Stephen Collinson: Trump’s main 2024 election goal is now to save himself

Trump’s showmanship bolstered a strategy of putting his legal woes at the center of a campaign already rooted in claims he’s the blameless victim of a politicized justice system.

But Tuesday’s political choreography showed this approach is more than a political strategy. It revealed a deeper, emerging reality about the 2024 campaign. Trump’s legal defense strategy is now entirely fused with his electoral one. His bid to regain the White House is no longer a mere political campaign but has now become about self-preservation. As his court battles grind on, his biggest aim appears to be recapturing the presidential authority that might give him the power to make his potential criminal liability – and even the threat of jail time, if convicted – go away. https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/14/politics/donald-trump-indictment-2024-campaign/index.html

Jeffrey Blehar: Trump’s Indictment Is Worse Than You Think It Is

The indictment can be found here. Come and see. Come one, come all, and read it. The text is lucid, the case is made with a minimum of jargon, and it hits like multiple icepick blows to the skull.

Do not willingly keep yourself ignorant of its enormity because you would prefer to huddle in a tortoise-shell defensive crouch. There aren’t merely claims, there are evidentiary submissions, including remarkable photographs and excerpts of recorded conversations.

Trump is nailed dead to rights, and what matters most of all is that it’s not on some technical offense. What he was doing, before only a physical raid on Mar-a-Lago stopped this madness, turns out to have been less an act of mere carelessness than an active threat to United States national security, one fueled solely by Trump’s demented behavior and sense of self-entitlement. https://www.nationalreview.com/2023/06/trumps-indictment-is-worse-than-you-think-it-is/
 

Shane Goldmacher, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan: How Trump Plans to Beat His Indictment, Politically

For Mr. Trump and his team, there has been a sense of familiarity, even normalcy, in the chaos of facing a 37-count indictment in the classified documents case. After two House impeachments, multiple criminal investigations, the jailing of his business’s former accountant, his former fixer and his former campaign manager, and now two criminal indictments, Mr. Trump knows the drill, and so do his supporters.

The playbook is well-worn: Play the victim. Blame the ‘Deep State.’ Claim selective prosecution. Punish Republicans who stray for disloyalty. Dominate the news. Ply small donors for cash.

His allies see the indictment as a chance to end the primary race before it has even begun in the minds of Republican voters, with a new commercial already being shown framing 2024 as an active battle with President Biden. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/12/us/politics/trump-indictment-strategy.html

Peter Baker: Trump’s Case Puts the Justice System on Trial, in a Test of Public Credibility

History’s first federal indictment against a former president poses one of the gravest challenges to democracy the country has ever faced. It represents either a validation of the rule-of-law principle that even the most powerful face accountability for their actions or the moment when a vast swath of the public becomes convinced that the system has been irredeemably corrupted by partisanship.

Mr. Trump, his allies and even some of his Republican rivals have embarked on a strategy to encourage the latter view, arguing that law enforcement has been hijacked by President Biden and the Democrats to take out his strongest opponent for re-election next year. Few if any of them bothered to wait to read the indictment before backing Mr. Trump’s all-caps assertion that it was merely part of the ‘GREATEST WITCH HUNT OF ALL TIME.’ It is now an article of faith, a default tactic or both. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/10/us/politics/trump-documents-indictment-democracy.html

Paul Farhia: How conservative media reacted to the Donald Trump indictment

In the hours after Donald Trump announced that he had been indicted on a charge of hoarding classified documents, conservative media outlets and personalities jumped to the usual barricades.

“A dark day in America,” Fox News host Sean Hannity said on his program Thursday night. The sometime Trump adviser continued: “Our system of justice has now been weaponized beyond belief, and this country is in serious trouble.”

“Well, they did it, and how dare they — they indicted him again,” fulminated Greg Kelly, a prime time host on Newsmax, a smaller cable channel that has attempted to outflank Fox on the right. He added: “This will not derail Donald Trump, no way.”

By then, the framing of the indictment was largely set — initially by Trump, who broke his own news Thursday evening on his Truth Social platform. He called the at-the-time unreleased indictment the work of “the corrupt Biden administration,” though it was the work of a grand jury, acting on evidence presented by a special counsel appointed by attorney general Merrick Garland to limit perceptions of political influence.

“Peak Witch Hunt” blared the red headline on Breitbart, though its lead story consisted of little more than the transcript of Trump’s comments from a video he posted on Thursday denouncing “the boxes hoax.”

