We're Nearing the Home Stretch. Can Biden Close the Gap?

Plus: Trump vs. the Libertarians.

We hope you all enjoyed your Memorial Day as much as Donald Trump plainly did: 

Happy Memorial Day to All, including the Human Scum that is working so hard to destroy our Once Great Country, & to the Radical Left, Trump Hating Federal Judge in New York that presided over, get this, TWO separate trials, that awarded a woman, who I never met before (a quick handshake at a celebrity event, 25 years ago, doesn’t count!), 91 MILLION DOLLARS for “DEFAMATION.” She didn’t know when the so-called event took place - sometime in the 1990’s - never filed a police report, didn’t have to produce the “dress” that she threatened me with (it showed negative!), & sung my praises in the first half of her CNN Interview with Alison Cooper, but changed her tune in the second half - Gee, I wonder why (UNDER APPEAL!)? The Rape charge was dropped by a jury! Or Arthur Engoron, the N.Y. State Wacko Judge who fined me almost 500 Million Dollars (UNDER APPEAL) for DOING NOTHING WRONG, used a Statute that has never been used before, gave me NO JURY, Mar-a-Lago at $18,000,000 - Now for Merchan!

In fairness, it’s probably tough to relax on a week when your criminal trial is entering its closing arguments.

In other news, our long national nightmare is over: MLB umpire Angel Hernandez, long reputed the worst in baseball, abruptly announced his retirement yesterday. Happy Monday.

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What’s Biden’s Through-Line?

President Biden had a busy weekend. On Saturday, he traveled to West Point to address and shake hands with the graduating cadets. Yesterday, he spoke at the solemn Memorial Day ceremonies at Arlington Cemetery.

And he’ll keep on going. A week from Thursday, on June 6, the president will be in Normandy to speak on the 80th anniversary of D-Day.

These are all patriotic and civic occasions. They are also, one might say, the perks of incumbency in an election year. These are things President Biden gets to do that his challenger, Trump, doesn’t.

Obviously they’re non-partisan events, and President Biden properly treats them as such.

But his campaign is allowed to take advantage of them! His campaign could be creating, through paid media and surrogates and everything else campaigns do, a two-week narrative about Biden, and a contrast with his opponent. Joe Biden: A responsible commander-in-chief; someone who respects the military; a supporter of veterans; the leader of a strong and proud United States of America. Donald Trump: None of these.

Is the Biden campaign in fact advancing a campaign narrative around these events? Maybe they are and I just haven’t seen it. Maybe they’re about to do so. Maybe they’re right not to do so. Maybe these aren’t the issues and values to emphasize right now. Maybe what I’m suggesting is too incumbent-centric a message, and in this day and age, no one likes incumbents.

Still, Biden is the incumbent. It’s not 2020. Biden has got to play the hand he’s dealt.

Or not. He can choose not to play that hand. But then he has to play another. He could systematically advance a bold reform agenda for his next term. He could really explain what Trump is going to do to fairness and the rule of law, to competence in government, to the fragile bonds of our civil society. But right now the Biden campaign seems a pudding with no theme.

The Biden campaign has an answer to this line of criticism, explained well by Jason Zengerle of the New York Times over the weekend:

This, in a nutshell, is what Joe Biden’s campaign believes to be its biggest structural problem—that the race does not yet sufficiently revolve around Trump. It attributes the polls that have shown him trailing Trump for the last eight months to the fact that voters do not realize, or have not fully grappled with the reality, that Trump will be on the ballot in November. Once they do, the Biden team appears convinced, they’ll remember all the reasons they sent Trump packing four years ago.

For a time, it seemed Biden thought that Trump’s clinching the Republican nomination, which he did in March, would cause voters to focus on the former president. Then the hope appeared to be that Trump’s having to show up in a New York City courtroom, and the resulting media frenzy, would bring his opponent to the front of voters’ minds. Neither really did the trick. Now the Biden campaign is trying to take matters into its own hands.

I very much hope they succeed in taking matters into their own hands. Trump keeps giving them plenty to work with!

But time is a-wasting. There’s only four months until early voting begins.

In the fall of 2016, I didn’t really grasp the risk of a Trump victory until I was on TV in September, I think, with a Trump supporter and a Clinton supporter. The Trump surrogate ratted off four or five things Trump would do—build the wall, ban Muslims, get tough on crime, no more Middle East wars, bring back manufacturing. Also, Hillary was bad.

