
I think Mark Cuban has made this point a few times. But yes, obviously, if you're a businessman who relies on imports and not in Trump's good graces. Good luck.
And even if you are in his good graces now, we've seen how many times he's turned on people completely for petty reasons or no reason at all. I know every exec things they are special and will always be one of the oligarchs that isn't thrown out of a window but that is what they all think until they're halfway to the ground.
Since you brought up Cuban, I really liked Matt's suggesting him as a potential VP pick, and I kinda want to see him run for president in 2028 if Harris loses.
His entire career has been plagued by sexual harassment scandals, the sort of fact that would be wildly known here if he was entering politics on the pro-Trump side.
It should be pointed out that the sexual harassment accusations were not directed at Cuban personally but rather his organization and while he should have done a much better job beforehand, he did take strong ameliorative steps after it came out.
Also, there was an apparently bogus accusation against him personally about his behavior at a nightclub which the woman refused to pursue perhaps because no one there (including her boyfriend!) would corroborate her claim.
Totally agree. People who are in the global 1% should embrace the American project with open arms and be willing to pay slightly higher taxes to keep it going.
Do Democrats want to continue the American project with slightly higher taxes? I think these wannabe philosopher-kings hear the stuff about inequality, disparate impact, and radically reimagining all our social constructs, hierarchies and norms as actually pretty serious, and only restrained to the extent that the GOP is a meaningful force. They probably overweight it relative to Trump's more imminent and prosaic dangers, though.
I don’t think national electeds are advocating this stuff but blue city councils, school boards, and especially the academic/NGO/staffer complex is. A lot of Elon Twitter is amplifying and driving outrage around this stuff, which is pretty relevant to the California-centric tech community even if it’s nut-picking to a degree.
I dunno man, I live in one of these uber-progressive places, and yeah there is funny eye-roll-y stuff from time to time, but mostly it just truly doesn't affect my life at all.
We can't have housing construction because that's colonization. We can't enforce traffic laws or have any standards for behavior in public spaces because that's inequitable. We can't have tracking or magnet schools because they're racist. Housing, transportation, public space, and education add up to pretty significant swaths of life!
Competely agree, and trump would be way worse but the dems aren’t squeaky clean on this. Look at how many arms of the govt, including DoJ are going after elons companies for nakedly political reasons. Spacex getting sued by govt for diversity/Eeoc violations when they can’t hire foreigners due to ITAR restrictions. Musk/tesla not envied to EV round table even though ford, gm etc have shipped like .0001% of the EVs Tesla had. Govt contracting out rural high speed to comcast at like 17k/connection and 10 years of construction when starlink can do it for 500/connection and get everyone online in a year. I’m not a fan of musks politics, but it’s dumb to the gov to act like this.
Musk's response to this stuff is beyond the pale, but it does no-one any favors to deny that Democrats actively pushed him away. And furthermore, it's a genuine problem when the party of supposed competence in government does stuff like overpaying >>10x for rural Internet for asinine reasons. And even I get mad whenever a rocket launch is delayed for purely bureaucratic and political reasons.
This is actually somewhat of a problem. I get what you're saying about both sides, but partly as a result, Musk has put his support behind Trump to the tune of $75 M in funding. It also doesn't go unnoticed on the right, and it fuels the both sides talking points of conservatives. I prefer when the Democrats take the high road, as they have with indicting members of their own party when appropriate.
Fair, but I'm unsympathetic to Musk, who'd been playing footsie with right wingers well before this. I would like to live in a world where Dems take the high road all the time, but that's holding them to an impossible standard that Rs don't even try to achieve. Politics is sometimes dirty... it's fair for Rs to lob criticisms at Dems for this, but again, it's nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump is doing and the news media shouldn't be carrying water for him.
Your argument is that you don’t care that the govt is going against Elon for political reasons. This really negates your point about dems being above all of this. You do it or you don’t, there is no “we do it sometimes, only against the people who make us real mad”.
Yes, J. Willard Gibbs is pretty clearly explaining why the intended audience for this piece aren't going to be convinced by it. There is a vocal part of The Democratic Party that has spent the last decade suggesting that not only do they have the right to use the power of government to punish their political opponents, but they also have a moral obligation to do so. Trump is such a threat to political norms that we must abandon political norms to defeat him isn't going to work out when you fail to defeat him.