The Trump talking points — the prosecution is unfair, Democrats are guilty of similar crimes, the indictment amounts to 2024 “election interference” — quickly echoed across Trump-partisan media. It was a replay of the reaction to Trump’s first indictment, in March, by prosecutors in New York City in connection to alleged hush-money payoffs to an adult-film star.

It was a reminder of how the modern news landscape offers safe spaces for partisan views, unmolested by contrary facts, analysis or interpretation. Trump’s fervent supporters could find immediate solace in information sources that confirmed their worldview. https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/06/09/trump-indictment-conservative-media-react/
 

Isaac Arnsdorf and Amy Gardner: Worries over electability pierce united GOP front on Trump indictment

Laurie Wood was in the hotel elevator when she saw the text alert on her phone: Donald Trump had been indicted. “Here we go again,” she thought.

In town as a first-time delegate to the Georgia GOP convention here, Wood stepped out onto a terrace for a cigar party grateful to be spending this historic night with fellow conservatives. State committee members gathered amid the smoke and mosquitoes were already anticipating Trump’s speech to the convention on Saturday, and now many were just finding out and beginning to reckon with the latest political earthquake.

“Game on,” said John Fredericks, a pro-Trump talk radio host popular in Georgia and Virginia, when a reporter read him Trump’s social media posts announcing the charges. “Indict away. Every indictment we get more emboldened, we get stronger, we get more votes, because working people in this country are on to their game. Trump will be the nominee, and he will win an overwhelming victory regardless of the number of witch-hunt indictments that the communists and the liberals try to push on him.”

The cigar party’s host, Republican National Committee member Jason Thompson, was quick to dismiss the indictment, which remains sealed but is said to arise from Trump’s handling of classified materials after leaving the White House. “Honestly that’s probably the weakest case — I’m a lawyer, I would know,” Thompson said between puffs. “All the presidents take documents with them, and they’re trying to make something out of it because it’s Trump.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/media/2023/06/09/trump-indictment-conservative-media-react/

Bess Levin: Bill Barr: Trump Is an Egomaniac Who “Repels” Voters and Is “Unfit” for Office…And I’d Totally Vote for Him in 2024

Speaking to CBS Mornings on Tuesday about the Justice Department’s probe into Trump’s handling of classified documents and potential obstruction of justice, Bill Barr said, contrary to his ex boss’s claims, the investigation has absolutely not been a witch hunt. “In fact, they approached this very delicately and with deference to the president,” Barr said, adding that if Trump had simply returned the documents when asked, the investigation would have “gone nowhere…but he jerked them around for a year and a half.” Whether special counsel Jack Smith indicts Trump or not remains to be see but regardless, Barr said, there is “no excuse for what [Trump] did here.”

Asked by host Gayle King what he expects the public reaction to a possible indictment might be, Barr responded: “This says more about Trump than it does the Department of Justice. He’s so egotistical that he has this penchant for conducting risky, reckless acts to show that he can sort of get away with it…and he’s done this repeatedly at the expense of all the people who depend on him to conduct the public’s business in an honorable way.” Asked about Trump’s third bid for office, the former attorney general declared him “almost unique in his inability to attract voters. He repels people other than his core base.”

Given all this, you might think that there would be absolutely no way that Barr would cast a vote for Trump in the 2024 general election, especially considering Barr has also said that Trump was responsible for January 6, and became “manic and unreasonable,” in the run-up to the attack that left five people dead. But: Surprise! (Or not, because he’s said it before.) Claiming that neither Trump nor Joe Biden are “fit for the office,” Barr said he would nevertheless go for Trump should 2024 turn out to be another matchup between the two men. He did not tell King how he sleeps at night, but presumably the answer would be “Just fine, why do you ask?” https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2023/06/bill-barr-donald-trump-2024

Ankush Khardor: The ‘Lock Him Up’ Election

Trump is walking a tightrope now, but so too is Biden, in his own way.

If the charges against Trump are legally and factually compelling, then Garland and Smith will have done the country a considerable service by finally breaking the norm of elite political impunity that has conspicuously and regrettably governed the country for the last half-century since Richard Nixon was pardoned by Gerald Ford to ensure he would not be prosecuted over the Watergate cover-up.

This prosecution, however, almost certainly will not be over by the time of the general election next fall. In ordinary circumstances, you would expect a complex, high-profile prosecution to take — from start to finish, including appeals — two to three years. Even if a trial manages to take place next year and Trump is convicted, there will undoubtedly be appeals, and Trump would likely be allowed to remain free while that process unfolds, perhaps even actively campaigning on how he should be reelected so that he can pardon himself and prosecute Biden for some reason or another.

