NYT Falls for Trump’s Limited Hangout

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Charlie Kirk and the President’s failson are very impressed with President Trump’s order that Pam Bondi seek to release grand jury transcripts.

 

Trump gave the order in response to a WSJ report describing a birthday letter, signed by Trump, included in a book that Ghislaine Maxwell made for Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003.

It isn’t clear how the letter with Trump’s signature was prepared. Inside the outline of the naked woman was a typewritten note styled as an imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person.

“Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,” the note began.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is. 

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey. 

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it. 

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that? 

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you. 

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

WSJ describes that this book was examined by Epstein and Maxwell investigators.

Pages from the leather-bound album—assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006—are among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago, according to people who have reviewed the pages. It’s unclear if any of the pages are part of the Trump administration’s recent review.

But while there are titillating allusions in the letter, such as the reference to a new secret every day, there’s is not any conceivable reason why this letter would be presented as evidence against either Epstein or Maxwell. It does not overtly describe trafficking minor women at all.

The order that Bondi unseal grand jury materials will do nothing but impress people like Kirk and Don Jr, designed to create a likely unsuccessful drawn out legal fight in which, even if the transcripts were released, would not include this book.

SQUIRREL! Trump yelled, when cornered.

And it worked not just for Charlie Kirk, but also for NYT’s Glenn Thrush, a politics reporter who survived a Me Too scandal repurposed to cover DOJ. It took him 11¶¶ before he explained that a judge was unlikely to release any transcripts, and another paragraph before he explained that the vast bulk of the evidence is in FBI custody.

Mr. Trump’s stated desire to address the “ridiculous” publicity around the case may not be enough to convince the judge to release the transcripts. Grand jury transcripts are, under federal guidelines, kept secret to protect crime victims and witnesses. They are typically released only under narrowly defined circumstances.

Even if the transcripts are made public, which might involve months of legal wrangling, the evidence represents a fraction of material collected in the investigation. Over the past several months, dozens of F.B.I. agents and prosecutors with the Justice Department’s national security division were diverted from other assignments to review thousands of documents and a vast trove of video evidence, including footage from video cameras in the prison. [my emphasis]

If the grand jury evidence is a subset of the larger FBI stash, Glenn, then Bondi could release the letter herself, on her own authority, today. At least tell your readers that, Glenn, even if you don’t make the entire story, “Cornered by WSJ story, Donald Trump attempts a limited hangout.”

Thrush quotes Goldman making a point that there’s more in FBI custody, but doesn’t explain the import of it–that Bondi could release whatever copy of this letter the FBI has immediately.

Donald Trump is sufficiently concerned about this that he’s attempting to distract dim-witted people.

Including, apparently, NYT reporters.

Update: On Xitter, Thrush claimed this, in the third paragraph, alerted readers that Trump was affirmatively chasing data that would not have the letter.

The president cited “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein” for his directive, which falls far short of demands from some congressional Republicans to make public all investigative files collected by the department and the F.B.I., not just testimony presented in federal court.

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Chuck Grassley Complicit in Sending Dozens of Innocent Men to a Concentration Camp

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As I laid out the other day, Chuck Grassley made a bunch of transparent excuses so he could cover up how Emil Bove gave advice to DHS that resulted in them defying an order from Judge James Boasberg.

It’s not me saying it. It is senior DOJ official Yaakov Roth saying it.

On March 16, he told Erez Reuveni and others that Bove was the one who — falsely — told DHS they could deplane flights that Boasberg had ordered be turned around without violating the court’s order.

On March 14, Bove said you might have to tell a judge “fuck you” to ensure Stephen Miller could use the Alien Enemies Act to deport people with no oversight. On March 15, Bove provided affirmatively false information to DHS, resulting in them defying Boasberg’s order — and with their actions, stranding hundreds of men, some completely innocent, in a brutal concentration camp in El Salvador.

Grassley must have recognized his arguments were transparent bullshit. Because in today’s hearing on Bove’s nominate, Grassley broke parliamentary rules to prevent Cory Booker, the home Senator on this nomination, from arguing against it.

 

As Sheldon Whitehouse notes, there are two parliamentary arguments that Bove’s nomination was not properly advanced. First, that Grassley blew off Booker’s point of order, then that there was a quorum to vote through the nomination.

HuffPo has more.

Chuck Grassley broke the rules to try to rush through Emil Bove’s lifetime appointment before — as Whitehouse noted — his conduct is investigated as criminal contempt.

He is protecting a guy who unloaded dozens of innocent men into a concentration camp. Worse, he is breaking the rules to promote Emil Bove to a lifetime appointment to reward him for stranding innocent men in a concentration camp.

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Pam Bondi Fired the Avenger of Sex Trafficking Victims on Donald Trump’s Personal Authority

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I’ve often said that, this time, Donald Trump has chosen poorly of which people to make political martyrs.

Less than eight hours after proclaiming that the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was just some “new SCAM” perpetrated by Democrats, about four days after he first attempted to float the wildly illogical claim that the Epstein “Files [were] written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration,” DOJ fired Jim Comey’s daughter, Maurene.

According to the NYT, the letter terminating Ms. Comey cited Article II authority.

Ms. Comey was informed of her firing in a letter that cited Article II of the Constitution, which describes the powers of the president, according to two of the people.

In recent weeks, Pam Bondi’s DOJ has pursued an accelerating purge of prosecutors, public affairs professionals, and ethics advisors protected by civil service protections, also citing Article II authority. But somehow Ms. Comey’s firing took place after Trump started to lose his shit over his inability to squelch his own supporters’ mania about the Epstein scandal.

After Donald Trump started to go nuts about Epstein, Ms. Comey was fired on Trump’s own personal authority. It’s certainly possible this SCOTUS would uphold his authority to do so, if sued. But he’d have to spend a lot of time arguing about his own personal discretion in the decision to fire her.

He did this. Donald Trump did this.

And all the while, her role as a prosecutor in the Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, and Diddy cases would be at the forefront.

Even ignoring the insanely stupid timing of Ms. Comey’s termination, creating at least the appearance of a connection between Trump’s failing attempts to squelch conspiracy theories and her firing, there are two other details that Pam Bondi cannot have thought through.

First, the indictment of Epstein and the prosecution of Maxwell depended — as did the reporting from Julie Brown (which Miami Herald has now posted together) it built on — on developing the trust of the victims. Here’s how Geoffrey Berman described it in his book.

Over the next weeks and months, a team of FBI agents, NYPD detectives, and our prosecutors scrambled to make that happen. This meant that they identified victims, interviewed them, and went about the sensitive task of getting them to agree to testify in open court against their tormentor. Without the voices of these young women—girls when Epstein raped them—there was not a case. That our team accomplished these tasks without word leaking to Epstein or his lawyers that he was under investigation is a testament to their intelligence and deftness.

[snip]

I made a plea to the victims: Our job is not over, there is justice to be done, and we need your help. Epstein could not have done what he did without the assistance of others. We ask for your cooperation in our ongoing investigation into Epstein’s co-conspirators. The response was overwhelming. We conducted interviews that afternoon and in the days that followed. Over time, many other victims agreed to be interviewed. After the initial shock of Epstein’s death, I could feel the team refocusing and reenergizing.

One big break was the cooperation of a victim, one of Epstein’s first, whom Maxwell and Epstein had recruited at a summer arts camp back when she was just fourteen years old. She is now an actress and married with children. She told us that Epstein and Maxwell approached her at the camp when she was fourteen. They took what seemed to her, at first, to be a genuine interest in her life and aspirations. Epstein paid for her voice lessons and some other arts instruction.

She had told no one about the abuse that followed, and specifically not her mother, who had naively believed that Epstein’s interest was benign—that he was a kind, wealthy man helping her daughter reach her dreams. It was difficult for her to come forward. She had never wanted her mother to feel guilty. (Her name, thankfully, has not been publicly revealed. Judge Alison Nathan, who was assigned the Maxwell case, allowed the victims to remain anonymous if they so chose.)

What she told us, and would later testify to, was that Maxwell was walking her pet Yorkie when she approached her at the camp. Epstein soon joined them and began asking questions. “He seemed very interested to know what I thought about the camp, what my favorite classes were,” she said.

They stayed in touch, and at one point he took her to Victoria’s Secret and bought her white cotton panties. Soon after, when she was alone with Epstein at his Palm Beach residence, he pulled his pants down, got on top of her, and masturbated. As she later testified at trial, “I was frozen and in fear. I had never seen a penis before. I was terrified and felt gross and like I felt ashamed.” What followed were group sessions involving Epstein, Maxwell, and other women, which began with “Ghislaine or Jeffrey” summoning everyone to follow them to Jeffrey’s bedroom or massage room. We continued to build the case and search for other victims.

The SDNY team, including Ms. Comey, spent a lot of time assuring victims that their willingness to testify might bring them some kind of justice.