The problem with the "nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump is doing" criticism is that the current president is a Democrat. And while I agree that it's "nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump *will* be doing", that kind of argument is not nearly as convincing to voters.
Let's not forget that Musk, like Trump, can be a fabulist about these kinds of things, as Kevin Drum discusses regarding his claim about "sharks and whales":
Trump has perfected the "accuse your enemies of what you're doing ahead of time so that when you get accused you can just nyeah nyeah at them and nothing gets traction" strategy. Every accusation is a confession. It's been 8 years of gaslighting America and I am so sick of it.
Sorry for being earnest here. I find Trump repulsive. Is that derangement? No. He's deranged. The emperor doesn't just have no clothes, he smears himself in shit and demands you say it smells like roses.
Thanks Matt. Really enjoyed this column.
Yes - people talk about "Trump Derangement Syndrome," but nearly 100% of people with TDS are his fans, not his critics
Biden screwing up on immigration was almost certainly an example of TDS. Trump did this and that can’t possibly be right, so let’s do the exact opposite. Revoke Trump’s executive order and refuse to do anything about it till it’s time to check the polls for the reelection.
I used to think of this as the 180 Degrees From Trump fallacy. Sometimes the truth is just 40 degrees from something Trump said, or 90 degrees, but whenever Trump said something a host of people would decide that the exact opposite must be true.
Yascha Mounk actually has a fantastic article on “180ism”, to this point; I’ve always thought that should be the term people adopt to describe this phenomenon. Either way, it’s a useful concept and it pops up quite a bit in American politics.
Hey Trump did the same thing about Obama
I’m not here to defend Trump.
Didn't that happen because the courts were about to shut down the executive action that closed the border during Covid? And then all that happened was a backlog of post-Covid asylum seekers came through. But that has largely dropped back to normal levels *already*-- it was a backlog after a period of low immigration, not a persistent increase.
It has dropped because Biden issued the same executive order, not by magic.
Sure. Explain that to every swing state voter.
Like what if Galactus was coming to Earth, devouring planets as he went, and instead of being united half of humanity was all "you say you want me to support professor X to help stop Galactus, but why are you so obsessed with Galactus instead of making a positive case for professor X??"
From the perspective of modeling the skeptics, one feels that maybe this is more like a scenario where Professor X is out of commission because plot reasons and instead you’re asking them to support Magneto to help stop Galactus, so their skepticism / demand for the affirmative case is a little easier to sympathize with.
That said: yes, you support Magneto even absent a convincing affirmative case because the alternative is Galactus eating the Earth!
Also magneto did nothing wrong
We didn’t land on Krakoa! Krakoa landed on us!
Good reframing, and spot on.
(I'd be in danger of being a Magneto follower anyway though because come on, magnetism is badass.)
"Jean Grey called me a 'deplorable' eight years ago, so I'm supporting Galactus!"
Look, I want to agree with your comment, but I must say, this is a bad plan for Earth. Professor X is obviously the right person to defend Earth against humanoid threats and inspire us with his innate moral sense, but Galactus is a uniquely bad enemy for him to contest! If he tries to use his powers, there's almost no way for him to "understand" a mind as immense and ancient as Galactus, and he's probably far more likely to die or be taken over himself in the attempt. Yes, he has access to a large team of mutants, but again, their powers are not necessarily going to line up well. Reed Richards or Dr. Strange are much better candidates for saving Earth from a cosmic entity like Galactus.
But, if neither of them is available, I think Dr. Doom is the best Dark Horse savior. "Lesser of Two Evils" is the perfect rallying cry for this situation!
Just once I'd like to meet an alien menace that wasn't immune to bullets.
Please do not apologize for being earnest. The world (and the internet) would, IMO, be better places with a little more earnestness and less cynicism/snark.
