George T. Conway III: An Airtight Ruling Against Trump

The historic opinion of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in United States v. Trump, held that former President Donald Trump does not enjoy immunity from prosecution for any crimes he committed in attempting to end constitutional democracy in the United States.

For the purpose of this criminal case, former President Trump has become citizen Trump, with all of the defenses of any other criminal defendant. But any executive immunity that may have protected him while he served as President no longer protects him against this prosecution.

In its judgment accompanying its opinion, the appeals court took an additional important step in moving Trump’s case to trial. It essentially set a deadline of next Monday for Trump to seek relief from the Supreme Court. The court of appeals directed that, by February 12, if Trump does not ask the Supreme Court to halt proceedings in the district court, those proceedings should recommence immediately.

Which means that Trump’s lawyers have to take their case to the Supreme Court—by filing an application for a stay—by next Monday. And the Department of Justice will surely respond almost immediately.

What will the Supreme Court do? The strength of today’s opinion makes it far more likely that the Court will do … nothing. Any court—including the Supreme Court—would have a tough time writing a better opinion than the one the D.C. Circuit published today. The best course of action would be for the Supreme Court to deny a stay, and to deny review altogether, in a matter of days.

And that could mean a trial in United States v. Trump no later than early summer. That’s what a unanimous, airtight opinion can do. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2024/02/dc-circuit-court-ruling-on-trump-immunity/677367/

Maureen Dowd: Inside Trump’s Not-So-Swift Brain


It’s easy to imagine what’s going through Donald Trump’s head right now. I can hear his interior monologue all the way from Mar-a-Lago. He’s fulminating, working himself up to another epic meltdown, like he had over Nikki Haley the night he won the New Hampshire primary. The thoughts pinballing through Trump’s cortex might be something like this:

“I like Taylor Swift. I do. She’s made a career of revenge, which gets my Complete and Total Endorsement. She’s beautiful, just my type, unlike that wack job E. Jean Carroll and her sick lawyer, Roberta Kaplan.

“SAD! But Taylor must be destroyed. She and Travis will be deified as prom king and queen at the Super Bowl, especially if 87 pops the question on America’s Holy Day like they’re in a Hallmark movie. And no one can be deified more than me. I AM THE BIGGEST CELEBRITY ON THE PLANET! Jon Voight, that old Midnight Cowboy, compared me to Jesus, and my tremendous followers think God has sent me to fight the Marxists and fix America, which is now a third-world country.

“Taylor is being treated like an American icon, but I’m the American icon. I’m trying to save America by destroying democracy, the N.F.L. and Taylor Swift. I know it might seem crazy to attack the things that bind America. But I alone can fix it.

“MAGA is waging a Holy War on her because she’s going to urge people to vote, and that would be mainly suburban women who hate me. They tell me, ‘I don’t know if the suburban women like you.’ Suburban women, will you please like me — I saved your damn neighborhoods, OK?

“It’s pathetic that Crooked Joe Biden needs a pop singer to drag him over the finish line. It didn’t help Crooked Hillary when she got propped up by Bruce Springsteen, Beyoncé, Katy Perry, Christina Aguilera, Bon Jovi, Kelly Clarkson and Miley Cyrus. Speaking of music, I hope Taylor doesn’t get a Grammy. I deserve a Grammy!

“Black voters, Hispanic voters, young voters are coming to my side because I’m the greatest. The economy is roaring and the stock market is at record highs because investors are projecting I will beat Biden.

“LOOK AT WHAT YOU MADE ME DO, Taylor. You and Mr. Pfizer are now at the top of my enemies list. I don’t get too angry, I get even. Hey, Taylor, that would be a good song title for you!” https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/03/opinion/donald-trump-taylor-swift.html
 

David French: Taylor Swift and the Profound Weirdness of MAGA

Hatred makes people gullible and foolish. That’s a key lesson of the MAGA right’s deeply strange turn against Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, the Kansas City Chiefs’ star tight end Travis Kelce. In fact, that’s a key lesson from this entire sorry era in American political and cultural life.

There’s nothing new about partisan anger at celebrities. And Swift has dabbled in politics. In 2018 she endorsed the Democratic candidate for Senate in Tennessee, Phil Bredesen, over the Republican Marsha Blackburn, and in 2020 she endorsed Joe Biden for president. Kelce, for his part, appeared in ads for the Pfizer Covid vaccine. By MAGA’s calculation, between them the couple express the most infernal combination of affiliations — Democrats and vaccines.