I don’t know how the victims will respond to the news that Ms. Comey was fired before Maxwell’s appeals were exhausted (to say nothing of the Diddy sentencing, currently scheduled for October 3). But these victims put trust into Maurene Comey. Maurene Comey was one of the few people who convinced them she would take on very powerful people in search of justice for them.

And Pam Bondi fired her, on Donald Trump’s personal authority.

There’s one more detail. According to Berman, not long before he killed himself, Epstein proffered cooperation with SDNY, in another bid to get a sweetheart plea deal.

[Reid Weingarten] said that he had just come from meeting with Epstein at the Metropolitan Correctional Center and that his client was not happy. (Good! I remember thinking.) “I think my client might want to have an interesting conversation with your office,” he said.

I had expected an overture. With Epstein facing forty-five years in prison—a life sentence for a man his age—it made sense for him to want a deal. But my openness to one was quite limited. He’d already been given the deal of the century in South Florida, buying him more than a decade of undeserved freedom.

Prosecutors, though, never foreclose the conversation. At minimum, you may get new leads, more victims to talk to, additional perpetrators. “The Southern District is always interested in having interesting conversations,”

I said. I told my team to expect a call. A few days later, Weingarten reached out. He said that his client would come in for a proffer—an agreement between a defendant and a prosecutor’s office in which the defendant agrees to share information with the understanding that his statements won’t be used against him at trial.

But Epstein had one condition: he wanted assurances that the SDNY did not see him as a rapist. That was the end of that. He was a rapist, and we were not about to give him some other, more polite-sounding label.

Ms. Comey would be one of the people privy to that proffered testimony.

That doesn’t mean she’ll go release it, or even start naming the rapists who victimized the girls Epstein trafficked. Unlike Bondi and her top aides, Ms. Comey will presumably honor her ethical duty.

But having fired Ms. Comey, one of a few people who earned the trust of sex trafficking victims that she would go after the powerful to seek justice for them, and having claimed to do so on the President’s own authority, Pam Bondi has chosen to fire precisely the person who championed justice for sex trafficking victims … and she did so in Donald Trump’s name.

Update: I should say one more thing. It’s possible Bondi (“Blondi,” as Laura Loomer has dubbed her) did this in response to pressure from Loomer. As I noted here, Trump seems loathe to confront Loomer directly, and Bondi is trying hard to shrug off the pressure of Loomer.

But Loomer, for all her hubris, really is pretty dumb about politics outside of her bubble, to say nothing of the law. For example, she’s calling for a Special Counsel to be appointed on Epstein, but under Trump’s FL Get out of Jail Free Card, that would likely require Senate confirmation. So it would be especially rich if Bondi did something this stupid in response to pressure from Loomer.

Update: Politico reports that Ms. Comey sent a letter to colleagues warning against fear.

“If a career prosecutor can be fired without reason, fear may seep into the decisions of those who remain. Do not let that happen,” she wrote. “Fear is the tool of a tyrant, wielded to suppress independent thought. Instead of fear, let this moment fuel the fire that already burns at the heart of this place. A fire of righteous indignation at abuses of power. Of commitment to seek justice for victims. Of dedication to truth above all else.”

[snip]

In her parting message, Comey wrote that during her nearly 10 years at the Manhattan U.S. Attorney’s office, her goal was “making sure people with access, money, and power were not treated differently than anyone else; and making sure this office remained separate from politics and focused only on the facts and the law.”

“Fear,” she wrote, “was never really conceivable.”

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Anatomy of a Self-Imagined Journalist Who Fancies That Trump Tells the Truth in His Tweets

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There was a delightful moment on Xitter today (and by “delightful … on Xitter” I mean yet another stunning shitshow at Elon’s Nazi Bar), when Jonathan Martin presumed to fact check just one element of Trump’s latest tweet attempting to enforce loyalty around Epstein.

It’s as if Martin genuinely believes that the things included in Trump’s tweet are factual assertions. It’s as if Martin has no fucking clue that this tweet — virtually all Trump tweets — are an attempt to reinforce polarization pivoting around himself as the center of all power: In group, out group, create your very own reality by tweet to which your in group must adhere and the out group reinforces by posing in opposition to it. This is, they always are, about reinforcing his cult.

Let’s lay out all the things that lefties and journalists like Martin are disseminating today, as if they were transparent statements of truth, clinging to their blind faith that language is transparent, even when wielded by a guy who doesn’t hide his authoritarian aspirations.

The Radical Left Democrats have hit pay dirt, again! Just like with the FAKE and fully discredited Steele[*] Dossier, the lying 51 “Intelligence” Agents, the Laptop from Hell, which the Dems swore had come from Russia (No, it came from Hunter Biden’s bathroom!), and even the Russia, Russia, Russia Scam itself, a totally fake and made up story used in order to hide Crooked Hillary Clinton’s big loss in the 2016 Presidential Election, these Scams and Hoaxes are all the Democrats are good at – It’s all they have – They are no good at governing, no good at policy, and no good at picking winning candidates. Also, unlike Republicans, they stick together like glue. Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this “bullshit,” hook, line, and sinker. They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years. I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax. Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore! Thank you for your attention to this matter. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN! [my emphasis]

Here’s what Trump’s latest post looks like as a series of truth claims, with my assessment of the truth — or, more often, the utility — of each.

Democrats have hit pay dirt. There’s a great deal that is not said in this sentence, perhaps to avoid the logical conflict of his past screed about Epstein, where in sequential sentences Trump said, repeatedly, that Democrats created the “Epstein files,” but then asked, “Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files?” Perhaps Trump is assuming familiarity with that earlier screed. Nevertheless, he starts by claiming that Democrats are succeeding at … he doesn’t say what, with the Epstein story. That’s actually true though: the Democrats’ focus on Epstein is undermining Trump’s coalition, but they’re able to do so largely thanks to Trump’s own reliance on conspiracy and the ineptitude of his own Deep State.

The Steele dossier is fake. Note, Trump actually issued two versions of this tweet, the second one just to correct the spelling of “Steel.” I think Trump is justified in claiming that some — but not all — of the allegations in the Steele dossier are fake. That’s why he has spent years building his polarization around it.

The Steele dossier is fully discredited. Again, I think it’s fair that the dossier itself has not stood up to scrutiny.

Dems created that story. While it is true that, after Oleg Deripaska first paid Christopher Steele (indirectly) to hunt down dirt on Paul Manafort, the dossier itself was funded (indirectly) by Democrats. But there’s abundant reason to believe that Deripaska, who learned about it in real time, was able to fill it with disinformation (though Steele denies this). And the most inflammatory allegation — that Michael Cohen colluded with Russia to address the Russian scandal — likely involved Dmitry Peskov’s office, the one guy who definitely knew that Cohen and Trump were both lying to hide that they had been in direct communication with the Kremlin, with Peskov’s office, during the election, in pursuit of an impossibly lucrative real estate deal. So while Democrats paid Steele (again, indirectly), they didn’t create the false stories. There’s very good reason to believe Russia created at least some of them.

The 51 people who signed a letter saying that the Hunter Biden laptop looked like a Russian information operation were analysts. Here’s where Trump starts telling a series of lies about the letter that 51 former spooks wrote raising questions about the Hunter Biden laptop. By calling them “Intelligence” analysts, Trump attempts to denigrate them in two ways. He is attacking the very idea of intelligence. And he is minimizing the qualifications of many of those — including John Brennan and James Clapper — who signed the letter. Plus, while some of the signatories were analysts, some had other intelligence functions, including operational roles.

The 51 former spooks lied. The former spooks did not lie in real time — they expressed an opinion that the emails published by Rudy Giuliani had the earmarks of a Russian information operation and substantiated the reasons for that opinion with a number of true reasons. And some of the people who signed the letter say they still believe the Hunter Biden laptop — the packaging up of all the records on one laptop — could be an information operation. Nothing in the Hunter Biden prosecutions disproves that — the FBI never digitally validated the laptop, never did an index of what was on it and when it got added. Indeed records prosecutors themselves submitted suggest that the copy of a laptop that John Paul Mac Isaac shared with Rudy did not match the laptop as it was earlier shared with the FBI.

The 51 former spooks “swore” the laptop came from Russia. The 51 spooks did not swear the laptop came from Russia. They wrote an unsworn letter asserting that it had the earmarks of Russian involvement, even stating “we do not know if the emails, provided to the New York Post by President Trump’s personal attorney Rudy Giuliani, are genuine or not and that we do not have evidence of Russian involvement.”

Dems created that story. Again, Trump is misstating the Democrats’ role here. Dems definitely were behind the writing of the letter (though with the involvement of non-partisan spooks). But Rudy was the guy who — after soliciting help from alleged Russian intelligence agents over the course of a year — released the files in such a way that they could not be verified.

