Congress Pokes Trump, Putin in Eye
Plus: Judge Merchan faces a courtroom headache: How to shut Trump up.
The foreign aid bill—$95 billion for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan, plus other sundries like a possible ban on TikTok—is headed to Joe Biden’s desk after the Senate approved it 79-18 last night.
A quick reminder: It was only months ago that congressional Republicans, in a fit of pique spurred by Donald Trump, killed a nearly identical aid package that also contained a number of border security measures. Those measures had been endorsed by the Border Patrol Union, but Republicans sniffed that they weren’t nearly enough to solve America’s border woes. So instead they get nothing on the border, and the aid passed anyway. Happy Wednesday.
It’s Still Trump’s Party—Mostly
In three months, the Republican party will nominate Trump as its presidential candidate for a third consecutive time. This is unusual in American politics.
Yesterday Republicans in the United States Senate voted 31 to 15 for aid to Ukraine. House Republicans had divided 101 to 112 a few days earlier. So a (slight) majority of all Congressional Republicans voted for aid to Ukraine. Most Republican members of Congress took a position on a very important issue against their presidential nominee. That too is unusual in American politics. I can’t offhand think of another recent instance of such a break from a party’s nominee in an election year by that party’s elected officials.
So in 2024 the GOP is still Trump’s party. But it’s somewhat less so than it was before this week. Maybe significantly less so.
Some will hasten to say that Trump didn’t speak up as clearly as he might have against the aid package, that he made it somewhat easier for Republicans in Congress to vote as they did. There’s some truth to this. Still, Trump hasn’t budged in any fundamental way from the anti-Ukraine, pro-Putin, and anti-NATO stance that he’s embraced for years. So the congressional vote couldn’t help but be a statement of independence from Trump.
Many Republican elected officials will do their best to paper over this difference. They’ll hurry to leave behind this brief moment of splitting with Trump over Putin. They’ll scurry back as quickly as possible to their comfort zone of opposing all things Biden and left and woke.
But you know what’s good about having two parties? If one party tries to paper over its differences, the other can try to keep them in the public eye.
If he is to have a chance to win, Trump depends on holding the support of normal Republicans. Surely some of them—and it won’t take that many—can be pried away from Trump by reminding them how much he is at odds with the views they have, and that their elected representatives have, about America’s role in the world.
It’s true enough that for most voters it’s the economy, not foreign policy, that matters most. And it’s certainly the case that Biden has to make his case on the economy and other domestic issues to a swath of undecided or uncommitted voters.
But there’s a different type of undecided voter in play as well. That voter might be more accurately called a conflicted and cross-pressured voter. He or she is likely going to trust Republicans more than Democrats on the economy no matter what. That voter will be inclined to vote for normal Republicans down ballot. But that voter will be tempted to desert Trump at the top of the ticket. If he’s reminded over and over why he should do so.
Such voters could be decisive. Call them Nikki Haley voters.
Yesterday in Pennsylvania, about 156,000 Republicans voted in the closed, Republican-only primary for Nikki Haley. That’s over 16 percent of the Republicans who voted. That is a lot of Republican voters against Trump. If half of those Republicans vote for Biden in the fall and the other half stay home, and if Democrats can turn out their normal vote, Trump will lose Pennsylvania.
Presidential campaigns are unpredictable. They can be stable for quite a while. Whatever change there is can be glacial and grudging. And then there can be a moment when an unexpected or unanticipated event intervenes, and things can change abruptly.
It would be an exaggeration to say, with Marx, that in such a moment “All that is solid melts into air.” But it would be reasonable to say that in such a moment what seemed set in concrete can become moldable clay. At such a moment some normal Republicans could at last be compelled to face with sober senses the real conditions of political life, and their real relations with Trump.
—William Kristol
The Court Ponders: How To Shut Trump Up
Wild sights in the courthouse for Trump’s New York trial yesterday, with Judge Juan Merchan all but begging Trump’s lawyers to give him a good argument why the former president shouldn’t be held in contempt over violating his gag order. Here’s the Times:
While the judge, Juan M. Merchan, did not issue an immediate ruling, he engaged in a heated back-and-forth with one of Mr. Trump’s lawyers, scolding him for his failure to offer any facts in his defense of the former president.
“You’ve presented nothing,” Justice Merchan told the lawyer, Todd Blanche, adding soon after: “You’re losing all credibility with the court.” . . . The judge was skeptical, all but pleading with Mr. Blanche at one point to make a more substantive legal argument.
“I hate to keep coming back to this, but you’re not offering me anything to support your argument,” he said.
We’re only days into Trump’s New York trial, but you can already see the ordinary protocols of the justice system creaking from the strain of trying to contain him.