Earnestly-expressed concern about Trump is not a commodity in short supply on the Internet, and can get tiresome to read *whether or not it’s well-founded* (the fact that some of it isn’t, despite the essentially infinite well of good-faith reasons to throw the vile scumbag on the midden of history where he belongs, also unfortunately has the effect of poisoning the well.) The Orange Man is bad — terrible, in fact - but I appreciate Casey’s approach to judiciousness in sincere public expression of that fact because I think it’s instrumentally a good idea.
The term "Trump Derangement Syndrome" is gaslighting because the people that parrot it often were the ones frothing over Obama's tan suit and Dijon mustard.
I usually just retort to those people "I guess I am sorry that I still have some human decency."
Good lord, I forgot about the tan suit. Just learned Peter King actually said this about it:
"There’s no way, I don’t think, any of us can excuse what the president did yesterday. I mean, you have the world watching."
https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2014/08/peter-king-outraged-over-obamas-tan-suit.html
Rep Peter King (IRA-NY), leading Congressional expert on terrorist financing (because he has personal experience), is an asshole. Why am I not surprised.
Don't forget "If I had a son, he'd look like Trayvon." They still haven't gotten over that one.
Lee Atwater and Karl Rove were the trailblazers.
Yeah, like when Trump says Democrats are weaponizing courts against him. That would never happen!
If they had gone after him immediately on the classified documents I would take this seriously, but they gave him plenty of opportunities to return the documents _before_ getting the courts involved(other presidents have done the same thing he did, but returned the documents immediately upon being asked rather than doubling down)
He tried to get his lawyers to destroy evidence! There is no case that he didn’t flagrantly break the law.
It's almost as if Kevin M. is sanewashing Trump's refusal to turn over classified documents and conspiracy to destroy evidence...
I think Trump clearly and illegally refused to turn over classified documents and also conspired to destroy evidence. That doesn't mean the courts have not also been weaponized against him in other cases.
I don't consider the classified documents case as weaponizing courts against him. Most of the other ones I do.
Can you make a coherent argument in support of this sarcastic take? The NYC case is the only one that I think you can even argue was not overwhelmingly legitimate, but even there the argument boils down to "yes, he clearly broke the law, but if it wasn't Trump then they wouldn't have brought charges". So Dems are weaponizing the courts to...prosecute people for legitimate violations of law? Like, what is the actual, rational argument that there's an issue here?
And not just that one case was questionable, but rather that Dems as a whole, and Biden specifically, are weaponizing the courts in the ways that Trump a) claims is happening, and b) has promised to do himself if elected?
The NYC case was amazing because right after the ruling, you could read people in Vox, NYMag, and NYT all give lucid reasons why the first felony conviction of an American president and major presidential candidate actually isn't on very solid legal ground. It was surreal. The tone was at direct odds with the content of what they were arguing. Like someone informing you that your childhood pet just died with an enormous grin.
The indoor voice went "yes, it could be this is just not all that sound of an application of obscure New York law whose reading could have easily put Hillary Clinton in jail for her mislabeled campaign spending, but who can say for sure!" And then because it was in an indoor voice, they didn't worry too much about it. No, sorry, if you think this ruling is suspect, that is kind of an enormous deal like the January 6th legislature riot in *precisely the heuristic* of "we can't keep having this sort of thing happen again and have free and fair elections."
Maybe it's one weird event and we'll move on. I am quite open to that read of both Jan 6 and the NYC ruling. It's entirely possible. But the alternative is we're having regular violence at the transfer of power and regular felony prosecution of controversial politicians using ambiguous state laws. Neither are sustainable under the terms of what we call a republic.
Even if you think both are bad, I don't see how you compare the storming of the US Capitol to try and retain power for a man who lost a democratic election to a single state DA using a legitimate law to go after conduct that was actually committed and violated the law, even if the targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence. They didn't manufacture the facts to prosecute him. They took genuinely corrupt activity and applied the law to a highly publicized corrupt act.
I will forever be upset at the NYC DA for bringing the case, if only because it's caused such an enormous distraction.
Using a dubious legal reasoning of the variety Trump could've attempted to convict Hillary Clinton with in 2017 for her mislabled Fusion GPS spending or mishandling of classified information on a private email server is actually bad. One could just as easily say "they didn't manufacture facts about Hillary" or there was "genuinely corrupt activity" for prosecuting either of those two things. It's entirely plausible to read it that way. But convicting Hillary would be wrong. "The targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence." Well what a relief, the Lord almighty has stepped in and He has decided America will never again have a controversial prominent politician. I guess we don't have to worry about a thing.