The laptop came from Hunter Biden’s bathroom. This allegation, like a recent claim Trump has made that the laptop came from Hunter’s bedside, doesn’t match the known facts but is very interesting nonetheless. The stated provenance of the laptop shared with John Paul Mac Isaac is that Hunter Biden dropped it off and JPMI offered it up to the FBI. But there is another laptop — the one Keith Ablow sat on for a year — that did come from inside a cottage Biden was renting that directly abuts on Ablow’s office. This claim the laptop came from Hunter’s personal space doesn’t make sense, but it seems to envision the possibility that Ablow (who is friends with Roger Stone) had a role in the Rudy laptop caper.

Russia, Russia, Russia is a “totally fake and made up story.” Trump’s Coffee Boy, Campaign Manager, National Security Adviser, personal attorney, and rat-fucker were all legally adjudged to have lied to cover up details of Trump’s ties to Russia in the 2016 election. They lied about:

  • An impossibly lucrative business deal that Michael Cohen and Trump were chasing during the election
  • When and how the Trump campaign learned that Russia planned to release stolen emails to hurt Hillary
  • What Manafort said during an August 2, 2016 meeting with alleged Russian spy Konstantin Kilimnik, at which they discussed:
    • The campaign strategy to beat Hillary in swing states
    • A plan to carve up Ukraine
    • How Manafort would get paid, including by Deripaska, whom the FBI also alleges has ties to Russian intelligence
  • Whether and how Roger Stone got advanced notice of the stolen files WikiLeaks would later drop, starting around the same time his lifelong buddy Manafort had that meeting with Kilimnik
  • Trump’s plans to undercut President Obama’s efforts to punish Russia for the election interference

Russia is not a totally fake story in the least: It’s true that those lies — and Trump’s rewarding of them with pardons — prevented Robert Mueller from ever explaining what the men were lying about. But that doesn’t make it fake; it makes the truth unexplained. Data mules who disseminate such claims without correction are complicit in disinformation.

Dems created that story. While Democrats supported the investigation into Trump’s aides, they didn’t contribute in any way to the lies told by his Coffee Boy, Campaign Manager, National Security Adviser, personal attorney, or rat-fucker. Indeed, Trump’s own actions — his attempts to dismiss the import of Mike Flynn’s lies — caused the FBI to keep digging.

Hillary Clinton is crooked. Trump’s DOJ conducted two extended investigations into Hillary Clinton, first the Clinton Foundation, and then her concerns about Trump’s Russia ties. Very motivated prosecutors never managed to implicate her in any crime. Meanwhile, much of what Trump claims implicates Hillary — like a corrupt foundation or making false public claims about an opponent or weaponizing the FBI to fabricate a case against one’s political adversaries — are things he himself does, on top of the open financial corruption.

Hillary Clinton had a big loss in the 2016 Presidential Election. In 2016, Hillary had the exact same electoral loss that Trump had in 2020: 232 Electoral Votes to 306. But Hillary won the popular vote.

The Russia story was used to “hide” Clinton’s loss in the 2016 Presidential Election. Hillary Clinton freely conceded the election. And while she has said Russia had a factor in the loss (a claim that has never been tested), most Democrats, including Hillary, point to Jim Comey’s shenanigans as the proximate cause for her loss, a claim Trump himself reinforced when he fired Comey.

Democrats are only good at hoaxes. This section begins Trump’s attempted jujitsu at creating polarization around political success or failure. Democrats actually suck at hoaxes, as the spectacular backfiring of the Steele dossier shows.

Democrats are no good at governing, policy, or picking winning candidates. Trump’s attempts to reverse Biden’s policies are already resulting in inflation and economic decline. And Democrats certainly picked the winning Presidential candidate in 2020!

Democrats stick together like glue. That Jonathan Martin even imagined Trump meant this as a serious fact claim is farcical. The Dems are squabbling right now over how much support to give their rising new star, Zohran Mamdani! But Trump is using this statement to set up artificial conflict in an attempt to regain the loyalty of his followers. That is, he’s attempting to contrast non-existing Democratic unity with alleged disunity on the right.

The Jeffrey Epstein scandal is new. The sweetheart plea deal that Alex Acosta signed with Jeffrey Epstein was in 2008. Acosta joined Trump’s cabinet in 2017. Trump’s hand-picked US Attorney Geoffrey Berman charged Epstein anew in 2019, the same year Epstein killed himself. Ghislaine Maxwell was charged under Trump, too, shortly after Trump’s AG fired Berman to stop various investigations implicating people close to him. Maxwell’s prosecution and conviction took place under the Joe Biden Administration — but Trump’s own DOJ just declined to intervene in Maxwell’s appeal to the SCOTUS. The scandal has rolled out over years, during many of which Trump himself was President and Trump’s own people, from his chosen FBI leads to his own family members to key pro-Trump trolls to his Vice President, have sustained Epstein as a current issue.

We will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein scandal “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax.” Trump is, here, attempting to slot in the Epstein scandal as a hoax besides the other true things (plus the Steele dossier) that Trump has convinced his followers are not true. Trump is exceedingly good at repetition of his chosen labels so this one is likely to stick.

Those who “buy this ‘bullshit” are Trump’s “PAST” supporters. Trump here is playing a loyalty game, effectively pushing those who continue to chase the Epstein scandal into his out group.

Those past supporters have been “conned … for 8 long years.” After trying to push those adhering to the Epstein scandal to an out group, Trump falsely claims they’ve believed anything but what he has told them in the last eight years. Heck, Trump’s own FBI Director, Deputy Director, and Attorney General were very recently chasing this scandal, and Trump isn’t pushing them into an out group.

Trump has had more success in six months than perhaps any President in history. Trump has had political success, sure, with Republicans in Congress backing his policies largely unquestioningly. But his chosen policies are beginning to destroy America.

Trump’s past supporters “want to do the Democrats [sic] work.” Again, this is an attempt to push those adhering to the Epstein scandal into the off group, accusing them of disloyalty.

Trump’s past supporters should not “even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success.” This is yet more attempt to push those adhering to the Epstein scandal into an out group, a group he is attempting to prohibit from sharing in his claimed success.

Trump doesn’t want the support of those past supporters anymore. Trump of course wants the support of the 30% of his base that adheres to the Epstein scandal — as both a formal study and Harry Enten’s polling make clear, “Donald Trump would not have won the Presidency in 2024 if it were not for the backing of QAnon believers.” This is yet another attempt to lure people away from the Epstein scandal by pushing them into an out group.

Thank you for your attention to this matter. This is a new standard element to Trump’s tweets. Perhaps someone (Susie Wiles?) believes it gives Trump gravitas. Still, it’s nice that Trump is thanking us for doing what so many can’t withstand, paying attention to his every tweet.

Trump wants to make America like it was in some idyllic past. The slogan “make America great again,” mobilizes an every-moving sense of nostalgia (and, for many, racism) that works especially well with disaffected people. Repeating it as Trump does reinforces his in-group that believes the past was some kind of idyllic time.

This post is, at current count, almost 2,200 words, 1,900 if you exclude the actual tweet. This is the kind of fact checking and context that journalists should do every time before they disseminate Trump’s tweets. Doing anything less — disseminating a 200th tweet that claims “Russia Russia Russia is a hoax” without rebuttal is simply cooperating in the disinformation (to say nothing about how critical comments reinforce the out group dynamic).

These are not truth claims, poor naive Politico “Senior political columnist,” Jonathan Martin. I’m sorry I need to explain this to you, eight years into Trump’s regime by tweet. I’m sorry you haven’t thought about how much disinformation you helped to repeat unquestioned over those years. But these were never truth claims.

This tweet, like most of Trump’s tweets, is an attempt to reinforce via repetition — especially repetition of Trump’s false claims of victimization — the polarization and tribalism that leads his followers to adhere to him so unquestionably. It is true that Epstein is posing unprecedented challenges for this operation. But journalists would do well to use this moment to think about how Trump’s tweets work, and have always worked.

* In a rare move, Trump issued a second version of this post, correcting an initial misspelling, “Steel.”

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The Press Keeps Coddling Trump’s Tariff Lawlessness

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Here’s how Ana Swanson, one of NYT’s main reporters covering Trump’s trade war, referred to the legal judgment that Trump’s tariffs are unlawful in a post titled, “Bluffs and Bluster Aside, Trump’s Tariffs Are Here to Stay.”

One remaining factor that could significantly lower Mr. Trump’s tariffs are the challenges that are now proceeding through the legal system. Federal courts have called into question the legal authority that Mr. Trump has used to threaten his global tariffs, and they are expected to rule on that question this fall.

Mr. Trump’s advisers have said that they have other legal channels to impose tariffs if the courts rule against them, but those methods were not likely to give the Trump administration as much scope and flexibility as it currently has asserted. [my emphasis]

Courts have not “called into question” Trump’s legal authority to impose arbitrary sanctions. Two ruled that Trump’s tariffs were unlawful.

