‘Pain For Our Enemies, Pleasure For Our Friends’
Plus: How hard should Biden hit the conservative Supreme Court?
The second day of jury deliberations kicks off any minute here in Donald Trump’s New York trial; a verdict could be either minutes or days away. Better read Morning Shots fast, just in case. Happy Thursday.
The Noise Machine
We’re with JVL on the Trump trial: “Whatever comes next, people who are committed to the rule of law should be satisfied that while we may not get the outcome we prefer, or think is correct, the system worked as designed.”
Prosecutors have ably made their case. Trump’s lawyers have defended him vigorously. The jury is in deliberations as this hits your inbox. Should they convict Trump, he’ll have every opportunity to appeal. All this is as it should be.
Outside the courtroom, things are getting grislier.
Former D.C. cop Michael Fanone is one of the most well-known faces from January 6th. Dragged into the crowd, beaten and tased, Fanone suffered a concussion and a mild heart attack. For his actions that day and his advocacy since, Fanone has been lionized by many Trump foes—and dragged through the mud by pro-Trump media, where unflattering stories about him are a fixture on sites like Breitbart and the Gateway Pundit. On social media, the vitriol is worse: Fanone is regularly accused of being some sort of false flag or agent provocateur. (He let himself get the tar kicked out of him by Trump supporters because he wanted to make Trump supporters look bad!)
On Tuesday, Fanone appeared at a Biden campaign event outside Trump’s New York courthouse. “I came here today to remind Americans of what Donald Trump is capable of and the violence that he unleashed on all Americans on January 6, 2021,” he said.
A few hours later, a SWAT team showed up at Fanone’s mother’s house. NBC News reported that someone had circulated a fake “manifesto” online suggesting he had killed his mother and planned to shoot up a local school—a potentially deadly online “prank” known as “swatting” that aims to spark a violent confrontation between a person and law enforcement.
Or here’s this: In a letter to Attorney General Merrick Garland yesterday, Sen. J.D. Vance—a guy currently spending his days auditioning as Trump’s vice presidential pick—indulged in a little right-wing boilerplate, complaining that Judge Juan Merchan’s gag order on Trump in his New York trial was an unconstitutional violation of Trump’s first amendment rights. But then Vance went further: Merchan, he wrote, should face a criminal investigation himself.
Meanwhile, Republicans and figures across the right-wing media ecosystem continue to warp the moment-to-moment proceedings of the trial to insist the fix is in. Multiple GOP senators leaped to weigh in on a particular instruction from Merchan to the jurors—that under New York state law, they need not be unanimous as to which underlying crime Trump was trying to cover up as long as they unanimously agreed he had been trying to cover up something criminal.
In the telling of Sen. Marco Rubio—another veepstakes contender—this instruction made the proceeding “exactly the kind of sham trial used against political opponents of the regime in the old Soviet Union.”
These things all happened separately, but they’re all of a piece. The world of online right-wing #discourse is a funhouse mirror where events are stripped of all context and assembled into a narrative of unbelievable Democratic power and corruption. Anonymous nihilists who spend their days mainlining that discourse lash out in unpredictable ways. And unscrupulous Republican politicians see nothing but upside in pushing the envelope ever farther on matters like prosecuting a judge.
In the courtroom, a complex system is working. Outside the courtroom, the political right is trying to abolish that system and replace it with a simpler one: Pain for our enemies, pleasure for our friends.
—Andrew Egger
Should Biden Run Against SCOTUS?
Courts are in the news—and not just in New York, where we await a verdict while Trump spends his time out of court trashing the legal system.
In northern Virginia, the wife of a Supreme Court Justice has flown an upside-down flag as a “symbol of distress” at their house.
In Washington, D.C., in the chambers of the Supreme Court (where so far as I know flags are still flown right side up), the actual justices of the Court have been slow-walking the Trump immunity case for almost six months, making it distressingly unlikely there will be a trial this year holding Trump accountable for January 6th.
In a federal courthouse in Florida, Judge Aileen Cannon is stalling the Trump classified documents case so that won’t come to trial this year either.
From a broadcasting studio somewhere, Trump apparatchik Steve Bannon proclaims that “DoJ is completely corrupt from top to bottom. It’s gonna have to be purged. It’s gonna have to be restructured. They’re gonna have to get rid of tons of billets there and lots of personnel on the afternoon of January 20, 2025.”
While next week, in California, Hunter Biden will be the defendant in a criminal trial brought by the Biden Justice Department.
This would seem to be a moment to remind the American people that courts matter. That judges matter. That the rule of law matters. That a president’s attitude toward the legal system, toward the courts, toward the Department of Justice matters. That whom a president appoints as Supreme Court justices and federal judges matters.
It’s simply the case that over the next four years, the Justice Department in a Biden administration would be run very differently than a Trump Justice Department. Even more important, perhaps, it’s the case that a President Joe Biden would nominate very different Supreme Court justices and federal appellate and district judges than would a president Trump.
So the character of the federal judiciary—of our whole judicial and legal system—should be a major issue in this presidential election. Yes, voters allegedly care more about kitchen table issues. But man does not live at his kitchen table alone. As Dobbs reminds us, legal decisions have real-world consequences. Decisions made by justices and judges appointed in a second Trump term would have real consequences.
Would it be that difficult to bring this home to voters? Would it be that difficult to impress on voters why they should care about the rule of law? Would it be that difficult to explain to them why they should fear Trump lackeys in the Justice Department and Trumpist judges on the courts?
Making this case in a sharp and compelling way might require that President Biden overcome some of his “institutionalist” qualms about criticizing particular Supreme Court justices by name, and explaining why we shouldn’t want more jurists like them. But that kind of institutionalist reticence sacrifices a real defense of our institutions for the appearance of institutionalism. If Biden has to use actual living judges as examples of what we should expect and fear from another Trump term, so be it. Respect for our institutions requires saying when they’re being misused, and by whom. It’s not anti-institutionalist to run against the threat of a partisan Republican and Trumpist Supreme Court. Quite the contrary.
The American people don’t think respect for the courts means that they can’t judge the decisions and actions of our judges. By about 60 percent to 40 percent, they say they disapprove of how the Supreme Court is doing its job. And they consistently give higher approval ratings to Obama- and Biden-appointed justices than to the Republican appointees.
So a focus on the depredations to the legal system of a second Trump term is both a legitimate and important issue for a presidential candidate to raise, and it’s an issue where the public is on President Biden’s side.
President Biden often frames the choice facing us as democracy and autocracy. I have no quarrel with that formulation. But it might be useful to be less fancy and more straightforward. Isn’t the choice really between the rule of law or the subversion of law? Isn’t the choice between the pursuit of justice on the one hand, or willfully undermining it on the other?
Democracy is on the ballot in 2024. So is justice.
—William Kristol
Catching up . . .
White House says Israel’s Rafah strike and ground assault don’t cross Biden’s ‘red line’: NBC News
This record stock market is riding on questionable AI assumptions: Wall Street Journal
Perhaps lost in the polling: The presidential race is still close: New York Times
Why Trump’s team thinks he can survive any verdict: Politico
Biden is investing heavily in Pennsylvania—with little to show for it: Politico
From allies and advisers, pressure grows on Biden to allow attacks on Russian territory: New York Times
Cheap Shots
"Sen. J.D. Vance—a guy currently spending his days auditioning as Trump’s vice presidential pick"
At first I read that as "vice presidential prick". Perhaps I got it right.
IDK, maybe we're not cut out for this democracy thing. If there's one thing I've learned over the past 9 years, people are most concerned about what they want versus what's best for the country. That, and the median American voter is a moron.