David French from the NY Times After the Trump Guilt Verdict

 

French: Well, I’m not surprised because the strength of this case was in the facts of the case, and that’s what a jury decides. A jury decides the facts. The judge decides the law. The court of appeals decides if the legal posture of the case was correct. But the jury addresses the facts. And the facts here are stronger than we knew they were going into the trial.

Going into the trial, I thought that the evidence that Donald Trump falsified business records and that he falsified business records with the consciousness of guilt surrounding the entire hush-money process. I thought the prosecution could make that stick. Then during the trial itself, the facts of the case were stronger than I believed before.

One of the things that I thought was particularly important in the case was actually the Stormy Daniels testimony. What the Stormy Daniels testimony did is it showed clearly and unequivocally why he would want to pay hush money, because she had a terrible story to tell.

And at that time in the campaign when she came forward, right after the “Access Hollywood” tape dropped, and said: I’ve got a story to tell — it was critical for him to suppress as much as he could.

 Alito, in other words, is entitled to privately support Trump, the January 6 insurrection and Christian nationalism, but he is not a normal private citizen. Although not bound by the ABA’s code, the principles upon which it is based should be uncontroversial: Alito holds public office and thus must uphold a higher standard of personal conduct, avoiding speech that would fatally undermine his claim of impartiality.

“[W]hen you’re a Supreme Court justice, you’re supposed to avoid giving off even a whiff of partisan bias,” former U.S. attorney Joyce Vance noted on her website. “Or religious favoritism. As a judge, and certainly, as a Supreme Court justice, you have that duty. Justice Alito flunks the test and flunks it badly.”

If nothing else, Alito has provided liberal critics grist and damaged the credibility of the decisions his right-wing supporters would like him to write going forward (the Supreme Court is expected to rule shortly on whether Trump and other former presidents enjoy immunity from prosecution). But now even institutionalists, who have been hesitant to damage what they see as the legitimacy of the Supreme Court, are arguing something must now be done.

-Charles R. Davis in Salon.com

 

Can Biden Become a Pugilist for Populism?

Why it’s time to take Adam Tooze’s advice and “re-politicize the economy.”

KATRINA VANDEN HEUVEL

From The Nation

Ranking Trump from The New York Times

When historians and political scientists rank presidents from best to worst, Donald Trump invariably comes out at the bottom. This year, to give one example, the 2024 Presidential Greatness Project released the results of a survey of 154 current and former members of the presidents and executive politics section of the American Political Science Association. The highest ranked included no surprises: on a scale of 0 to 100, Abraham Lincoln (95.03), Franklin Roosevelt (90.83), George Washington (90.32), Teddy Roosevelt (78.58) and Thomas Jefferson (77.53). Dead last: Donald Trump (10.92), substantially below James Buchanan (16.71), Andrew Johnson (21.56), Franklin Pierce (24.6) and William Henry Harrison (26.01). There are other ways to rank American presidents, however: How consequential were they? By these standards, Trump no longer falls at the bottom of the pack. That’s not necessarily a good thing. My view is that Trump is a consequential president for all the wrong reasons. After the nation rejected the presidential bids of George Wallace, Pat Buchanan and David Duke, Trump demonstrated that the contemporary American electorate would put a candidate who appeals to voters’ worst instincts in the White House. Trump has capitalized on the anger, fears and resentments of a besieged but fundamentally decent working class to exacerbate ethnonationalist hostility to immigrants and minorities, creating a right-wing populist antidemocratic movement. Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning. Get it sent to your inbox. In the process of building this MAGA coalition, Trump has made explicit the racist, anti-immigrant themes that have underpinned the Republican Party for the past half-century. Persistently, insistently repeating election lies, subverting election norms, raising doubts about election integrity and refusing to commit to accepting the 2020 — or 2024 — vote count, Trump is focused on transforming the Republican Party into a cult with adherents willing to support a nominee who openly plans to undermine — indeed ravage — American democracy. In that sense, Trump ranks high as a transformative president. A 2022 paper, “Donald Trump and the Lie,” by Kevin Arceneaux and Rory Truex, political scientists at Sciences Po Paris and Princeton, provides a case study of Trump’s impact on American politics. The authors studied “the evolution of public opinion about Donald Trump’s ‘big lie’ using a rolling cross-sectional daily tracking survey” from Oct. 27, 2020, through Jan. 29, 2021. They found: The number of Republicans and independents saying that they believe the 2020 election was fraudulent is substantial, and this proportion did not change appreciably over time or shift after important political developments. Belief in the lie may have buoyed some of Trump supporters’ self-esteem. “Republican voters reward politicians who perpetuate the lie,” Arceneaux and Truex concluded, “giving Republican candidates an incentive to continue to do so in the next electoral cycle.” I asked a range of experts on the American presidency to evaluate Trump in terms of impact. Their answers varied in terms of substance, tone and the level of harshness of their assessment of Trump’s policies, rhetoric and initiatives. For a number of presidential scholars, Trump represents not an innovative force but rather a revival of — and capitalization on — the darker strains in this country’s history. Marjorie R. Hershey, a political scientist at Indiana University, Bloomington, wrote in an email: I’d rate Trump as a significant president. Not a great president or even a good one, but significant in that he has pushed a movement to reverse many of the gains in acceptance of diversity that have been so hard-fought in recent decades. “That’s not new,” Hershey declared, adding: In some ways, Trump is a modern-day version of the grisly race baiters of the Old South in that he’s understood that whipping up fears and hatred and stimulating chaos allows those with real power to accumulate more profits while the rest of the public is busy hating and fearing one another. Nor, Hershey contended, is Trump a political genius: It’s not that Trump is a brilliant politician. He’s just met his time. So many people’s anxiety level has been increased by 9/11 and other terrorism and Covid and, especially, rapid sociodemographic change. Nativism has long shadowed U.S. politics, but the speed of this particular change, in which the population has dropped from about 85 percent non-Hispanic white to less than 70 percent in just a few decades, has raised some pretty base fears. Along similar but not parallel lines, Lori Cox Han, a political scientist at Chapman University, where she directs the presidential studies program, wrote to say that “Trump could definitely be called transformational, but in a negative way.” The nation, she added, has never experienced a president (or ex-president) who has been this disrespectful of the Constitution, the rule of law, the norms of the office or just basic decency. So yes, I would say that he has shifted the common understanding of what is good and sensible and that he has gravely damaged principles and values within the Republican Party on issues such as foreign policy and immigration, transforming it into something unrecognizable to where the party stood during the Reagan years. Clearly, Han concluded, “Trump is still a significant presence in American politics, but he has turned much of the traditional discussion about presidential leadership on its head.” Thomas B. Edsall