In a piece with Tony Romm today, noting that Trade Rep Jamieson Greer was initiating an investigation, “to determine whether certain policies and actions by the Brazilian government are unreasonable or have hurt U.S. businesses” — that is, to determine whether the complaints Trump made in a letter targeting Brazil last week were even true –they describe:

By targeting Brazil, Mr. Trump nonetheless has touched off complaints that he is using his trade powers to settle political scores, regardless of questions of legality. The president has claimed vast authority to issue steep levies even without the express approval of Congress, as he looks to combat the nation’s trade deficit, address security concerns and, at times, meddle in another country’s internal affairs.

Thus far, the questions have been answered: Trump’s usurpation of Congress’ authority is illegal, and Greer’s belated investigation — an attempt to retcon Trump’s claims with some flimsy findings to justify them — is itself proof of that lawlessness (and should be reported as such).

And that’s what Swanson says when she does mention the legal challenges. In a 1400-word piece titled, “Tariffs or Deals? Trump Seems Content With Punishing Levies,” she doesn’t mention the legal challenges — significantly lawyered and supported by right wing groups — at all, not even in her discussion “about whether any of the president’s supporters will break with him on his aggressive strategy.”

A story by Swanson’s NYT colleague, Jeanna Smialek, describing efforts by the EU to replace the US as a trading partner doesn’t mention the legal challenges. A piece on the chaos created by Trump’s prevarications, bylined by both Smialek and Swanson, doesn’t mention the legal challenges. A piece on the damage Trump’s trade war poses for Europe doesn’t mention them.

Romm seems to be the one person at NYT who wants to talk about the law. He partnered on the piece reporting the US Court of International Trade’s judgment that Trump’s tariffs were unlawful that Swanson linked above, included a longer discussion of the legal problems with Trump’s tariffs in the piece on Trump’s tariff threats against Brazil, linked in the second block quote above and by another story on the Brazil threat links.

But other than that, the abundant coverage NYT has given Trump’s trade war in the last week barely considers the legality of this all, or even the timing of Trump’s delayed new tariffs, scheduled to go in effect one day after the Federal Circuit considers the legality of the tariffs anew. This coverage repeatedly obscures what the CIT already found: that the tariffs are unlawful.

NYT is not alone. Over at the WSJ, right next to a story describing that Trump’s tariffs have begun to create inflation, Greg Ip has an 1100-word story declaring,

Forget TACO. Trump Is Winning His Trade War. The president wants tariffs, the higher the better. Whether that is achieved unilaterally or via deals is secondary.

Trump has won, Ip explains in ¶9, because the 10% tariffs he didn’t relinquish have started making money.

[D]espite the absence of deals, he has succeeded. In June alone, Treasury collected $27 billion in customs revenue, up $20 billion from a year earlier, a pace that would imply $240 billion more a year. That isn’t enough to eliminate most families’ income tax as Trump once promised, but it can still pay for plenty of other priorities.

Yet when Ip mentions the CIT ruling, in passing, over ten ¶¶ later (Ip makes a factual error here; two courts have declared Trump’s tariffs illegal, though Trump’s DOJ insists the CIT is the only court with jurisdiction) he doesn’t mention that Trump only got a stay by promising to pay all those tariffs back if he loses.

Many of those checks and balances and norms are now gone. Trump claims the authority to raise tariffs on anyone and anything indefinitely for virtually any reason under the International Emergency Economic Powers Act, a law intended to sanction adversaries such as Iran or Venezuela. One court has declared his use of it illegal; that decision has been stayed.

If Trump eventually loses this legal fight — Trump’s DOJ posited to even get this stay — importers get a refund, with interest. All that money goes away.

If tariffs imposed on plaintiffs during these appeals are ultimately held unlawful, then the government will issue refunds to plaintiffs, including any postjudgment interest that accrues.

Consumers, mind you, would be fucked. They won’t get the taxes they already paid back. But the revenue from importers, and then some, would all disappear if SCOTUS eventually rules these tariffs are unlawful. Imagine the political headache that would cause?

The many stories yesterday about Mark Carney conceding that Trump will make no deals that don’t involve tariffs? No mention that the Federal Circuit Court will hear Trump’s appeal of the ruling finding the tariffs unlawful the day before Trump’s onerous new tariffs are set to start.

Even this celebrated Jonathan Karl interview with Kevin Hassett, in which Trump’s economic advisor babbles when asked about the Brazilian tariff threat, only questions on what authority Trump threatened that 50% tariff in passing, without mentioning the court ruling that Trump cannot use tariffs to pressure other countries, as the letter clearly does.

I’m increasingly mystified by the disinterest in the legal challenges to Trump’s authority to impose these tariffs at all, particularly in a piece like Ip’s that contemplates where or if any checks on Trump remain. There are still courts here.

It’s certainly possible that journalists assume, because the Federal Circuit Court stayed the injunction imposed by the CIT (citing the Wilcox decision I discuss below), they will rule for the government. That may be the case (though unless I’m mistaken the 11-judge en banc panel that will hear the case in a few weeks includes no Trump appointees, whereas one of the judges on the CIT panel was a Trump judge). But observing that, “these cases present issues of exceptional importance warranting expedited en banc consideration of the merits in the first instance,” the Federal Circuit committed to weigh in definitively and quickly, whereas most other Trump challenges have only just reached the merits stage in the District Courts (one exception — the challenges to Trump’s attempt to cow law firms — hasn’t even and won’t set an appellate briefing schedule yet). However they’re inclined to weigh in on the merits claim before them, the Federal Circuit does view this entire situation as exceptional.

It’s certainly possible that journalists assume, like a bunch of random social media people, that the Supreme Court will back the President on this as they have in many — but by no means all — legal challenges to his abuse of power. That’s perfectly reasonable. SCOTUS’ Republican majority has rubber-stamped unprecedented abuses from Trump already (even ignoring their opinion giving Trump criminal immunity that got him this far), so it is conceivable they’ll let Trump usurp Congressional authority to impose tariffs.

Yet several things distinguish the challenges to Trump’s tariffs from the other SCOTUS rulings, which have allowed Trump to dismantle agencies mandated by Congress or fire people Congress attempted to grant independence. The one area where SCOTUS has already invented an over-determined exception (in the Wilcox opinion the Circuit Court cited to explain granting a stay) to their general rule of granting Trump more power, in which they distinguished the hypothetical firing of the Federal Reserve Chair from the firing of officials mandated to protect labor interests, is understood to serve the stability of the economy. The same commitment to serving corporate interests may tip the scale against Trump on this point.

Furthermore, on the tariff challenges, SCOTUS will have to pick between those it normally caters to. A goodly number of right wing legal stars are arguing both the lead case and weighing in as Amici representing right wing entities like the Chamber of Commerce or AEI-linked economists, which may make SCOTUS’ right wingers weigh John Sauer’s claims more critically. This is the rare case where the right and left are unified in opposing Trump.

Plus, things have changed since the Circuit ordered an expedited schedule five weeks ago. Trump’s recent stunts may irk the courts. For example, to get the two month stay of the injunction that even permits him to keep sending out letters, Trump made the same claims his discredited economic advisors keep making on TV — that he was on the verge of dozens of deals, deals that might be be jeopardized by a stay.

As members of the President’s Cabinet have attested, the CIT’s order would irreparably harm the economic and national security of the United States. The Secretary of Commerce explained that the injunction “would undermine the United States-United Kingdom trade deal that was negotiated in reliance on the President’s emergency tariff authority,” plus the recent “China trade agreement,” and “would jeopardize the dozens of similar arrangements with foreign-trading partners that” are being negotiated. A76. “Each of these negotiations,” the declaration explained, “is premised on the credible threat of enforcement of the IEEPA tariffs,” and the injunction could compromise that threat, so that “foreign counterparts will have reduced incentives to reach meaningful agreements[].”

The declarations that CIT blew off but which the Federal Circuit apparently heeded in granting a stay brag repeatedly of the “dozens” of trade negotiations ongoing (though they point solely to the UK framework as proof that their tantrum is working). Howard Lutnick claimed that “scores of countries immediately reached out” on April 2, following Trump’s initial tariff panic. “[F]oreign-trading partners that have run trade deficits in goods for years, and helped hollow out the American manufacturing base, immediately came to the negotiating table.” He claimed, “an adverse ruling would jeopardize the dozens of [] arrangements [similar to the UK deal] that I am negotiating.” Marco Rubio claimed back in May, “In some cases, we have reached frameworks with our trading partners,” but in the time since, it appears that by “some” Rubio meant “two.” Rubio also warned of “diplomatic embarrassment” if Trump’s claim to have the power to set tariffs were rebuffed by courts, which I can understand posing a concern to Rubio but is not a legal principle. All these declarations claimed to be negotiating with Canada and Mexico, in addition to China.