Trump has utterly ignored the gag order placed on him. In posts since yesterday’s gag order hearing, he has already called Merchan a “ridiculously Conflicted Judge,” “a Rigged Judge who is working for the Democrat Party,” a “conflicted and corrupt Judge who shouldn’t be allowed to preside over this Political Hoax,” a “HIGHLY CONFLICTED, TO PUT IT MILDLY, JUDGE” presiding over a “KANGAROO COURT,” and a member of a “New York Cabal run by Crooked Joe Biden’s White House.”
This sort of behavior is what a judge’s discretionary contempt power is for, and the penalties at his disposal—repeated financial fines or even the possibility of immediate incarceration—are enough to keep most defendants from misbehaving too much.
But not so with Trump. A thousand-dollar penalty for each post violating the gag order? Please—he’ll make that up in minutes with his latest day of court-complaint fundraising. (Numbers from week one of the New York trial, per our Marc Caputo: $5.6 million in online donations, including $1.6 million from a single email solicitation blaring that “I’m stuck in Biden’s Corrupt Court AGAIN facing 34 FELONIES AND LIFE IN PRISON. TALK ABOUT TRUMP DERANGEMENT SYNDROME!”)
And even the prosecutors seem aware that jailing Trump for contempt would be playing into his hands. “We are not yet seeking an incarceratory penalty,” prosecutor Chris Conroy said at yesterday’s contempt hearing. “Defendant seems to be angling for that.”
Then there’s the fact that the more acting out Trump does, the greater his chances of conga-lining the whole proceeding into a mistrial. It’s another outcome that would dismay your median criminal defendant: resetting the clock on a trial back to the beginning, redoubling the loss of time and cash blown in court should prosecutors refile charges. But not Trump, who enjoys a trial sell-by date most defendants do not have access to: November’s presidential election.
—Andrew Egger
Catching up . . .
Senate passes bill for foreign aid and possible TikTok ban: NBC News
Trump allies zero in on hush-money prosecutor: Axios
Ukraine is finally getting more U.S. aid. It won’t win the war—but it can save them from defeat: Vox
Supreme Court hears abortion clash over emergency room treatment for pregnant women: NBC News
Trump’s team keeps promising to increase inflation: Vox
Biden admin makes it easier for flyers to get refunds: Politico
Quick Hits: Impeachment Kabuki
Why did Republicans impeach Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas? Up at the site, Will Saletan writes that it was a “nakedly political ploy,” a piece of GOP election messaging more so than a work of necessary government housekeeping.
But don’t take his word for it, Will writes:
The absurdity of the impeachment was on display last Tuesday, just before House managers formally brought the impeachment articles to the Senate. That morning, the House Homeland Security Committee interrogated Mayorkas about the DHS budget. The committee’s Republicans hurled bogus accusations at him—claiming, for example, that he had instructed immigration officers “not to take prior criminal conduct into account when taking enforcement action.” Mayorkas patiently explained that the accusations were false. His interrogators ignored the corrections and repeated their falsehoods.
There was one moment of candor, however, and it came from Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene. She told Mayorkas: “The open border is the Number One issue across America in poll after poll, and that is exactly why this committee impeached you.” . . .
As the Senate moved on to debate the impeachment, other Republicans joined in the electioneering. Sen. Lindsey Graham said his message “to the American people” about Mayorkas was: “There’ll be an election in November. This is the only chance you have to get this right.” Sen. Ron Johnson vowed, “We’ll continue to prosecute this case right up until November.”
Cheap Shots
You know what's really unusual beyond House members not fully backing Trump's Ukraine position?
A major political party nominating a man to the presidency who is charged with multiple felonies (including a plot to remain in power after losing an election and a scheme to steal highly sensitive and classified state secrets)? A man already convicted in civil court of sexual assault and fraud. A political party who lies and excuses and rationalizes every egregious and shameful thing he does and says. And a "religious" movement who looks at this man without a single redeeming human quality and thinks he's sent by God.
Doesn't get much more freaking off-the-wall unusual than that.
If the New York case is being held in a "kangaroo court," why is a jackass on trial?
Maybe DJT is smarter than we give him credit for being, knowing that his stock in trade is to portray himself as a victim at every turn and leveraging that into political capital, not to mention financial opportunity, from people who never will be known as objective observers. He figured that out long ago. But common sense and a certain amount of life experience tell me that there is a law of diminishing returns to all of this. There are only so many times that people want to hear that someone else is a victim when they know that they would be held to a different, higher standard themselves. There is only such much money that they are willing to tithe to his cause before they realize that they cannot afford to keep giving on a limited budget. And there is the guilt by association, as the worm slowly turns, people like Moscow Marjorie, Putin's Puppet become such a 2023 thing, and the nation and the Strong Men of the world begin to move on from The Leader, as they inevitably do when change is a constant force and priorities evolve in other directions.
Whatever comes of this trial, and the others next in line, and the political arc of MAGA, we know that eventually the truth will emerge and people will seek other pathways forward. History has a habit of resolving these matters, though we somehow must convince it to step in sometime before November. Fingers crossed.