The Clinton supporter, on the other hand, couldn’t encapsulate the Clinton agenda at all crisply.

Ironically, I remembered then the remark by Bill Clinton that Americans prefer strong and wrong over weak and right. And I, who loathed Trump and had discounted Trump’s chances, thought: Yikes.

I’m in a Yikes mood again. Trump’s campaign in 2024—for all of Trump’s personal lack of discipline—has intelligible messages: Things were better under Trump. We need him back because he’s a tough guy in a tough world. And this time he’ll really drain the swamp. But don’t worry, he knows what he’s doing as he’s draining—he’s been president!

Trump’s campaign events mostly reinforce his message: Trump’s a populist (NASCAR!). Trump’s strong and bold (he ventured to the South Bronx and the Libertarian convention!). Trump’s fighting the deep state (belligerent press conferences outside the trial in New York!).

It’s all nonsense, and much of it may not even be particularly effective. Trump’s a very flawed candidate. But he must be doing something right: He’s held his narrow lead over the last three months, despite being outspent by Biden and despite being cooped up in a courtroom in New York City for much of the last five weeks.

Maybe things will catch up to Trump. Maybe a guilty verdict in New York—if there is one—will do some damage. Maybe Biden’s financial advantage will start to make a difference. Maybe nothing can really change until the June 27 debate (if that happens), and there’s no point doing too much until then except chipping away and keeping it as close as possible.

And maybe this newsletter will turn out to be an instance of premature hand wringing. I hope.

 —William Kristol

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Trump vs. the Libertarians

While you were off enjoying your three-day weekend, Trump was doing something unusual: bombing in front of a hostile crowd. Here’s Politico:

If Donald Trump came to the Libertarian National Convention to make peace on Saturday, it could hardly have gone worse.

Within minutes of beginning speaking—and after enduring sustained jeering and boos—the former president turned on the third party, mocking its poor electoral record in presidential elections even as he appealed to them for their endorsement.

“What’s the purpose of the Libertarian Party of getting 3 percent?” Trump asked the crowd, which proceeded to pelt him with jeers. “You should nominate Trump for president only if you want to win.”

The libertarians in attendance didn’t want to hear it, as hecklers chucked insults at Trump all night. “Liar,” they called him. “Panderer,” they shouted. “You crushed our rights,” they belted.

If you read Tyler Groenendal’s great piece earlier this month, you’re already up to speed on how the institutional Libertarian Party—such as it is—was taken over in recent years by an extremely online faction called the Mises Caucus. The Mises group shares plenty of DNA with Trump’s own MAGA movement: Like MAGA, they’re fixated on the supposed existential threat of “wokeness” in America. Like MAGA, they’ve jettisoned much of the party’s longstanding policy orthodoxy—while at the same time intensifying their focus on drubbing “squishes” out of the party. Like MAGA, they’re edgelords who see owning the libs as an end in itself.

Trump and his surrogates who also attended the convention, including Sen. Mike Lee and Vivek Ramaswamy, plainly thought that there was fertile soil for coalition-building there. What they quickly learned was that most rank-and-file libertarians remain the same prickly go-it-alone types they’ve always been—the type of voter who really doesn’t want to hear about how they need to jettison their political principles to defeat a supposed common enemy.

When Ramaswamy spoke, his calls for a “libertarian-nationalist alliance” (a libertarian-nationalist alliance! Think of it!!) were drowned out by boos. When Trump supporters tried to get a “We Want Trump” chant going during the former president’s remarks, they were overpowered by chants of an old libertarian classic: “End the Fed!”

After the fact, Team Trump rushed to do some optics damage control. On Newsmax yesterday, spokesperson Karoline Leavitt painted the misfired speech as a sign Trump was comfortable going into hostile territory: “He is building the most diverse and broad political movement that this country has ever seen.”

In reality, the speech was notable for how unusual it is to see Trump swimming against an audience. All politicians aim to give their speeches to friendly crowds, of course. But for Trump, the aesthetics of the huge, adoring crowd have long been the core of his entire franken-populist political identity—they’re the real America, he tells them from the stage. They’re the forgotten man, the silent majority.