Because it's a high-stakes election and a Democratic DA did it after promising people in his campaign to do something like this, the very same logic Democrats rightly used against "Lock Her Up" in 2016 is just forgotten. The problem isn't any "enormous distraction"; most voters have forgotten about it right now. The problem is the precedent for controversial national politicians running for office in the future. It's telling major liberal outlets were running pieces talking about the sheer oddity of combining an obscure NY state law with misdemeanor document charges to produce this outcome. If you can't imagine any random Republican DA trying this stunt, you have more faith in Republicans than I do!
"Using a dubious legal reasoning of the variety Trump could've attempted to convict Hillary Clinton with in 2017 for her mislabled Fusion GPS spending or mishandling of classified information on a private email server is actually bad. One could just as easily say "they didn't manufacture facts about Hillary" or there was "genuinely corrupt activity" for prosecuting either of those two things. It's entirely plausible to read it that way. But convicting Hillary would be wrong."
If HRC was responsible for that reporting and it could be shown that it was reported that way for a corrupt purpose then I'm not sure what the issue would be. I see this a lot with Republican defenses of Trump's corruption- "they'll come for your folks too if you let this happen!" If HRC committed criminal or corrupt actions then she should be subject to prosecution. I don't have any issues with that. My familiarity with the facts of Fusion GPS vs. Trump's behavior makes her connection to the criminal conduct feel much more tenuous than Trump's was, but that's for a prosecutor to decide.
""The targeting of Trump was likely due to his prominence." Well what a relief, the Lord almighty has stepped in and He has decided America will never again have a controversial prominent politician. I guess we don't have to worry about a thing."
Again, I'm not sure why the prospect of a future controversial politician who engages in corrupt and arguably criminal conduct being subject to potential criminal prosecution is something that we should fear- we should welcome the notion that no one is above the law. My comment about his prominence highlighted a relatively basic and uncontroversial fact, which is that criminal activity that takes place in the public eye raises the possibility of prosecution. Just this past week, there was a guy arrested for fighting outside the Ravens game because the video of the assault went viral. Fights outside of football stadiums happen all the time, but the prominence of this one in the public consciousness meant that he lost his job and was arrested. Is that "fair" since other people do the same thing and don't get arrested? Maybe not, but I have a hard time feeling that bad for people who engage in legitimate criminal conduct and are prosecuted for it, even if they wouldn't have been charged if they hadn't spent so much time in the public eye.
"The problem is the precedent for controversial national politicians running for office in the future."
Won't someone PLEASE think of the future politicians?!?!?! Any future politician who is ethical isn't worried about the precedent this sets. Any individual who engages in rampant corrupt activities, such as Trump, who was thinking about engaging in a political life may now think twice about subjecting their behavior to this level of criminal scrutiny. That doesn't trouble me.
"If you can't imagine any random Republican DA trying this stunt, you have more faith in Republicans than I do!"
I certainly can! But I imagine they'll be tethered, at least ostensibly, to the law in the same way that Bragg's case was. You seem to be worried than non-criminal conduct, perhaps even non-corrupt conduct, will be prosecuted for made up reasons just to go after political opponents. I have less concern about that since, again, the charges here were based on a real law and the facts were what actually happened. Doesn't mean that Trump won't win on a variety of technical legal grounds on appeal (that's why appeals exist- because not everything goes perfectly and mistakes and misinterpretations in the lower court do happen), but that doesn't make the existence of the charges outrageous.
The charges were filed a year and a half ago. If DAs were going to turn around and manufacture charges as retaliation against this case they've certainly had plenty of time to do so. The fact they haven't is telling.
Again, I wish this case hadn't been brought, but that's because it's so easy to caricature and use for political gain, not because the underlying facts and issues are out of bounds or corrupt.
Except there is a strong argument in Hillary's defense that doesn't apply to Trump. What she did was not illegal (or perhaps, not prosecutable if that's more palatable to you.)