But Trump has instead shown that he himself is disrupting actual negotiations in process to simply send his demands; he basically intervened to forestall a deal with the EU. As Trump confessed the other day, “Am I right when I say I don’t want deals, I just want the paper to get sent?” After laughing, he worried, “I don’t know if this is on television,” as if he has something to hide. Then later in the day, when asked if he would release details of the purported deal with Vietnam, Trump opined, “I don’t think it matters how much you release of the deal.” (There may be reason for that; as we get further from the deal with China that purported to be asymmetrical in US favor, China has both gotten Nvidia chips and imposed licensing on battery technology, meaning Trump continues to trade away America’s manufacturing strengths.)

That’s a point the Chamber of Commerce made in its amicus brief. The whiplash is “crippling” businesses.

These harms are compounded considerably by the unlimited, unilateral nature of the President’s asserted IEEPA tariff authority, which fosters deep uncertainty and makes it extremely difficult for American businesses—large and small—to plan for the future. And in business, uncertainty creates hardship.

[snip]

The President’s “pause” in enforcing some of these tariffs provides little reprieve for businesses. Because international orders must often be made far in advance, many businesses are holding off making orders fearing that, by the time the order arrives in the United States, tariff enforcement will have resumed. Recent statements by the President and his advisors have only magnified this uncertainty. Just this week, the President announced 25% tariffs against South Korea and Japan if they do not negotiate a trade deal by August 1. Elisabeth Buchwald & John Liu, Trump announces new tariffs of up to 40% on a growing number of countries, CNN Business (July 8, 2025), https://www.cnn.com/2025/07/07/economy/trump-letterstariffs. Meanwhile, Secretary of the Treasury Scott Bessent stated that the paused April 2 tariffs would “boomerang back” on August 1 for countries that do not negotiate a deal. Ari Hawkins, Trump team moves goalposts on tariffs again, Politico (July 6, 2025), https://www.politico.com/news/2025/07/06/bessent-trumptariffs-deadline-august-00440522. For businesses, this uncertainty is crippling.

Trump’s demand letter to Brazil, with which the US has no trade deficit, is still worse. It aims to coerce an entirely personal goal, help for his fellow coup plotter — precisely the kind of arbitrary leverage the CIT used to distinguish Trump’s use of tariff threats from any limited use of tariffs under IEPPA. And the fact that Jamieson Greer is only now investigating whether the claims in the letter are true — normally the first step to imposing tariffs under an existing legal means — is a tell that Trump is simply making shit up.

The arbitrariness and coerciveness of the Brazil letter is a point that — as Romm reported in the NYT — plaintiffs plan to bring up during the appeal (which I also predicted here).

Jeffrey Schwab, senior counsel for the Liberty Justice Center, which is representing a set of small businesses suing the government, said Mr. Trump’s renewed tariff threats seemed only to affirm their arguments in the case.

“This is exactly why these tariffs are a problem,” he said. “They can change at the drop of a hat, and our clients can’t keep track of what the tariffs are going to be because they change so quickly.”

Mr. Schwab said he also expected the political threat against Brazil, in particular, to come up during the legal challenge. He said that the president’s primary justification for issuing tariffs under the federal economic-emergency law is to respond to a trade deficit, and that Mr. Trump’s attempts to protect Mr. Bolsonaro had “nothing to do with that.”

Even after his tariffs were deemed illegal, even during this grace period where Trump is still permitted to negotiate tariffs already deemed unlawful, Trump is making his legal case far worse. At the very least, that may give either the Federal Circuit or SCOTUS the proof needed to declare that Trump is just making shit up. If not, if SCOTUS ultimately upholds his arguments, the sanction for Trump’s utter contempt for the law would be even greater.

But if they do that, they’ll do that in siding against the business community, right alongside ruling against Democrats in Congress and Democratic states.

And that’s the kind of drama that should present a hook for coverage — or at least careful consideration in coverage claiming Trump has no checks.

The business press has been publishing near daily stories about Trump’s attempt to bully Jerome Powell, most recently with plans to announce his replacement early, possibly with the babbling Hassett. But the principles underlying the legality of Trump’s tariffs are of equal import to the stability of the business world, and might resolve, one way or another, even before Powell is replaced next year. Yes, Trump’s sycophants have told people like Swanson they have other means via which Trump can set tariffs, but as I understand it those take time and require facts of the sort Trump wants to avoid. They don’t assert the same kind of unreviewable authority to just make shit up that Trump has so consistently relied on in his power grabs and is increasingly flexing here.

I’m not saying I have the answers to this question. I’m definitely not predicting how the courts will weigh in.

What I’m saying is that something almost unique is brewing in these dockets, with the business community standing up to Trump in ways more visible than in coverage — to say nothing of Congress.

Ultimately, within a year (even if SCOTUS takes the case without expediting it and stalls, like they did for Trump’s immunity claims), there will likely be a binary legal decision about whether or not the President can just make shit up to claim an economic emergency and in so doing, destroy small businesses and even enact his own personal vengeance. Or, SCOTUS will impose a check on Trump’s authority that will gut his bid to subjugate the rest of the world to a weakening US economy.

Whichever it is, it’s an eventuality far more certain than anything else Trump is up to.

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Old Man Chuck Grassley Got Snookered by Emil Bove’s Contemptuous Dodge

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Senate Judiciary Democrats asked Chuck Grassley to hold a hearing with whistleblower Erez Reuveni to learn about Emil Bove’s contempt in the face of orders Judge James Boasberg gave DOJ on March 15. In a letter that carefully dodges smoking gun proof that Emil Bove did command others to blow off Boasberg’s order, Grassley refused.

I’m going to assume that Chuck Grassley is just really old and so vulnerable to being duped by someone devious like Bove. Otherwise, of course, we’d have to conclude he’s complicit in a clear attempt to deport innocent men to a concentration camp at all costs.

Grassley’s three main rebuttals of Reuveni’s allegations are:

  • DOJ has gotten appellate relief on at least some of the misconduct Reuveni reported
  • Emil Bove made the comment about telling a judge “fuck you” before Boasberg issued any orders
  • Bove testified under oath that he did not order any DOJ lawyers to blow off Boasberg’s order

Grassley pretends that the files handed over by Reuveni include “almost none” that “include, reference, or even cite” Bove.

Almost none of the additional documents you published include, reference, or even cite Mr. Bove.

Almost none is not none, as I’ll show below.

Grassley further claims that most of the files reflect “litigation strategy about the scope of court orders.”

Most of the communications merely reflect Administration attorneys internally debating or discussing litigation strategy and the scope of court orders. Debate about the scope of court orders is fundamentally inconsistent with an intention to ignore them. Moreover, many of the legal positions discussed in the documents were ultimately advanced in federal court as the formal position of the United States, and the Administration has received at least some appellate relief in each of the cases described.

With regards to the JGG lawsuit to which the “fuck you” comment is pertinent, that relief consists of two Trump appointees stalling a contempt motion for months, as both TPM and NYT pointed out today. Here’s how TPM’s David Kurtz described it.

The DC appeals court — a three-judge panel composed of Trump appointees Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao and Obama appointee Cornelia Pillard (who opposed the move) — placed an administrative stay on Boasberg’s contempt proceedings way back on April 18. What is usually supposed to be a short-term pause in the case has now dragged on for nearly three months.

In that time, former DOJ career lawyer Erez Reuveni has revealed bombshell internal DOJ emails and texts. Those documents show that Bove, in his role as principal associate deputy attorney general, gave the green light for continuing with the March 15 removals of Venezuelan nationals to CECOT in El Salvador under the Alien Enemies Act in spite of Boasberg’s order blocking the deportations and directing the planes carrying the detainees to turn around. (For his part, Bove denies violating any court orders, and the Justice Department has made the preposterous argument that Boasberg’s written order didn’t include the direction to turn the planes around and that trumped his oral demand that they do so.)

In slow-rolling the contempt inquiry, the DC appeals court hasn’t just enabled Bove (who has engaged in other egregious conduct at DOJ). It has hung Boasberg out to dry, done nothing to staunch the Trump administration’s blatant defiance of court orders in other cases, and has left the judicial branch more exposed to a rogue executive determined to expand his power at the expense of the judiciary.

The relief Grassley is relying on is, in fact, partisan stonewalling.

That matters, because he is replicating a corrupt dodge that Bove — and DOJ itself — are both adopting.

That corrupt dodge starts, first of all, with his claim that Reuveni’s “fuck you” allegation — corroborated in four sets of texts exchanged with colleagues during the weekend in question — came before any judge had issued orders.

The gravamen of the allegations is that Mr. Bove directed Justice Department attorneys to ignore court orders, but (1) the meeting with Mr. Bove occurred before there was any litigation or court order to follow;

That’s true: Bove made the “fuck you” comment at a meeting on March 14. Boasberg issued the order not to unload any planes with Alien Enemies Act detainees on the evening of March 15.