Moreover, “shut up and sing” (or, in Kelce’s case, shut up and catch) has been such a consistent theme in right-wing cancel culture that it was the title of the Fox News host Laura Ingraham’s 2003 book and of a 2006 documentary about the Dixie Chicks (now just the Chicks). But Republican opposition to celebrity engagement has always been highly selective. Even as he condemned Swift, one prominent MAGA figure recently boasted that his “side” still had Kid Rock, Ted Nugent and Jon Voight. And it was the G.O.P., after all, that elected both a movie star (Ronald Reagan) and a reality TV celebrity (Donald Trump) to the presidency.

But while traditional partisan pettiness can explain the knee-jerk negative reaction to Swift, it can’t come close to explaining the incredible weirdness of the recent theory emanating from people with some of the largest platforms in MAGA America. According to them, Taylor Swift’s extraordinary popularity isn’t the organic outcome of a talented and appealing superstar’s bond with her fans. No, according to them, Swift’s rise is an op or a psyop engineered by the deep state in order to benefit Biden. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/02/04/opinion/taylor-swift-travis-kelce-maga.html
 

Jonathan Last: If You Came Down From Mars Would You Guess That Trump Was Winning?

Start with the unprecedented fact that we’re on the brink of having a former president—who attempted a coup and is currently facing 91 criminal charges—as his party’s nominee.

Include the detail that this former president has said he will “terminate . . . parts of the Constitution” (his words) and wants to be “a dictator” (also his words). Add to it that leadership in the former president’s party is refusing to commit to certifying an election in which he is the loser.
And that a senator in this party argues that this president will have the authority to ignore Supreme Court rulings.

If you came down from Mars and looked at all of the current and historical data, but did not have access to polling, and had to guess the state of the race, then every reasonable observer would assume that Biden was way ahead.

Because we have polling, we know that Biden is not up large. And so we’re trying to invent ex post facto rationalizations to explain a reality that differs from what reasonable observers would predict. https://plus.thebulwark.com/p/if-you-came-down-from-mars-would

David Atkins: What if Today’s Republican Party Wasn’t a Trump Personality Cult?

In a rational Republican Party, Ron DeSantis and Nikki Haley would be frontrunners battling in South Carolina for the right to face President Joe Biden in November. Donald Trump, having lost by over 7 million votes as an incumbent in 2020 and facing multiple felony trials in 2024, would be out of the spotlight. As a party out of power in the White House and the Senate, the GOP would have a robust debate over policy and electability.

But the Republican Party is not a normal political party. It is a cult of personality.

The majority of Republican primary voters still believe the lie that Trump won the 2020 election. Most Republicans in New Hampshire, which just delivered him a victory over Haley, say that Trump is fit for the presidency even if he is convicted of a felony. While the Republican primary voters who supported other candidates mostly did so out of dislike for Trump, 80 percent of those who backed Trump did so out of solid support for him personally.

Trump’s base of evangelicals, white nationalists, and hardcore conservatives thrills to his revanchist message and detests compromise with the American majority that’s backed Democrats in seven of the last eight presidential elections. The MAGA enthusiasts lack a coherent public policy framework beyond hatred of marginalized communities and Blue America in general. Could anyone outside of polling professionals define where the MAGA base stands on anything from housing policy to taxation of Wall Street profit-taking to the hypothetical defense of Taiwan? https://washingtonmonthly.com/2024/01/31/if-the-republican-party-wasnt-a-trump-personality-cult/
 

Sean Wilentz: The Case for Disqualification

Even as Donald Trump roars and intimidates with ever more violent threats, even as his lawyers warn that kicking him off the ballot in November would “unleash chaos and bedlam,” even as it becomes evident that we are not in the midst of a normal national election but an ongoing coup d’état by a charismatic despot, it is taking a long time for the public to understand the enormity of the events of January 6, 2021, and all that precipitated them.

Less than a week after the attack on the Capitol, Eric Foner, the preeminent authority on Reconstruction, pointed to Section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment, ratified three years after the end of the Civil War, which bars anyone who has sworn to uphold the Constitution and who has engaged in insurrection from ever holding office again. Plainly, Foner said, then-president Donald Trump, along with other public officials, had sworn “an oath to defend the Constitution and, on Jan. 6, they violated it.” To bar them from public office, as the Constitution mandates, “would be the mildest of punishments” for “an uprising that left five people dead, threatened the lives of members of Congress, caused havoc in the Capitol, and sought to overturn the results of the presidential election.” Upholding the law of the land, Foner remarked, “would be an affirmation of the vitality of our wounded democracy.”