While I can't speak to the Fusion GPS spending situation as I have done no research on the topic. I did listen to 16 hours of Comey (A lifelong republican) testifying before congress regarding her email server, and the man made a very compelling case that the email scandal was driven by politics rather than fact.
In his words "I know this is hard for some people to hear, but this was not a close call."
Mens Rea requires that an individual be aware they are committing a crime (beyond reasonable doubt) before you can convict them. While you don't need to know EXACTLY what crime you are committing, you DO need to have some awareness that you are doing something wrong.
Recall that the state department had a standing policy that NO classified information be transmitted electronically. Also recall that many members of congress use their personal emails for work purposes. Now recall that Hillary was ~68 years old at the time.
In other words, in Clinton's mind, she told her staff to not send anything classified through email, and that she could just keep working on non-classified documents on this "server thing" that she probably didn't fully understand but trusted was secure enough for non-classified information.
This is obviously terribly irresponsible. She should have known some classified information would inevitably pass through her server, policy or not, and it's certainly a good argument for firing her, but it is feasible she had no idea she was breaking policy, and that's what the FBI decided "unanimously" (according to Comey).
To sum up, one could NOT say there was "genuinely corrupt activity", regarding the email scandal. The legal facts were truly just different.
Maybe we should hold presidents to higher standards!
I do not actually believe the main problem with our democracy is politicians mislabeling campaign payments from time to time. It's not great, but it's far from the biggest issue with our politicians, including Trump.
Should we only do things if they're addressing the main problems with our democracy? If it's not "the biggest issue" with our politicians we should just move along? This seems like a walk-and-chew-gum scenario.
The Georgia RICO case is nonsense, too.
Why is that? I mean it has been mismanaged in a ridiculous way but that isn’t the same thing as being caught in a recorded phone call pushing a sitting governor to illegally halt an election or make some votes appear.
That's not much of a coherent argument.
It wasn’t an argument: I was only pointing out that the NYC case is not the only legally dubious one.
I don't agree, and you've not presented any reason why I should, even though you had responded to a comment whose sole purpose was to see if anyone could lay out a coherent rationale for the claim that the courts are being weaponized against Trump.
I'd genuinely like to see someone make that argument to see what folks on here believe justifies the claim.
I don't consider the classified documents case as weaponizing courts against him. All of the other ones I do. Look into the details of the recent Jack Smith filing. The procedural rules were bent in order for him to drop a filing out-of-turn for the purpose of influencing an election.
Can you articulate specifically what rules you think were being bent? I'd appreciate a direct source.
But more directly, I'm not sure "a procedural rule was bent" is a great case to support the claim "The courts are being weaponized against Trump." Most court cases have some level of procedural fuzziness. If there wasn't, we could replace judges with a computer program!
Correct, it did not happen. Trump is a criminal.
I think this is pretty hilarious, given the fact that courts have been going after Trump since before the Reagan administration.
The Democrats weaponized Richard Nixon's Justice Department!
I'm sorry are you talking about the highly classified documents that Trump himself said he took knowing he shouldn't have them or the Jan 6 case where Trump lead a violent mob to our capitol? Which of those behaviors do you think politicians should be immune from prosecution from? For that matter, at what matter is a politician so important that they we shouldn't try to keep them accountable for anything.
Well said, Kevin. Indeed, that would never happen!
Well said, Casey, but I think that there's nothing interesting to say about Trump anymore. There's no new information and we spend too much time parsing the entrails of his every blurp.
No, the only interesting subject is Trump's supporters and voters. They see everything there is to know about Trump and they conclude, "yes, I definitely want four years of that."
There's only one truly good source to understand this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extraordinary_Popular_Delusions_and_the_Madness_of_Crowds
"No, the only interesting subject is Trump's supporters and voters. They see everything there is to know about Trump and they conclude, "yes, I definitely want four years of that."
I think this is a mistake. Most people vote against the other party. Harris will be getting more votes because she is *not* Trump/Republican than because belief that she is somehow uniquely good for president. Similarly, Trump will be getting a lot of votes who pick him because he is *not* Harris/Democrat. Are there exceptions - sure, swing voters exist. But they are a very small (but important!) segment of the population.