You could be real America too, runs the message. All you need to do is buy a hat and show up.

Trump’s big crowds make for powerful visuals and feed Trump’s political lies: Look at the crowds I draw! And we’re supposed to believe Biden got more votes in 2020? It isn’t just ego that’s made Trump and his allies repeatedly inflate and exaggerate his crowd sizes over the years; those lies are political messaging too.

Of course, the whole thing is an aesthetic fiction. Millions more Americans vote than ever attend rallies for anybody. And there’s nothing like a few booing Libertarians to puncture the soap bubble.

—Andrew Egger

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Catching up . . .

• Global shock after Israeli airstrike kills dozens in Rafah tent camp: The Guardian

• Netanyahu says deadly Israeli strike in Rafah was the result of a ‘tragic mishap’: AP

• U.S. Army aid vessels become unmoored near floating Gaza pier: NPR

• Dems in full-blown ‘freakout’ over Biden: Politico

• Closing arguments set to begin in Trump’s historic New York criminal trial: Axios

• Eyeing Trump, but on the fence: How tuned-out voters could decide 2024: New York Times

• Trump makes sweeping promises to donors on audacious fundraising tour: Washington Post

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Quick Hits

1. Trump prosecutors’ last hurdle: proving intent

Up on the site this morning, former federal prosecutor Dennis Aftergut has a great piece on the lay of the land in Trump’s trial as closing arguments start. Four of the five elements of felony falsification of business records, he argues, are well proven. Prosecutors have shown that business records were falsified to cover the Stormy Daniels hush-money trail. They’ve shown that Trump knew these records were false, that he made them (or caused them to be made), and that he did so with fraudulent intent.

But there’s one more hurdle for prosecutors to climb, Aftergut argues:

For a felony conviction, the jury must also be convinced beyond a reasonable doubt of the fifth element—that Trump intended to commit violations of election law or tax law. If the jury is going to hang, it will almost certainly be over whether there’s reasonable doubt over the existence of that intent . . .

What does this mean for prosecutor Joshua Steinglass’s closing argument? His focus should be on the final element of the felony. Of course, he will also recount for the jury the evidence proving the other four—but when it comes to those elements, sensible jurors should be readily convinced.

Steinglass might do well to open with something like this:

Ladies and gentlemen:

Who goes to the extraordinary lengths to which defendant Donald Trump and his co-conspirators went to falsify business records and cook the books?

Who goes around the bend and back, doing what we know Trump approved—“grossing up” the $130,000 payment that Michael Cohen made to Daniels by doubling it, throwing in other expenses, and adding a bonus, with all of these changes intended to help hide the truth that the defendant was simply repaying his fixer?

Who records the money all as something it wasn’t—a “retainer” and “legal expenses”—in business records that tax officials or other public auditors might review?

The answer is obvious: Dishonest people do that—dishonest people trying to cover up their corrupt intent to commit violations of the law.

There’s a reason I am starting with the last element of the crime here—whether defendant Trump intended to commit other crimes when he made (or caused to be made) falsified business records. This issue is the nail on which you just heard Mr. Trump’s lawyers hammer hardest.

But it’s as strong as the other four, and here’s why: your common sense. Your common sense tells you that the sophisticated, convoluted, Rube Goldberg-like nature of the “grossing up” calculation is a sure sign that the falsified records were meant to hide another crime.

Read the whole thing.

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2. I’ve got a plane to sell you

In theory, U.S. campaign finance laws exist to keep incredibly wealthy people from showering huge sums on candidates and to keep candidates from putting campaign donations directly into their own pockets. In practice, we have Trump’s 2024 campaign, during which Trump is paying tens of millions of dollars in his personal legal bills with super PAC money.

Now the Daily Beast reports Trump just sold a jet to one of his megadonors: 

After nearly half a billion dollars in legal judgments against him this year, Donald Trump’s company opted to offload one of his private jets this month, public filings show. And the buyer is a Republican megadonor who poured nearly $250,000 into a political committee tied to Trump’s 2020 campaign.

The plane, a 1997 Cessna jet, is worth in the range of $10 million, according to evoJets, though terms of the transaction couldn’t be confirmed.

Hard-up billionaires selling their jets to more liquid billionaires—that’s populism in action, baby.

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