Three years later the Supreme Court will now decide whether to sustain the recent decisions of the Colorado Supreme Court and the Maine secretary of state to follow the Constitution’s mandate, much as Foner suggested. Unsurprisingly, Trump’s lawyers and defenders, when not unsubtly raising the specter of mass violence, have groped for any escape route they can find. George W. Bush’s attorney general Michael B. Mukasey has floated the strange reading that the relevant section of the Fourteenth Amendment covers only persons appointed to office.

 In its filing contesting the Maine disqualification, Trump’s legal team tries to peddle the claim that the amendment bars persons “from holding specified offices, not from running for them or from being elected to them.” https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/02/22/the-case-for-disqualification-trump-sean-wilentz/

David A. Graham: Trump Isn’t Merely Unhinged

With apologies to a certain newspaper’s slogan, many of Donald Trump’s most dangerous statements hide in the plain light of day.

The problem is not that they don’t get reported on—they do—but even so, they are easy to tune out, perhaps because he’s been saying outlandish things for so long that people simply can’t bring themselves to parse the new ones; or perhaps because they’ve become accustomed, or at least numb, to his utterances; or perhaps because they don’t want to let him occupy their headspace; or perhaps because he got kicked off Twitter (now X) and they had no interest in joining Truth Social. Or maybe it’s because the more sinister material gets mixed up with his strange elocutions (“We’re gonna have a great country—it’s gonna be called the United States of America”), contrarian hot takes (“You know, Hezbollah is very smart. They’re all very smart”), and gibberish (“All of these indictments that you see—I was never indicted. Practically never heard the word. It wasn’t a word that registered”).

They are the sorts of ideas that would have been shocking to hear from any mainstream politician just a decade ago. And yet, today, Trump—arguably the single most influential figure in the United States—says these things, and they hardly register. Consider the following examples, all from just the past few months:

1. Promised to destroy the federal government as we know it.
2. Argued that a presidential candidate should be immune from prosecution.
3. Insulted and attempted to intimidate judges, prosecutors, witnesses, and others.
4. Continued to claim that the election was stolen.
5. Excused the January 6 riot.
6. Entertained pardoning himself.
7. Menaced American Jews for not voting for him.
8. Suggested executing Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Mark Milley.
9. Accused NBC of treason and threatened to pull it off the air.
10. Promised to lock up political opponents.
11. Recommended extrajudicial executions.
12. Called for a judge overseeing his case to be prosecuted.
13. Told voters not to bother voting.
14. Celebrated the antidemocratic strongman Viktor Orbán.
15. Promised to indict Joe Biden. https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2023/11/donald-trump-15-most-dangerous-statements/675970/

Susan B. Glasser: The Senate’s False Hope of a Grand Bargain Meets Its Trumpy Demise

Tying the fate of Ukraine in its existential fight with Russia to a resolution of the near-irresolvable politics of the American border seems a particularly cruel twist. For Trump, it’s like a gift. Why wouldn’t America’s most noted admirer of the Russian President, Vladimir Putin, want to undercut Ukraine while, at the same time, sinking a package that might look like a real bipartisan win for Joe Biden? Trump wants an issue to run on, not a solution. (And a potent issue it is—recent surveys suggest that Biden is highly vulnerable to the charge that he’s let the border problem fester, with voters in battleground states giving Trump a wide advantage on immigration.) Never underestimate the appeal of personal vengeance to Trump as well—it hardly helps the case that this deal has been the top priority of his remaining nemesis in the Republican Party, the Senate

You know McConnell is in trouble when Democrats seem to almost be feeling sorry for him. On Wednesday night, at the annual Washington Press Club Foundation congressional dinner, the Senate Majority Leader, Chuck Schumer, went out of his way to assure everyone that the current mess was not McConnell’s fault. “I’ve got ninety-nine problems but Mitch ain’t one,” he joked, though it was unclear whether the audience fully appreciated the Jay-Z reference. McConnell, at eighty-one, and visibly frail since an accident last year, is widely assumed to be on his way out of the Senate. He has long wanted support for Ukraine to be a part of his legacy. For months he has gone to the Senate floor to implore colleagues in his party to stick with the fight. Instead, more and more of them are sticking with Trump, which has led to some awkward moments for McConnell, who, at one point in recent days, seemed to abandon the deal that he himself had asked another Republican senator, James Lankford, of Oklahoma, to negotiate. By Wednesday, McConnell offered a near-admission of failure, suggesting that it may be time to cut loose aid for Ukraine and look for a separate vote to continue funding. At the same time, Trump was in Washington, blasting away at Republicans senators who still support the deal as making a “terrible mistake.”

As this latest grand bargain heads toward its increasingly likely demise, with Trump heckling from the sidelines, the rest of the world will once again be gawking at our dysfunction. “My experience around here is: it’s all about timing,” King told me. He recalled Shakespeare’s Caesar: “There is a tide in the lives of men which taken at the flood leads on to victory.” His conclusion: “If they miss this chance to do something serious about the border, there’s no telling when it would come again.” My conclusion is even simpler: Republicans have chosen which tide to take. After Trump, the deluge. https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-bidens-washington/the-senates-false-hope-of-a-grand-bargain-meets-its-trumpy-demise
 

David A. Graham: Trump Isn’t Bluffing

In the past few months, the former president has described himself as a “very proud election denier.” He has repeatedly threatened and intimidated judges, witnesses, prosecutors, and even the family of prosecutors involved in the cases against him, going so far as to say that his legal opponents will be consigned to mental asylums if he’s reelected. He has suggested that the man he picked for chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff deserves to be executed on grounds of treason. He’s called for investigating NBC and possibly yanking the network off the air, also on grounds of treason—one of his most direct attacks on the First Amendment. And he’s vowed to arrest and indict President Joe Biden and other political opponents for no apparent reason other than that they oppose him.

The fact that Trump’s ideas have become more authoritarian is not yet fully appreciated. One reason is people have heard Trump say outlandish things for so long that they can’t identify what’s new, or they’ve become numb. Another is venue: Once Trump left the White House and stopped tweeting, his vitriol became less noticeable to anyone who didn’t attend his rallies, seek out videos of them, or join Trump’s own Truth Social network.

Even when a comment is so extreme that it does break into the mainstream, what happens next is predictable. The first time Trump says something, people react with shock and compare him to Hitler. The second time, people say Trump is at it again. By the third time, it becomes background noise—an appalling but familiar part of the Trump shtick.

This is just the sort of “normalization” that Trump’s critics warned against from the start, but it’s also a natural human response to repeated exposure. The result is that Trump has been able to acclimate the nation to authoritarianism by introducing it early and often. When a second-term President Trump directs the Justice Department to lock up Democratic politicians or generals or reporters or activists on flimsy or no grounds at all, people will wring their hands, but they’ll also shrug and wonder why he didn’t do it sooner. After all, he’s been promising to do it forever, right? https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/trump-veterans-day-speech-vermin-reelection/676137/
 

Joyce Vance: Texas Ignores the Constitution and the Rule of Law

He’s right on the nose. MAGA “patriots” want to have their cake and eat it, too, when it comes to the involvement of the federal government in their lives. It’s laughable; perhaps it was even meant tongue-in-cheek. But when it comes to Texas and the states supporting it in its battle against federal control of immigration policy and enforcement, there’s nothing funny going on.

Texas wants the federal government to do more to stem the flow of migrants across its border and be meaner about it. That’s hardly news, nor is it news to anyone that our immigration system is broken. Congress enacted the Immigration Reform and Control Act (also known as the Simpson-Mazzoli Act or the Reagan Amnesty) in November 1986 when Ronald Reagan was president. Almost 40 years later, and despite decades of attempts to reach a compromise that would set the stage for more recent changes to reflect current conditions, there has been no further legislation. Late last week, Speaker Mike Johnson announced that the compromise immigration bill the Senate was working on was “dead on arrival” in the House, and he would not bring it to the floor. And on Wednesday, in his first floor speech as speaker, Johnson said President Biden should use executive action to control migrants at the border. Have you ever heard of House Republicans suggesting a Democratic president should use more executive orders to direct policy? Without the slightest touch of irony, the man who shut down any legislative action intoned, “I’m here this morning to beg my colleagues to help us force the administration to take action.”

Our immigration system is broken—and will stay that way as long as Republicans promote its use as a political weapon. We need a foreign policy that helps stabilize Central American countries that are struggling and that reinforces the importance of protecting human rights, for instance, of women domestic abuse victims who flee for the United States under current conditions. We must respect international law on asylum and also build and communicate clear, readily understood rules for applying for citizenship that do not involve a decades-long wait that incentivizes illegal immigration. We need legislation that creates a rational system for permitting people who want to come to this country to get in line. Immigration is an economic engine that fuels our economy, with both workers and people buying goods and services. We need good federal policy that makes immigration work. But legally, the federal government sets policy, whether good or bad, that controls in this area. The states can’t simply decide they don’t like how the federal government is handling matters. https://joycevance.substack.com/p/texas-ignores-the-constitution-and

Michael Tomasky: The GOP Owns the Border Now

The GOP killed the border deal. The party that has been caterwauling for months—years—about the porous border dispatched one of its most conservative members, James Lankford of Oklahoma, to negotiate a bill. They had Democrats over a political barrel. President Biden was willing to sign a bill that included plenty of stuff that’s hard for many Democrats to swallow, but it’s an election year, and there’s Arizona to think about. They had a bill the likes of which they won’t see for another 15 years.