Yeah, not enough electoral analysis takes this attitude into account. I have not always voted *for* Democrats but I have voted *against* Republicans 100% of the time so far. Sometimes it’s like a choice between being slapped across the mouth or kicked in the crotch, and those are the only choices. My vote doesn’t indicate that I love being slapped across the mouth.
Perfect comment, sir.
Also this is the first column in a while where the top comment isn't something about how if you think about it clearly it's all Democrats' fault
I first heard about Democrats steeling an election during Obama's re-electing campaign. It did not start with Trump.
The "first" under Trump was that anybody took the idea seriously. In all previous instances it was a fringe conspiracy theory that caused nearly everyone on both sides of the aisle to roll their eyes.
2004 was less fringe than you think. Sitting members of congress were voicing it. It doesn't compare to 2020, but it was still bad.
That's when Trump became heavily involved when GOP politics, so wasn't that still starting with Trump?
The Bush-era US Attorney scandal was about "voter fraud" bologna.
I heard it about 1960 a lot as a kid, then about 2000, then about 2004, then 2012, 2016, 2020, and 2024.
In 1960 that would have probably have been related to LBJ, and he deserved the extra scrutiny.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Box_13_scandal
To be fair to LBJ, that was just how Texas politics was done at that time. He had previously lost the special election for senate in 41 precisely because he wasn’t as ruthless in rigging the precincts he controlled that time around, an error he did not make in 48.
Yes, the Democrats probably did steal the 1960 election. And it's to Nixon's credit that for the good of the country he didn't fight it, not unlike Gore's gracious concession in 2000.
Source for that? I only found these two,
First: https://www.politico.com/news/2022/02/07/1960-electoral-college-certificates-false-trump-electors-00006186
Which was a bit shady but Nixon didn't need to fight it because Hawaii legit certified their recount later and because Kennedy had already won.
(This does lower my opinion of Kennedy)
Second: https://www.jstor.org/stable/27550168
Which suggests that the Democrats in Illinois may have acted shadily but it didn't end up stealing the election for Kennedy. (ALSO lowers my opinion of Kennedy)
That _is_ to Nixon's credit though - he had grounds to keep fighting and didn't. (And as it turns out it looks like he would have been wrong, even if justifiably so)
…and Kennedy still wins without Illinois.
Meh, this makes me queasy. If Trump steals 2024, should Harris not fight it for the good of the nation?
Yep! I’m proud of my husband’s grandfather for helping make box 13 happen! (We think/hope, he was a Jim Wells County election worker that year)
"But successful investors and entrepreneurs have no excuse for ignoring the extent to which integrity and the rule of law provide the necessary backstop for everything good that comes out of a capitalist economy."
1000000 times this! It boggles my mind that Dems aren't out there making this particular case over and over and over. The squishy Rs that I'm trying to convince actually respond to this argument!
(I know this article was about the positive case for Kamala -- which I appreciate and was well argued! -- but I didn't want to let that Trump point slide. Go out and say this to anyone who will listen!)
I think Mark Cuban has made this point a few times. But yes, obviously, if you're a businessman who relies on imports and not in Trump's good graces. Good luck.
And even if you are in his good graces now, we've seen how many times he's turned on people completely for petty reasons or no reason at all. I know every exec things they are special and will always be one of the oligarchs that isn't thrown out of a window but that is what they all think until they're halfway to the ground.
Since you brought up Cuban, I really liked Matt's suggesting him as a potential VP pick, and I kinda want to see him run for president in 2028 if Harris loses.
His entire career has been plagued by sexual harassment scandals, the sort of fact that would be wildly known here if he was entering politics on the pro-Trump side.
It should be pointed out that the sexual harassment accusations were not directed at Cuban personally but rather his organization and while he should have done a much better job beforehand, he did take strong ameliorative steps after it came out.
Also, there was an apparently bogus accusation against him personally about his behavior at a nightclub which the woman refused to pursue perhaps because no one there (including her boyfriend!) would corroborate her claim.
I would normally think the org stuff would be enough to derail a political career, but Trump was president, so maybe not...
Cuban is a great surrogate for exactly this reason. He just says what every business person I know thinks.
