Greg Abbott's Favorite Murderer

Plus: The wishcasting of Trump's GOP punching bags.

When Donald Trump and Joe Biden face off for their first debate next month on CNN, they’ll be doing so without a live studio audience—a swerve away from recent practice. We’re all in on the idea on the merits, but Team Biden wanted the change for strategic reasons too: “Trump feeds off the crowd, they give him life,” one Biden adviser told Politico today. “We wanted to take that away.”

Trump seems to feel the same way: “I would strongly recommend more than two debates, and, for excitement purposes, a very large venue, although Biden is supposedly afraid of crowds,” he wrote this week on Truth Social. He accepted Biden’s two proposed dates, though. Happy Friday.

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Texas Gov. Greg Abbott. (Photo by Tom Fox-Pool/ Getty Images.)

Greg Abbott’s Favorite Murderer

In the summer of 2020, a Texas man named Daniel Perry was watching the Black Lives Matter protests unfolding across the country with a sense of deep rage. “I might go to Dallas to shoot looters,” he texted one friend. “I might have to kill a few people on my way to work they are rioting outside my apartment complex,” he wrote to another. “No protesters go near me or my car.”

A few weeks later, Perry drove his car into a crowd of people at a Black Lives Matter march in Austin, Texas, running a red light with tires screeching, leaning on his horn, and nearly hitting several. As several protesters angrily punched the car that had nearly hit them, another marcher, Garrett Foster, walked up to Perry’s car window to speak with him. Foster was legally carrying a rifle. Perry shot him five times. 

Last year, a jury convicted Perry of murder. Yesterday, Texas Gov. Greg Abbott pardoned him.

“Texas has one of the strongest ‘stand your ground’ laws of self-defense that cannot be nullified by a jury or a progressive district attorney,” Abbott said in a statement.

In issuing his pardon, Abbott gave his blessing to a fictional alternate history of Foster’s murder—one ginned up by right-wing media to paint Perry as a martyr who was just protecting himself against lawless rioters. 

In Abbott’s telling, Foster had approached Perry’s car and “brandished” his rifle—a legal term indicating he had wielded his gun in an aggressive, intimidating manner toward Perry. But witnesses at trial testified that Foster had merely been carrying the rifle—perfectly legal in Texas—and that the barrel had remained pointed down. This testimony was supported by Perry’s own statements in his police interview: “I believe he was going to aim at me. I didn’t want to give him a chance to aim at me.” 

Abbott’s proclamation also elides that it was Perry who drove into the protesters, not the other way around: “Daniel Scott Perry’s car was immediately surrounded by aggressive protestors who rushed to obstruct, strike, pound, smash, and kick his vehicle.” 

And, of course, Abbott’s pardon ignored altogether Perry’s earlier inconveniently bloodthirsty fantasies about killing protesters.

It might be a tired exercise at this point, but imagine the jerseys had been swapped. Say Perry’s resentment had been directed, not at Black Lives Matter protesters, but at the Stop the Steal protests that popped up around the nation between November 2020 and January 2021. Say he’d openly, repeatedly fantasized about killing right-wing protesters in texts with friends. Say he’d driven his car into a group of those protesters. Say he’d shot one dead.

Or make it less abstract. Say that, at the moment Daniel Perry had revved his car into the group Garrett Foster was marching with, Foster hadn’t approached Perry to try to speak with him. Say he’d seen Perry had a gun, reasonably concluded that the man who had just driven into a crowd might be inclined to use it, and immediately shot him.

Had Foster shot Perry, his stand-your-ground self-defense claim would have been far less tenuous than the one Perry made. But can you imagine Gov. Abbott coming to his defense? Issuing him a pardon? A Black Lives Matter marcher? Not in a million years. For way, way too many Republicans, political violence has become a matter of shirts and skins.

—Andrew Egger

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Tickets are on sale now for our June 21 show in Denver featuring Gov. Jared Polis and the gang. We hope to see you there!

The WSJ’s Trump-Haley Kumbaya Fantasy

The Wall Street Journal editorial writers are a tortured bunch. Or at least their logic is. They’ve issued some strong words about Donald Trump, writing in 2022 for example that “Character is revealed in a crisis, and Mr. Pence passed his Jan. 6 trial. Mr. Trump utterly failed his.” They’ve scolded the former president for conduct that was “inexcusable and will mar his legacy for all time.”

But for the most part, they’ve twisted themselves into pretzels to blame, not Republicans who support Trump, but Democrats. It is Democrats, they claim, whose arrogance pushed voters into Trump’s embrace. Their contributors have offered that Democrats “can’t quit” Trump because seeing themselves as part of the resistance is such a rush.

During the primaries, the Journal seemed to be rooting against a Trump victory—yet it was never entirely clear whether this was because another Trump term in the White House would be ruinous for the country or just because, as the Journal opined in February 2021, “Mr. Trump may run again, but he won’t win another national election. . . . The country is moving past the Trump Presidency, and the GOP will remain in the wilderness until it does too.”

It has been clear to Journal readers for some time that once Trump had secured the nomination, the editorial board would jump back aboard the train. The alternative, after all, would be a victory for those they label his “fanatical opponents.”

Remember Gordon Sondland? While Trump’s ambassador to the European Union, Sondland provided damning testimony in the first impeachment hearing to the effect that the scheme to shake down Volodmyr Zelensky wasn’t some side hustle but was planned and executed at the highest levels of the administration. He was fired. 