As a practical matter, that means that the result of the presidential election will also control whether this prosecution reaches an orderly resolution. After the Manhattan charges were filed, Biden stayed far away from commenting on Trump’s case and he’s likely to do so in the near term over this indictment. But this will not be tenable so long as Trump is a candidate. As a result, the Biden campaign will have to defend this project and the underlying principles that they reflect, whether they like it or not, which will put them in the strange — and yes, again, unprecedented — position of having to support the prosecution of the sitting president’s most significant political rival, the very thing that Biden hoped to avoid upon entering office.

For now, we are witnessing one of the most complex and consequential legal and political battles of our lifetimes — one with a shockingly wide spectrum of possibilities for how it all shakes out. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/trump-indictment-turns-2024-into-lock-him-up-election.html

NY Times Editorial: Trump Left the Justice Dept. No Choice

It is hard to overstate the gravity of the criminal indictment issued against Donald Trump late Thursday by a federal grand jury. For the first time, a former president has been charged with violating federal laws, laws that he swore to uphold just over six years ago. It is the first time a former leader of the executive branch has been charged with obstructing the very agencies he led, and the first time a former commander in chief has been charged with endangering national security by violating the Espionage Act.

The indictment, unsealed on Friday, accuses Mr. Trump of 37 crimes. The majority of them — 31 of the counts — are for willful retention of national defense information, each a violation of the Espionage Act. There is one count of conspiracy to obstruct justice, in which Mr. Trump is accused of conspiring with his personal aide, Walt Nauta, to hide classified documents from the F.B.I. and the grand jury investigating the case. The other charges involve withholding documents, corruptly concealing documents and making false statements to law enforcement authorities.

The potential prison sentences for Mr. Trump add up to as much as 420 years, even though conviction almost never results in the maximum sentence. But this indictment confronts the country with the harrowing prospect of a former president facing years behind bars, even as he runs to regain the White House.

Mr. Trump and his Republican allies are already trying to politicize the indictment, insisting that the charges issued by 23 randomly chosen residents of South Florida were an attempt by President Biden to demolish his rival. But the evidence compiled by the government is so substantial that it is clear the Justice Department had no choice but to indict. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/09/opinion/trump-indictment-documents.html
 

Jonathan Chait: Why No Amount of Evidence Will Make Republicans Admit

Trump was not raised in a traditional conservative milieu. He came into a seedy, corrupt world in which politicians could be bought off and laws were suggestions. He worked with mobsters and absorbed their view of law enforcement: People who follow the law are suckers, and the worst thing in the world is a rat.

That ethos ultimately explains Trump’s approach to classified information. He casually discarded all the rules concerning government secrecy as president — using an unsecured mobile phone, tearing up official documents, sharing highly classified information with Russian officials, and conducting state affairs at his loosely secured Florida resort. After leaving office, he naturally assumed he could continue flouting regulations about government secrecy. If the government was demanding its documents back, that was not an order but a negotiation. And why should he give up his leverage? He had something they wanted.

You can imagine the futility of trying to explain to Trump the seriousness and national security implications of the laws he was brazenly flouting, if any of his aides even bothered trying to get it across to him.

It is the interplay of the two forces, the paranoia of the right and the seamy criminality of the right’s current champion, that has brought the party to this point. Trump’s endlessly repeated “witch hunt” meme blends together the mobster’s hatred of the FBI with the conservative’s fear of the bureaucrat. His loyalists have been trained to either deny any evidence of misconduct by their side or rationalize it as a necessary countermeasure against their enemies.

The concept of “crime” has been redefined in the conservative mind to mean activities by Democrats. They insist upon Trump’s innocence because they believe a Republican, axiomatically, cannot be a criminal. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/2023/06/trump-indictment-why-republicans-will-never-admit-his-guilt.html

Matt Dixon and Jonathan Allen; How Ron DeSantis found a home in Florida’s swamp

Ron DeSantis promised to drain the swamp in Tallahassee. Instead, over more than four years as governor, he has reconfigured the swamp to suit his political needs and shielded it from Florida’s famous sunshine.

In anticipation of his 2024 presidential bid, he pushed the Legislature to change Florida's resign-to-run law. He revised state policy so he could transfer $80 million in campaign cash to a federal political committee. And just after his official announcement last month, his administration pressured state legislators and lobbyists to aid his presidential campaign while they awaited his decisions on pet projects in the budget.

His use of state power to aid his presidential ambitions hasn’t come as a surprise to Florida political insiders who have watched him use the tools of governance to advance his agenda and ideology.

Now, as DeSantis campaigns for the presidency, he’s renewing his vow to drain a swamp — this time in Washington — and is trying to convince conservative voters that he is better suited than former President Donald Trump to shrink government and make it more accountable to the public. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/2024-election/ron-desantis-found-home-floridas-swamp-rcna86919

James Poniewozik The Paranoid Style in Tucker Carlson’s Home Office

Most of the time, it does not qualify as newsworthy to see a man in your social media feed staring into a camera, asking "What exactly happened on 9/11?" and demanding to know why the media isn’t digging for the truth about J.F.K.’s assassination. Usually, it’s just a sign that you should not have accepted so many friend requests from high school classmates you barely remember.

But when that man was recently paid millions of dollars by Fox News to say much the same things on one of the most popular shows on cable TV, attention is paid. In Tuesday’s debut episode of “Tucker on Twitter," the new home-brew show from Tucker Carlson, the ousted prime-time star’s brand of resentment, insinuation and dog-whistly mocking finally gets the guy-ranting-from-his-den visuals that suit it.

There’s a touch of echo in the audio; there are wall hangings, wood paneling, a bit of woodsy green through a window. Carlson holds his own Teleprompter controller and wears a suit with a pocket square. The overall look is talk-show Green Acres, or Ron Swanson if he shaved and went to prep school.

As a production, Tucker on Twitter looks less like a newscast than one of the improvised lockdown shows that late-night talk hosts recorded from home in the early Covid days of 2020. But in this case, Carlson’s quarantine is self-inflicted.

But since 2017, Carlson has made himself likely the most influential broadcaster in conservative politics by posturing as an outsider on the inside. However well he can monetize a Twitter audience, it’s another matter to retain as much political-cultural power as an outsider on the outside. Nor do we know if this is a real transformation or just a stopgap until Carlson is contractually free to go back on TV.

Until then, the truth is out there, and so is Tucker Carlson — whether or not they are necessarily in the same place. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/07/arts/television/tucker-carlson-twitter.html

Susan B. Glasser: Finally, a Few G.O.P. Candidates Dare to Speak Trump’s Name

The Republican civil war that Donald Trump’s continued ascendance has long heralded is finally happening. That much is evident from recent events. But you can be forgiven for confusing it with a clown show. There is no clear line where one ends and the other begins. In the 2024 G.O.P. Presidential primaries, a few candidates have—finally, belatedly—begun to criticize the former President, but is any of it really serious in this age of performative B.S. that has come to characterize the Trump-era Republican Party?

A clown show is Trump's preferred form of politics, and he relishes nothing more than a fight, or, as is now the case, many fights simultaneously. Criminal charges against a front-runner, at virtually any other time in American history, would likely have been seen as disqualifying. The pile-on from other Republicans might, in a different moment, be seen as confirmation of the candidate’s incredible weakness. Yet Trump remains the overwhelming leader in the G.O.P. race.

And, rather than unite against him, the other Republicans in the fast-growing field—ten and counting with the addition this week of Christie, Pence, and the little-known North Dakota governor, Doug Burgum—seem determined to replay the early 2016 primary season, when Trump’s fervent minority was enough for him to win in a crowded race despite the majority of Republicans not supporting him.

If anything, since that race, Trump has only perfected the art of using division to his own advantage. The New York indictment caused his poll numbers to go up, not down. He anticipates the same thing happening if federal charges are indeed forthcoming. And why shouldn’t he? In an NBC survey in April, sixty-eight per cent of Republican voters polled said that charges against him were a politically motivated attempt to stop Trump and agreed with the statement No other candidate is like him, we must support him.

With Trump both a proven loser and at some actual risk of future imprisonment, there remains a real, if slim, chance that this could be an actual Republican race and not another coronation. But, if this is a genuine civil war inside the G.O.P., even some of the combatants don’t seem fully committed to the fight. Take Pence, who long ago secured his place as among America’s most sanctimonious—and most subservient—politicians. Shortly after his announcement, he quickly undercut his strong words about Trump and January 6th, vowing to back whoever became the eventual Republican nominee—presumably even if it is Trump, a man he had just said dishonored the Constitution. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/finally-a-few-gop-candidates-dare-to-speak-trumps-name