Grassley makes much of the fact that August Flentje told DOJ HR that Bove told the lawyers to avoid an order prohibiting the AEA flights at all costs.

In an April 8th letter addressed to the Justice Department’s Human Resources Division, August Flentje—Mr. Reuveni’s former supervisor—stated: “The Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General [Bove] advised our team that we must avoid a court order halting an upcoming operation to implement the Act at all costs.”1 This statement was made under penalty of perjury months before Mr. Reuveni made the claims in his whistleblower disclosure, and directly contradicts his assertions. Mr. Bove’s comments to subordinate Justice Department litigators— made in advance of anticipated litigation—advising them to avoid a court order that would negatively impact a mission is inconsistent with instructions to ignore a court order, and entirely consistent with Mr. Bove’s sworn testimony.

But again, that was March 14.

They didn’t avoid an order prohibiting the operation. Drew Ensign tried his damndest to mislead Boasberg about flights in the air, but Boasberg nevertheless issued the order.

Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to turn the planes around, not to deplane the planes.

So, Mr. Ensign, the first point is that I — that you shall inform your clients of this immediately, and that any plane containing these folks that is going to take off or is in the air needs to be returned to the United States, but those people need to be returned to the United States. However that’s accomplished, whether turning around a plane or not embarking anyone on the plane or those people covered by this on the plane, I leave to you. But this is something that you need to make sure is complied with immediately.

Boasberg did give the order that Emil Bove was so inexplicably desperate to avoid.

And that’s where Grassley gets either cute or duped. He quotes Bove stating, under oath, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order” (with equivocal comments, not under oath, from Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi).

At his hearing, under oath, Mr. Bove firmly stated, “I have never advised a Department of Justice attorney to violate a court order.” The Deputy Attorney General issued a statement confirming that he also attended the meeting, and “at no time did anyone suggest a court order should not be followed.” In another statement, the Attorney General unequivocally said that “no one was ever asked to defy a court order.”

All very nifty, Senator, except when you consider the smoking gun that does name Bove by his title, Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General.

Yaakov Roth, a top Civil Division lawyer documented in an email to Reuveni and others that PADAG (Bove) “advised DHS last night that the deplaning of the flights that had departed US airspace prior [sic] the court’s minute order was permissible under the law and the court’s order.”

Only it wasn’t.

Boasberg specifically ordered DOJ to inform its clients to turn the flights around, not to deplane the planes.

And then Bove instructed DHS — not DOJ lawyers, but DHS personnel, possibly including lawyers — something different.

Bove instructed DHS they could do something impermissible under the order Boasberg gave. And that’s the core of the contempt for which Boasberg found probable cause that two Trump appointees have bottled up at DC Circuit.

By mid-Sunday morning, the picture of what had happened the previous night came into clearer focus. It appeared that the Government had transferred members of the Plaintiff class into El Salvador’s custody hours after this Court’s injunction prohibited their deportation under the Proclamation. Worse, boasts by Defendants intimated that they had defied the Court’s Order deliberately and gleefully. The Secretary of State, for instance, retweeted a post in which, above a news headline noting this Court’s Order to return the flights to the United States, the President of El Salvador wrote: “Oopsie . . . Too late 😂😂.” Nayib Bukele (@nayibbukele), X (Mar. 16, 2025, 7:46 a.m. EDT), https://perma.cc/Y384-4TDW, https://perma.cc/6VTW-5KRD (ellipses in original)

Bove may not have lied — this is not proof he told DOJ lawyers to fuck off a Boasberg order. But he did tell DHS to fuck off a Boasberg order.

Which is it, Senator Grassley: Are you old and confused? Or complicit?

Because Erez Reuveni supplied you the smoking gun proving that Bove blew off Boasberg’s order.

Grassley does one other dishonest thing in his letter. He makes much of the fact that Todd Blanche, not Bove himself, fired Reuveni.

The whistleblower also claims his termination was the result of his efforts to ensure agency compliance with court orders. The documents Mr. Reuveni produced, however, reveal that the ultimate termination decision was made and signed by Deputy Attorney General Blanche—not Mr. Bove.

Another of the “almost none” documents that Reuveni turned over showed that Bove was gunning for Reuveni just before he was ousted.

Days before Blanche put Reuveni on leave, April 1, Flentje texted Reuveni about “a nastygram from Emil Bove” conveyed by Roth, the same guy who sent the smoking gun email.

On April 5, a few hours after Todd Blanche did put Reuveni on paid leave, Flentje confirmed that at the meeting on March 15, he “told our host we would not violate a court order.”

That is, in response to Reuveni being placed on leave, Flentje confirmed there was a “through line” from questions about whether or not DOJ would follow an order to Reuveni’s suspension (and subsequent firing).

For Grassley, “almost none” is two too many to sustain his case, because the smoking gun documenting who defied an order after Bove proclaimed he might tell a judge “fuck you” is right there with Bove’s title on it.

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John Roberts Subjects America’s School Children to the Whims of a Wrestling Promoter

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Every time the Supreme Court does something outrageous to empower Trump’s fascism, as it did yesterday by letting Trump shut down a statutorily-mandated agency, Department of Education, I try to think of an area to politically organize around and push back on the action.

I do this not out of any pollyannaish desire to diminish how problematic the court’s actions are. Though Justice Sotomayor already enumerated those in her dissent.

The equities, too, cut against the Government. While “equity does not demand that its suitors shall have led blameless lives as to other matters, “it does require that they shall have acted fairly and without fraud or deceit as to the controversy in issue.” Precision Instrument Mfg. Co. v. Automotive Maintenance Machinery Co., 324 U.S. 806, 814-815 (1943) (citing Keystone Driller Co. v. General Ex- cavator Co., 200 U.S. 240, 245 (1933). The Government has continued to press a plainly pretextual explanation for the mass firings in court, even as the Executive makes inconsistent statements to the public. See supra, at 12-13, and n. 14. That the majority sees fit to repay that obfuscation with emergency equitable relief is troubling.

The relative harms to the parties are also vastly disproportionate. While the Government will, no doubt, suffer pocketbook harms from having to pay employees that it sought to fire as the litigation proceeds, sce App. 169a~170a, the harm to this Nation’s education system and individual students is of a far greater magnitude. The Department is responsible for providing critical funding and services to millions of students and scores of schools across the country. Lifting the District Court’s injunction will unleash untold harm, delaying or denying educational opportunities and leaving students to suffer from discrimination, sexual assault, and other civil rights violations without the federal resources Congress intended. The majority apparently deems it more important to free the Government from paying employees it had no right to fre than to avert these very real harms while the litigation continues. Equity does not support such an inequitable result.

The decision was all the worse when you consider — as Chris Geidner and others have — that two years ago, SCOTUS overruled Joe Biden’s far more modest exercise of executive authority, student loan relief. This was SCOTUS putting their right wing thumbs on the scale to help Trump attack education.

I’m not turning to politics to ignore the damage of this ruling (though it does help to avoid despair). Rather, I do this because — as I tried to lay out in this post and this graphic — ultimately we need to win this battle politically.

Ultimately we need to convince robust majorities in the country that Trump’s policies are destroying their lives. In the case of destroying the Department of Education, we need people in school districts around the country to understand how Trump’s defiance of Congress harms local education.

Even the remedies for SCOTUS’ abuse of power that many advocate — expanding the court, impeaching the justices who rewrote the Constitution for Trump — would require far more political backing than any such effort currently has or could have had under Biden.

You have to fight and win the political battle.

The United States has had to fight back from disastrous Supreme Courts in the past. But it takes fighting the political battle.

And this battle is a particularly noteworthy one.

A lot of white extremism in the US arises from a backlash to integration (the rabid excuse for eliminated Department of Education). But Americans love their local schools; one of the few political bright spots last year came when Kentucky beat back a heavily funded constitutional amendment pushing school vouchers. The far right Moms for Liberty has suffered increasing setbacks in recent years, after an initial surge. More importantly, those two political battles show how, when schools are involved, previously apolitical people will come out and fight hard in their communities. A lot of the funding and programming targeted by this decision will hurt rural districts, so this fight will extend far beyond suburban school districts.

This has the possibility of mobilizing PTA moms who don’t think of themselves as political actors, the kind of civil society you need to fight fascism.

Plus, think of the optics of this! Trump has sicced a wrestling promoter currently fighting allegations of fostering sexual abuse of boys on school children. Let me repeat that: Trump has sicced a billionaire wrestling promoter, currently fighting allegations she overlooked sexual abuse of boys, who has absolutely no expertise on education, on school children. That’s the person who is going to start taking away educational opportunities for poor kids.

John Roberts just gave this billionaire wrestling promoter accused of letting an employee sexually exploit boys sanction to start destroying local school programs.

That’s a pretty easy story to get parents outraged about.

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The Allies Of the Billionaires

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In this post I offered a brief history of the efforts by the filthy rich to destroy the New Deal. Under Trump those attacks are now aimed at democracy. This post lays out the field of conflict between the filthy rich and normal people. Who are the allies of the filthy rich, and what can we do with that information?

Andrew Mellon stated the program of the billionaires after the 1929 stock market crash:

Liquidate labor, liquidate stocks, liquidate the farmers, liquidate real estate. It will purge the rottenness out of the system. High costs of living and high living will come down. People will work harder, live a more moral life. Values will be adjusted, and enterprising people will pick up from less competent people.

That’s Trump’s program. In the 1930s, when the attacks began, that program got no traction. The only way the filthy rich could succeed was to find allies who would effectively shield their goals from view. It took a few decades, but they found or created those allies.

It seems to me that there are three groups of collaborators, Theists, Neoliberals, and Grifters. Their motivations are different, and in some ways radically different from the filthy rich, but they all benefit by tagging along with the billionaires.

Theists

There are several groups who teach that the US is a “Christian Nation”, and that it should be a theocracy, or at least that the “laws” of the Bible should govern all Americans, religious or not. Among them are Christian Dominionists, Christian Nationalists, and specific sects. They are supported by groups engaged in lobbying, litigation, and proselytizing. They have their own education structures, including universities and their own media.

There are a number of Christian sects that share some or many of their beliefs. For example, the Catholic Church agrees that all Americans should be governed by their moral teachings about abortion, and that Catholics should be exempt from lnsurance laws that relate to birth control; but retains some sense of the teachings of Jesus on other issues. There are lots of people who agree on specific issues, like equal marriage, and act on them, perhaps by home-schooling, or by supporting theistic lobbying and litigation groups.

The common thread among these groups is the belief that they know the moral truths of the universe, and that the rest of us should/must accept their views. They don’t want anyone reading or thinking anything but what they allow.

Neoliberals

Neoliberas see human beings as homo economicus. They say that human beings have a single goal, maximizing their personal utility. They think that life is a competition for scarce resources, and that the strongest will survive and get the most, and that is just fine. For more, and for a sane alternative, see this post.

Neoliberals fall into two groups. On one side are sellers of goods and services, that is, people who own a business. This group includes investors, the rich who don’t have to work for a living, and the theorists and teachers of this doctrine. The rest of us, the masses, the employees, the consumers, the users, we make up the other side.

The first class has specific goals, mainly getting rid of regulations, and cutting taxes. In this, they agree with the filthy rich. For the rest of us, neoliberalism only offers an explanation of our condition: it’s our fault.

Owner neoliberals differ from theists in two fundamental respects. First, they don’t care what people think or study or theorize about, except for economics. There, they rigidly push their own version, which you studied in Econ 101. Or maybe you learned it in high school, taught from a syllabus prepared by a neoliberal think tank like the Heartland Foundation , which is funded by the Charles G. Koch Foundation and other right-wing operations.

They don’t want you to think clearly about economics, because you will see that they use it to preserve their power, and support the agenda of the filthy rich. They want you to ibelieve that their version of capitalism as foundational to democracy.

One of their tools is distraction. You do things you enjoy, whether it’s shopping, or going to the movies, or playing video games. These are fun and even necessary for a good life. But in excess they keep you from learning and thinking enough to participate in a democracy. You exist solely as a consumer. You work so you can buy entertainment and other stuff.

Expertise only comes with effort, even for the best of us. Here’s an example. At the top of this post is a painting by the American Thomas Kinkade. Take a quick look This painting is typical of the kind of art preferred by sellers of distraction. It doesn’t require anything of the viewer. It oozes with a brain-dead nostalgia, and hides every vestige of the reality of the era it depicts.

Now click through to this painting, Susanna and the Elders by Artemisia Gentileschi, painted in 1610. Look closely at what’s happening Even if you don’t know the story (it’s Daniel 13 in the Catholic Bible ), and even if you don’t know the life history of Artemisia, you can feel the pressing weight of sexual menace. This painting requires attention, and is made more potent with context both of its time, the artist’s experiences, and our me-too age. (Side note: I saw this painting in Paris in May in an exhibit at the Jaquemart André museum. There is also a fairly good copy of Judith Slaying Holofernes,  and the original of Joel and Sisera. And this is a reminder that Wikipedia is a terrific resource and worth a contribution.)

The point here is that owner neoliberals benefit if you limit your thinking to conventional stuff. It’s easier to make and sell profitably. Distraction pacifies you, makes you think you’re living a good life, but hides all other possible ways to live. Those other lives include participating in a functioning democracy.

Worker neoliberals? The billionaires just want you to vote for their candidate, work for them, and buy stuff. People who blame themselves for problems created by the elites don’t demand change. And they keep getting screwed.

Grifters

This is a group of second-rate people who cling to the illusion of competence. There are two main groups here: politicians and their strategists, consultants, and sycophants; and faux intellectuals who swarm in think tanks and even a few universities. Neither group wants you to think clearly about what they are doing.

The politicians want to serve a small club and you aren’t in it. They pretend to serve the median non-thinker in their party, weirdos for the Rs, and centrists for the Ds. Rs fight for the crazies. Ds punch left. Both parties serve their donors first.

The faux intellectuals have all sold out. They surrendered the essence of both the intellectual life and the democratic life, openness to the full implications of life in our society. In exchange, they get money and security. They pretend to provide a principled justification for the policies preferred by their donors, but only the ignorant are fooled.

So?

In any conflict, the first step is to identify the enemy, and to identify those on your side. Then you look for the weak points in the enemy lines. I think this description points to a couple of weaknesses in the alliance against democracy.

1. People who claim to be love liberty don’t want to be ruled by Theists. That includes a lot of neoliberals, both owners and workers. The Theist image of human nature is radically different from that of neoliberals.

2. The interests of owner and worker neoliberals are wildly different. The trick, I think, is to persuade workers that they are entitled to fair treatment as of right, not out of charity.

3. Republican politicians have been pushed so far into lunacy that they are vulnerable to attack from the left by almost any sane politician. Even if Alabama won’t elect a Dem, they should be willing to elect a Republican who won’t hurt them as much as the far-right loon Tommy Tuberville.

4. I don’t think there’s much hope for leaders of the Theists. The combination of self-righteousness and graft makes them impervious to criticism. But that isn’t true of regular people. I think many of them understand the actual teachings of Christianity, and can see where this administration betrays that teaching.

5. In general, I think most of the leaders of the allies are incorrigible. But I also think many followers are reachable, perhaps by shame. I’ll take that up in a later post.

6. What else?

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Jeffrey Epstein Is about Trump’s Failing Ability to Command Attention

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The bubbling Jeffrey Epstein scandal is about two things: the underlying scandal and any ties Trump has to it, and the way it has disrupted Trump’s normal super power ability to command and direct attention.

His attack on Rosie O’Donnell yesterday shows that his ability to direct the attention of the left remains undiminished and makes clear why this power is so important to Trump.

Trump’s attack on the comedian, just hours before his latest inept intervention in the Epstein matter, came in the wake of a number of stories — the NYT story describing that key National Weather Service positions were vacant when the flood hit,  the CNN report on a three day delay that Kristi Noem caused in the search and rescue, reports on Kerr County’s refusal to accept a Dem-funded early warning system that Rayne wrote up here, the NYT story describing how Noem cut off funding to a call center while it was fielding calls from survivors — holding Trump’s Administration or Republicans accountable for exacerbating the impact of the flood.

When Trump tweeted that Rosie O’Donnell “is a Threat to Humanity” and claimed to be considering stripping her citizenship (she lives in Dublin but as far as I know does not yet have Irish citizenship), that post circulated wildly among journalists and the left, sometimes with commentary about how grave a threat it was that Trump would even make such threats (which he has no legal power to carry out).

But the people who gaped at his unfiltered tweet did not explain, much less link, the background.

Trump attacked O’Donnell as predictions she made on TikTok last Sunday, which the right wing has been trying to dismiss by shaming her, were being confirmed by those press reports.

What a horror story in Texas — the flash floods in Texas. The Guadalupe River. 51 missing. 51 dead, more missing. Children … at a camp. And you know when the President guts all the warning systems and the, uh, weathering [sic] forecast abilities of the government, these are the results that we’re going to start to see on a daily basis, because he’s put this country in so much danger by his horrible, horrible decisions and this ridiculously immoral bill that he just signed into law. As Republicans cheered. As Republicans cheered. People will die as a result and they’ve started already. Shame on him. Shame on every GOP sycophant who’s listening and following the disastrous decisions of this mentally incapacitated POTUS.

Rosie O’Donnell made a powerful moral critique of Trump, and as that critique was bearing out, he responded to it by asserting to have power over her, power he doesn’t have. And rather than focusing on or even mentioning that moral critique — or even continuing to focus on the many ways the Trump Administration did exacerbate the flood — those who disseminated his tweet gaped in horror at his spectacular display of power, without identifying it as an attempt to avoid being held accountable.