But like so many GOP punching bags, he has bounced back to declare on the Journal op-ed page that Nikki Haley would make a dandy running mate for Trump. Clearly there are no hard feelings on Sondland’s part about the whole firing thing. He’s all in on a Trump return to the White House.

It’s interesting that the Journal is not featuring one of the 40 (out of 44) former Trump cabinet officials are who not supporting him for re-election. Sondland’s cheery outlook is that Haley will bring her fundraising prowess. With Haley on the ticket, Sondland predicts, “many so-called Never Trumpers would turn out for Mr. Trump, boosting the Republican National Committee’s coffers along the way.” And she’d be a legacy for Trumpism—his eight years plus her eight years would have “a powerful influence on America and the Republican Party.” Finally, a Trump/Haley team would unite the traditional Republicans with the MAGA wing in one big happy tent—Matt Gaetz and Mitt Romney happily co-existing.

This analysis leaves something to be desired. For one thing, the big donors may have been attracted to Haley precisely to block Trump. There is little reason to suppose that merely having her as a running mate would assuage their concerns. Nor is it likely in this life that Romney and Gaetz will put aside their differences to unite behind Trump—not even if a resurrected St. Francis of Assisi were his running mate. 

But the broader issue is not with Sondland but with the Journal itself, which has consistently made excuses for even Trump’s most anti-Constitutional and democracy-endangering outrages. To do so, it has downplayed even Trumpist assaults on cherished capitalist principles like free trade, limited government, and generous immigration. To justify this surrender, the editorial board has had to exaggerate the Democratic party’s extremism, portraying Biden—who has always hewed to the center of this party—as a tool of Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren. And it has had to minimize the threat Trump poses to the Constitutional order. 

The 2024 race is a test of character too. So far, the WSJ editorial page is failing.

—Mona Charen

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Wonder Why He Waited

Rep. David Trone spent nearly $60 million of his own money to lose the Democratic primary for Maryland's open Senate seat. After having his hopes dashed by Prince George’s County Executive Angela Alsobrooks in the primary on Tuesday, Trone disclosed a massive set of recent financial transactions Thursday, totaling as much as $97 million.

Trone bought anywhere from $13 million to $59 million at various points in 2023 and sold in the range of $8.5 million to $38.1 million. With the exception of a large sale of PepsiCo stock, all of the transactions were sales or purchases of U.S. Treasury bills.

These aren’t nefarious transactions, especially when it comes to members of Congress. Where Trone potentially runs into trouble is a violation of the STOCK Act, which requires these disclosures within a certain time frame. All of the disclosures released Wednesday were significantly backdated far beyond the 45-day requirement for members of Congress.

Congress is notoriously soft about disciplining its own members: The fine for first-time STOCK Act offenders is just $200.

The founder of alcohol retailer Total Wine & More, Trone is an extremely wealthy member of Congress, which is a high bar. It’s just not enough to win a statewide primary.

—Joe Perticone

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Quick Hits: Who Gets Self-Defense?

If you want to go deeper on the legal and political issues at play around Daniel Perry’s killing of Garrett Foster, veteran journalist Radley Balko’s “The Smearing of Garrett Foster,” written last year, remains the definitive piece on the subject:

Let’s be clear about what Abbott, [Tucker] Carlson and other MAGA types are advocating here. In pushing a pardon for Perry, they’re stating they believe that if someone plows his vehicle into a crowd of protesters, the protesters have no right to self-defense. They believe there should be no liability—criminal or civil—for deliberately striking protesters with a car. And while they may claim to believe the gun rights they advocate are absolute, when it comes to enforcing and protecting those rights, they clearly have little interest in defending those rights for people who don’t look, believe, or vote like them (see Philando Castile or John Crawford for additional examples) . . .

I don’t know if Daniel Perry set out to kill a protester that night. Perhaps he saw the protesters and just wanted to mess with them—to put a scare into them—then went further than intended and, through the lens of too many Tucker Carlson monologues, genuinely but incorrectly saw Foster as an extremist who was about to kill him.

Perry’s defense—that he just happened to have run a red light beyond which stood a group of protesters, shortly after leaving a trail of messages and comments expressing his desire to kill protesters—seems too coincidental to be plausible. But this why we have jury trials.

Foster’s death also demonstrates the infeasibility of ostentatious open carry. I generally support gun rights. But as I write this, news is breaking of another mass shooting, this time in Louisville. That mass shooting comes on the heels of the mass shooting last month here in Nashville. As Perry’s own expert testified, it takes only a fraction of a second to transition from lawfully open-carrying a rifle to unlawfully killing someone with it. The line between exercising one’s Second Amendment rights and extinguishing a life is thin, blurry, easily transgressible, profoundly consequential and, perhaps most alarming, easily misinterpreted.

In most cases, there’s no reason to think someone open-carrying a rifle is a threat. But at a protest, where the stakes and tensions are high? In the wake of a mass shooting, which tend to happen in clusters? It isn’t difficult to see how someone could err, as Perry clearly did. And Foster’s death demonstrates the consequences of such mistakes.

For these reasons, I think it was ill-advised for Foster to bring his rifle to the protest that night. But of the two gun owners in this story, one acted rationally, safely, and with restraint and respect for the lives and safety of those around him. The other shot and killed a man he himself has since acknowledged posed no threat to him. Yet right-wingers—allegedly Second Amendment supporters—are smearing the responsible gun owner and valorizing the reckless one.

Read the whole thing.

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Cheap Shots

Lots getting done in the People’s House: