UNLEASH JOE BIDEN

I don't know if you've noticed this, but Donald Trump is giving a lot of interviews these days. You probably know about the lengthy Time interview, but yesterday, while his court case was in recess, Trump gave interviews to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, as well as to local Fox affiliates in Milwaukee and Detroit.

You can't blame Trump's campaign for pursuing this strategy. It seems clear that President Biden's team doesn't want him to talk to the media very much. Representatives of elite news outlets have comnplained that Biden won't give them interviews, particularly The New York Times, which has launched a vendetta against Biden because of this refusal. Understandably, Trump wants to prove that he's not afraid to talk to the press.

The tone of Trump's interviews reminds me of the name of a popular subreddit at Reddit: Confidently Incorrect. For instance, in Trump's Detroit interview, he offers a conspiratorial interpretation of a fake Venezuela crime statistic:

The former President said current President Joe Biden is allowing criminals into the country, particularly from Venezuela.

"One stat before we go. Venezuela was very crime-ridden. They announced the other day 72% reduction in crime in the last year. You know why? They moved all their criminals from Venezuela right into the good old USA. And Biden let them do it. It's a disgrace," Trump said....

We promised to check on those claims – and WUFT, a public TV station in central Florida, checked Trump's similar claims earlier in April, saying they were down 67%. WUFT partnered with Politifact to check on his claims and found them to be false.

Politifact notes that while Venezuela has seen a recent drop in crime, it's much smaller than Trump claims. Venezuela also continues to have a higher crime rate than other countries in the region. (Remember Steve M.'s Law: Not everything Trump says is a lie, but any Trump utterance that includes a number is a lie.) But Trump will just keep saying this. He sounds sure of himself, and most of the time low-information voters will never learn about the fact check.

I know what you're thinking: Everything Trump says is self-evidently awful, ridiculous, or both. To you, I'm sure it is. It is to me, too. But he's not doing this to appeal to us. He's doing this to appeal to swing voters. And if they don't know much about the subjects he's talking about -- if, in other words, they know about as much as he does -- all they'll see is a confident guy who can talk at length about the issues, making the case that he'd be a great president and that Joe Biden is a lousy one. His sense of certainty might be enough to persuade them. (Remember what Bill Clinton said after he left office: "When people feel uncertain, they'd rather have someone strong and wrong than weak and right.")

Now, here's an AP headline about President Biden:

Biden Keeps Quiet as Gaza Protesters and Police Clash on College Campuses

Biden spoke on the subject today, and the headline has changed ("Biden Says ‘Order Must Prevail’ During Campus Protests Over the War in Gaza"). But we're still told that Biden didn't address the issue for quite a while:

[Biden's] remarks, occurring shortly before he left the White House for a trip to North Carolina, came after days of silence about the protests....

Biden’s last previous public comment on the protests came more than a week ago....

And Trump has picked up on this. Here's what he said to Jason Calvi of Fox's Milwaukee affiliate about the possibility of Gaza protests at the parties' conventions this summer:

Calvi: You'll be here in Milwaukee. Are you worried about protests? We've seen these protests at campuses across the country. Are you worried that they're going to target Republicans, as well, in Milwaukee?

Trump: No, I don't see it. I do see a problem in Chicago for the Democrats, because they've handled things very poorly in so many different ways, and they have a person that doesn't even speak to the public. I don't know, has he came out and spoken yet? I don't think he's spoken about what's going on with the colleges and universities. So, I think you're going to have a little bit of a problem in Chicago. Maybe a big problem. I think here is going to be good.

I don't agree with everything Biden said today about the Gaza protests, but I think he should be doing this every day: addressing the most important stories in the country, speaking out, making news. The public needs to see him engaging with what's happening in the country and the world every day.

But his handlers don't want that. They're afraid of gaffes. Well, a few weeks ago Biden incorrectly said that his uncle, a World War II pilot, might have been eaten by cannibals after being shot down over Papua New Guinea. But that story is mostly forgotten already. It's been overtaken by events.