Totally agree. People who are in the global 1% should embrace the American project with open arms and be willing to pay slightly higher taxes to keep it going.
Do Democrats want to continue the American project with slightly higher taxes? I think these wannabe philosopher-kings hear the stuff about inequality, disparate impact, and radically reimagining all our social constructs, hierarchies and norms as actually pretty serious, and only restrained to the extent that the GOP is a meaningful force. They probably overweight it relative to Trump's more imminent and prosaic dangers, though.
I rather agree. I want to reimagine America in a more hedonistic, sex positive way, but I don’t pretend to have the votes
Kamala Harris in particular very clearly wants to continue the American project with slightly higher taxes.
What Democrats are you talking about here?
I don’t think national electeds are advocating this stuff but blue city councils, school boards, and especially the academic/NGO/staffer complex is. A lot of Elon Twitter is amplifying and driving outrage around this stuff, which is pretty relevant to the California-centric tech community even if it’s nut-picking to a degree.
I dunno man, I live in one of these uber-progressive places, and yeah there is funny eye-roll-y stuff from time to time, but mostly it just truly doesn't affect my life at all.
We can't have housing construction because that's colonization. We can't enforce traffic laws or have any standards for behavior in public spaces because that's inequitable. We can't have tracking or magnet schools because they're racist. Housing, transportation, public space, and education add up to pretty significant swaths of life!
Competely agree, and trump would be way worse but the dems aren’t squeaky clean on this. Look at how many arms of the govt, including DoJ are going after elons companies for nakedly political reasons. Spacex getting sued by govt for diversity/Eeoc violations when they can’t hire foreigners due to ITAR restrictions. Musk/tesla not envied to EV round table even though ford, gm etc have shipped like .0001% of the EVs Tesla had. Govt contracting out rural high speed to comcast at like 17k/connection and 10 years of construction when starlink can do it for 500/connection and get everyone online in a year. I’m not a fan of musks politics, but it’s dumb to the gov to act like this.
With all due respect, boo freakin hoo. This isn't even in the same universe of behavior, and this sort of both sidesism does nobody any favors.
Musk's response to this stuff is beyond the pale, but it does no-one any favors to deny that Democrats actively pushed him away. And furthermore, it's a genuine problem when the party of supposed competence in government does stuff like overpaying >>10x for rural Internet for asinine reasons. And even I get mad whenever a rocket launch is delayed for purely bureaucratic and political reasons.
This is actually somewhat of a problem. I get what you're saying about both sides, but partly as a result, Musk has put his support behind Trump to the tune of $75 M in funding. It also doesn't go unnoticed on the right, and it fuels the both sides talking points of conservatives. I prefer when the Democrats take the high road, as they have with indicting members of their own party when appropriate.
Fair, but I'm unsympathetic to Musk, who'd been playing footsie with right wingers well before this. I would like to live in a world where Dems take the high road all the time, but that's holding them to an impossible standard that Rs don't even try to achieve. Politics is sometimes dirty... it's fair for Rs to lob criticisms at Dems for this, but again, it's nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump is doing and the news media shouldn't be carrying water for him.
Your argument is that you don’t care that the govt is going against Elon for political reasons. This really negates your point about dems being above all of this. You do it or you don’t, there is no “we do it sometimes, only against the people who make us real mad”.
Yes, J. Willard Gibbs is pretty clearly explaining why the intended audience for this piece aren't going to be convinced by it. There is a vocal part of The Democratic Party that has spent the last decade suggesting that not only do they have the right to use the power of government to punish their political opponents, but they also have a moral obligation to do so. Trump is such a threat to political norms that we must abandon political norms to defeat him isn't going to work out when you fail to defeat him.
The problem with the "nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump is doing" criticism is that the current president is a Democrat. And while I agree that it's "nowhere close to the same ballpark as what Trump *will* be doing", that kind of argument is not nearly as convincing to voters.
Let's not forget that Musk, like Trump, can be a fabulist about these kinds of things, as Kevin Drum discusses regarding his claim about "sharks and whales":
https://jabberwocking.com/did-elon-musk-really-have-to-study-whether-his-rockets-might-hit-sharks-and-whales/