Pragmatist

I have always thought I would like to be considered a "pragmatist." What a wonderful sounding word! Who wouldn't want to be a pragmatist? Only problem I have never found two people who agreed on the meaning of the word pragmatist. Maybe I need to ask a few more people.

Whether or not Justice Alito was part of the decision to fly the inverted flag, there is no question that he is a genuine Republican partisan who is more than willing to share views that echo narratives aired throughout conservative media. In 2020, for example, he warned that liberals were the real threat to freedom of speech. During oral argument in Trump v. United States, he wondered aloud if a president like Trump needed criminal immunity so that he would leave office at the end of his term — a troubling question that took for granted the idea that the prosecutions the former president faces are politically motivated. It is not that far-fetched to think that a Supreme Court justice might have internalized the extreme views of the insurrectionist right. Yes, he is a powerful member of one of the most elite institutions in the country and, yes, he’s highly educated and has access to a wealth of high-quality information. But there is no one living who is fully immune to motivated reasoning or completely unsusceptible to misinformation and disinformation. There is every reason, and then some, to think that Alito believes many of the same things that any other Republican of his age and ideological disposition might also believe, especially when his social world seems to consist of similarly like-minded, goal-oriented partisans. Cynicism is as often as much a form of comfort as it is anything else. It is comforting, in a way, to believe that powerful people have better sense than those they represent or work with or try to appeal to. It is comforting to think that the red meat is for someone else. The disturbing truth is that there’s probably more sincerity than not in American politics. We may not want to believe it, but most of the people in charge say what they mean and mean what they say. -Jamelle Bouie in the NY Times

Jason Stanley in The New Republic

Today’s GOP is laser-focused on education, trying to frighten parents about supposed “Marxist indoctrination” in schools and universities (a common tactic in today’s fascist international; see Brazil under Jair Bolsonaro). As a sign of the topic’s importance, the GOP campaign against schools and universities was central in Trump’s 2020 election bid. In a speech at an event called the White House Conference on American History, Trump declared: Students in our universities are inundated with critical race theory. This is a Marxist doctrine holding that America is a wicked and racist nation, that even young children are complicit in oppression, and that our entire society must be radically transformed. Critical race theory is being forced into our children’s schools, it’s being imposed into workplace trainings, and it’s being deployed to rip apart friends, neighbors, and families. The tactic of painting all of one’s political opponents as Marxists and communists, and claiming that they dominate the institutions, is a hallmark of the classic European fascist regimes of the mid–twentieth century. Today, it is employed as a justification to fire teachers and professors and replace them with loyalists and ultranationalists. Even a democratic nation’s greatest universities are not immune from being destroyed by this strategy, as one can see in India today. Now and in the past, schools and universities are and have been central targets of fascism. Attacks on education, including political works deemed obscene, are, to use a cliché, canaries in the fascist coal mine. Education in a liberal democracy introduces students to the diverse perspectives through a nation’s history, in order for people to foster a kind of empathy and understanding for one another; what my father in his work called civic compassion. Democracy is a system where we let ourselves be affected by our fellow citizens’ perspectives. Cutting students off from exposure to the perspectives of their neighbors therefore preempts democracy. Such erasures are more conducive to an education for authoritarianism, where an autocratic leader can more easily set groups against one another, relying on mutual estrangement and mutual misunderstanding. “Parents’ rights” is an expression used to cover for an illiberal public culture. Using the language of rights and freedoms to erase oppressed groups’ perspectives is a familiar vocabulary trick from America’s past (“states’ rights”).