Whether or not the US can restore democracy depends heavily on the success that Trump’s critics have in tying his failures to disasters like Kerr County. It depends on their ability to remain laser-focused on holding him accountable for the disasters his actions predictably cause. And Trump squelched the words of one prescient critic with a tweet. He did so with the willful cooperation of data mules on the left.

Trump’s ability to command and direct attention — his ability to rupture context and redirect attention to his own claims of authority — is his super power. It is how he has attained and remained in government; it is how he has beat back scandals that would have doomed others.

And that super power has been failing him as his DOJ and FBI reversed course on past fevered promises to disclose everything about the Epstein scandal.

That’s what, I have tried to argue, has always been missing from reporting on this exchange: how badly Trump flubbed a role, suppressing coverage by bullying a journalist, that is second nature to him.

Pam Bondi sets out to answer two questions from a journalist about Epstein. She’s actually good at this performed competence and had Trump just let her answer he might have avoided all the backlash. But Trump interrupts. He stumbles over delivery of the name, Jeffrey Epstein, as if he is trying to perform disgust, but it sounds hollow. He asks a question — “are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein” — that feigns ignorance of both the importance of the Epstein scandal to his base, to say nothing about how much his chosen aides, Bondi, Dan Bongino, and Kash Patel, have themselves never shut up about Epstein. Trump almost regains his footing when he complains that the journalist isn’t focused on Texas or “this” (huh? what is “this”?); Trump almost regains his footing by bullying a journalist, an easy trope for him. But then he tries to perform disgust again — “this creep” — and like the earlier mention of his friend, Epstein’s name, “creep” sounds forced, a badly delivered performance. Trump tries a familiar stance again — “I can’t believe you’re asking a question about Epstein” — but this was a question about a release Bondi’s own DOJ orchestrated. He ends with feigned outrage, accusing the journalist of “desecration.” The whole performance lacked energy, exacerbated by the slurring Trump exhibited throughout the event.

What is a normal ploy from him — attacking journalists to bully them out of covering things — simply failed. The great Realty TV Show Star flubbed his part, as devastating as if his voice squeaked when declaring “You’re fired,” back in the day.

Both in content and performance, his bid to shut down this line of questioning made him look vulnerable, not strong. It raised questions rather than silencing them.

With each development since — the clash between Dan Bongino and Bondi over who would take the fall first revealed in reports of Bongino’s pouty refusal to go to work on Friday, the persistent backlash from some of the loudest voices among his Twitter mob, leading up to Trump’s lengthy tweet yesterday — Trump’s command of attention has slipped.

While folks finally recognized that something is failing in Trump’s normal ability to command attention, this time, by gaping at the length of this tweet, if you look closer, the tweet was even more delightfully ill-conceived.

Both right wingers and journalists have, I think correctly, conceived the purpose as an attempt to alleviate pressure on Pam Bondi.

What’s going on with my “boys” and, in some cases, “gals?” They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB!

[snip]

LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB — SHE’S GREAT!

But even there, Trump starts pathetically, by claiming that “my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?'” are leading the attack on Bondi. This attack, on “Blondi,” is being led by Laura Loomer, and suggesting that she’s following Trump’s “boys” on this betrays a reluctance to go after Loomer directly.

The defense of Kash Patel (right wingers correctly noticed that Bongino gets no mention) is secondary.

Kash Patel, and the FBI, must be focused on investigating Voter Fraud, Political Corruption, ActBlue, The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020, and arresting Thugs and Criminals, instead of spending month after month looking at nothing but the same old, Radical Left inspired Documents on Jeffrey Epstein.

That mention builds on the drop dead stupidity of this post — one so stupid that even Benny Johnson noticed it.

For the first time ever, Trump claimed that the Epstein files were made up by Democrats — all Democrats, serially.

Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration, who conned the World with the Russia, Russia, Russia Hoax, 51 “Intelligence” Agents, “THE LAPTOP FROM HELL,” and more? They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called “friends” are playing right into their hands.

To be fair, this is not an entirely new ploy. Last year, Trump explained his hesitation to release the Epstein files based on a claim that “it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”

I guess I would. I think that, less so, because, you know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.

Even then, he was preparing a defense that if something in there implicated him, it was phony, fake, fraudulent.

Still, the claim that Democrats — Obama, Hillary, John Brennan, and Jim Comey (who is not a Democrat, or at least wasn’t when this all happened) — created the Epstein files would normally be a reasonable ploy, given the disinformation he has long used to sustain loyalty. He attempted to tie the Epstein files to things he has trained his rubes to believe were hoaxes — the legal adjudications that Trump’s top aides lied to cover up his ties to Russia and false claims about what 51 spooks said about the Hunter Biden laptop — as well as an actual hoax (the Steele dossier) that he has blamed on Democrats rather than the Russians who larded it with allegations that closely match real things only the Russians knew.

These things — Russia Russia Russia — are a foundational element of his tweets (and one of the things data mules disseminate without debunking, thereby reinforcing as unquestioned). This was an attempt to add one more element, as he added the spook letter and Hunter Biden laptop after Russia Russia Russia was already established as his foundational disinformation.

So this might have been a reasonable attempt to discredit the Epstein files, the things he anticipated claiming were “phony” last year. Except you don’t attempt this after years of treating it as credible.

Worse still, you don’t do that and then immediately ask the question that MAGAts have long used to reassure themselves that Trump wasn’t in the Epstein files.

Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn’t they use it?

Why didn’t they, indeed?

Again, even Benny has seen the problem with this, and he is painfully stupid!

The reason Trump’s claims that the Russian investigation and the spook letter and the Steele dossier are hoaxes have succeeded is because they were made public, often with the involvement of Democrats. But if Democrats — even Hillary, whose spouse flew on his plane! — larded the Epstein files with things damaging Trump, right wingers’ biases dictate that the left would have released it.

Before Trump’s claims that these were fabricated, the logic made sense to right wingers: Democrats didn’t release the files because there’s nothing about Trump in them. But if the left allegedly fabricated them along with the Russian investigation and the spook letter, which Trump has falsely claimed were fabricated in an attempt to hurt Trump, then they would have released them.

Furthermore, he would order Kash to include the Epstein files among the witch hunts on which he wants FBI to focus. Instead, he’s arguing that Kash doesn’t have time to investigate this alleged hoax targeting him because he is too busy investigating other fabricated claims of a hoax, his desperate attempt to find some way to sustain the claim that he’s not a loser beaten by Joe Biden in 2020.

The entire post collapses in on itself. Even Benny sees this! 

And that’s before something else Trump attempted. Trump told his rubes — a huge cross-section of which is QAnon adjacent — that nobody cares about Jeffrey Epstein.

Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.

Crazier still, when he first attempted this complaint, he used a phrase that is bound to fuel conspiracists.

“selfish people” are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein

Jeffrey Epstein never dies?!?! Did you really say that? About a guy whose circumstances of death are a key part of this conspiracy theory? Hell, the most unhinged Epstein conspiracists (including a good number of Trump supporters) question whether he did die. And you just wrote down that Jeffrey Epstein never dies?!?!

Trump’s supporters are in a cult. But many of them are also in the QAnon cult. And for those for whom the QAnon cult came first or remains predominant, telling them that “nobody cares about” Jeffrey Epstein ruptures the unity between Trump and them, because he is attacking one of their foundational beliefs. It’s like telling devout Christians that Jesus never walked the Earth. You have just assailed a foundational belief of those who believe — as proven by Epstein — that pedophiles control the powerful. So long as Trump flirted with QAnon conspiracies, he and his rubes shared that foundational belief; yesterday, he assailed it.

(Both Phil Bump and Mike Rothschild addressed what happens when you betray the trust of conspiracists back when Bongino first affirmed that Epstein killed himself; their descriptions really anticipated what we’re seeing this week.)

There certainly are questions about what aspects of Trump’s sustained fondness for Epstein remain in files that once might have been on Pam Bondi’s desk before they weren’t and never had been, according to Bondi. It’s certainly likely that something in them explains the failure of Trump’s super power here, his inability to deliver his long-practiced lines, first of bullying a journalist, then claiming Dems implicated him in a hoax.

But the reason why his super power is failing doesn’t matter so long as it does continue to fail, especially given that Epstein conspiracies were always non-falsifiable and Trump’s conflicting stories make them all the more so. Unless something drastically changes, every attempt Trump makes to squelch this focus will only exacerbate the growing cognitive dissonance his rubes have. And the underlying Epstein scandal is so spectacular — so unquestionably a case of injustice to the victims — that even feckless Dems have the means of keeping it at the forefront.

Trump survives based on that super power, on his ability (as he succeeded in doing with the Rosie O’Donnell tweet) to dodge accountability by distracting away from it.

If that super power starts to fail, though, so will his ability to avoid accountability.

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