And they killed it. Because Trump wants to say ‘open borders.’ Forget policy, forget human beings, forget all that. Politics is politics, and lots of things happen for, duh, political reasons. But this was on a whole ’nother level. When we think their behavior can’t get more shocking, it always, always does.”

So how can the Democrats be sure that voters get the message that the Republicans now own this chaos? Obviously, for starters, just say it and say it and say it. https://thenewrepublic.substack.com/p/the-gop-owns-the-border-now-heres
 

John Cassidy: Why Trump’s G.O.P. Sock Puppets Are Sinking a Bipartisan Effort to Tighten Up Border Security

On his social-media platform on Monday, the former President took time out from asking his followers whether he resembles Elvis Presley to denounce the bipartisan bill as “a Death Wish for the Republican Party.” Of course, what he really meant is that passing the bill and restricting the inflow of migrants could conceivably be a death wish for his Presidential campaign, because it might deprive him of his signature issue. As other Republicans sought to explain their opposition to the legislation in terms of its contents, Trump, as he often does, said the quiet part out loud. In a second social-media post, he described the bill as “a highly sophisticated trap for Republicans to assume the blame on what the Radical Left Democrats have done to our Border, just in time for our most important EVER Election.” And he went on: “Don’t fall for it!!!”

Republicans bowed to Trump’s demands, which means they are now willing to allow the situation at the border to persist for at least another ten months. There are only two possible explanations for this stance: they are either ignoring what they have repeatedly described as a grave threat to national security, or they have been deliberately exaggerating the dangers all along for political reasons. No prizes for guessing the correct explanation.

“Working with my administration, the United States Senate has done the hard work it takes to reach a bipartisan agreement,” Biden said. “Now, House Republicans have to decide. Do they want to solve the problem? Or do they want to keep playing politics with the border?”

With Trump directing G.O.P. operations, that last question answers itself. https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/why-trumps-gop-sock-puppets-are-sinking-a-bipartisan-effort-to-tighten-up-border-security
 

 Maggie Haberman: The retribution presidency

John Bolton has a warning about what a second Donald Trump presidency might look like.

“Trump really cares only about retribution for himself, and it will consume much of a second term,” Bolton, who served as Trump’s national security adviser, writes in a new edition of his White House memoir, “The Room Where It Happened.”

“I am your warrior. I am your justice, and for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution,” Trump told supporters last year. He promised to appoint a special prosecutor if he’s re-elected to “go after” President Biden and his family.

A vindictive Trump second term is now a frequent point of discussion. But Bolton already got a close-up look at Trump’s nature — and how his anger can boil over. He spent 17 months in the administration and left in 2019.

“He liked humiliating people from the get-go,” Bolton said in an interview. “I don’t think I have seen, from when I was in the White House to any period since when I have left, I don’t think there’s any change in his personality.”

In the new section, Bolton, a Republican who is hawkish on military power and who was former President George W. Bush’s ambassador to the United Nations, bluntly writes that Trump is “unfit to be president” and is driven only by self-interest. https://messaging-custom-newsletters.nytimes.com/dynamic/render
 

Tom Nichols: An unserious nation faces dire choices.

Anyone who has ever worked in politics knows that sometimes good bills die for stupid and cheap partisan reasons. The House GOP’s obstruction, however, is beyond partisanship. Republicans are threatening to harm the country and endanger our allies merely to help Trump’s reelection chances, obeying a man under multiple indictments and whose track record as a party leader has been one of unbroken losses and humiliation.

Trump, of course, cares nothing for national policy. He has also clearly abandoned any pretenses about democracy, a position that might seem less than ideal heading into a general election, which is likely why Trump’s campaign has tried to ridicule concerns about its candidate’s commitment to the Constitution. But the former president’s footmen can’t help themselves, and they continue to trumpet their hopes for a dictatorship. Over the weekend, Senator J. D. Vance of Ohio, under pressure from ABC’s George Stephanopoulos, said that a president has the right to defy the Supreme Court. (This wasn’t the first time: Trump, the senator said in 2021, should “stand before the country like Andrew Jackson did and say, ‘The chief justice has made his ruling; now let him enforce it.’” https://www.theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2024/02/the-weirdest-presidential-election-in-history/677356/