Even the much more alarming things Trump has said recently -- like his assertion in the Time interview that he won't intervene if anti-abortion states monitor pregnancies or jail those who seek abortions -- aren't dominating the news conversation, because other stories are seen as more important. So Trump just carries on talking. Biden should talk a lot more too.

TRUMP ON ABORTION (AND COVID): THE STRONGMAN PASSES THE BUCK

Is Donald Trump a strong leader? A majority of Americans believe he is. In a March survey from Gallup, 57% of respondents said that Trump "is a strong and decisive leader." That number included 58% of independents and even 18% of Democrats. In an Economist/YouGov survey conducted in January, 55% of respondents said that Trump is a "very strong" or "somewhat strong" leader, including 53% of independents and 23% of Democrats.

Belief in Trump's strength as a leader is so pervasive that it survived even the extraordinary amount of buck-passing he did during the biggest crisis of his final year in office, the COVID pandemic. Trump was a blame-shifter right from the start, telling a reporter who asked him about the lack of available tests, "I don't take responsibility at all." When governors sought medical supplies from the federal government, Trump told them, “Respirators, ventilators, all of the equipment — try getting it yourselves.” He blamed China. He blamed past presidents, especially Barack Obama.

Trump, the strong leader, likes to shift blame whenever he believes that no good outcome is possible for him. He's blame-shifting on abortion, which he once supported openly and now opposes only because his voter base does. He deeply resents any implication that he might bear some responsibility for the future of abortion rights in America, even as he takes credit for appointing the Supreme Court justices who got rid of Roe v. Wade. If you don't like what's about to happen, don't come whining to him! It's not his fault -- and it won't be his fault in a second term, as he insisted to Time magazine's Eric Cortellessa in a newly published interview. Over and over again he said it would be a state matter:

You came out this week and said that abortion should be left to the states and you said you won't sign a federal ban. So just to be clear: Will you veto any bill that imposes any federal restrictions on abortions?

Trump: You don’t need a federal ban. We just got out of the federal. You know, if you go back on Roe v. Wade, Roe v. Wade was all about—it wasn't about abortion so much as bringing it back to the states. So the states would negotiate deals. Florida is going to be different from Georgia and Georgia is going to be different from other places....

People want to know whether you would veto a bill, if it came to your desk, that would impose any federal restrictions. This is really important to a lot of voters.

Trump: But you have to remember this: There will never be that chance because it won't happen. You're never going to have 60 [Republican] votes [in the Senate]. You're not going to have it for many, many years, whether it be Democrat or Republican. Right now, it’s essentially 50-50. I think we have a chance to pick up a couple, but a couple means we're at 51 or 52. We have a long way to go. So it's not gonna happen, because you won't have that. Okay. But with all of that being said, it's all about the states, it's about state rights. States’ rights. States are going to make their own determination.

So just to be clear, then: You won't commit to vetoing the bill if there's federal restrictions—federal abortion restrictions?

Trump : I won't have to commit to it because it’ll never—number one, it’ll never happen. Number two, it’s about states’ rights. You don't want to go back into the federal government. This was all about getting out of the federal government. And this was done, Eric, because of—this was done, this issue, has been simplified greatly over the last one week. This is about and was originally about getting out of the federal government. The last thing you want to do is go back into the federal government. And the states are just working their way through it....

... Your allies in the Republican Study Committee, which makes up about 80% of the GOP caucus, have included the Life of Conception act in their 2025 budget proposal. The measure would grant full legal rights to embryos. Is that your position as well?

Trump: Say it again. What?

The Life at Conception Act would grant full legal rights to embryos, included in their 2025 budget proposal. Is that your position?

Trump: I'm leaving everything up to the states. The states are going to be different. Some will say yes. Some will say no. Texas is different than Ohio.

Would you veto that bill?

Trump: I don't have to do anything about vetoes, because we now have it back in the states.

Donald Trump is viscerally pro-choice, no matter what he tells the rubes now, because having abortion available as a backup during his days as a self-promoting cocksman was a matter of self-preservation. (Self-preservation is the closest thing Trump has to a core value.) He worries that abortion might defeat him in 2024 the way many people believe COVID defeated him in 2020. So he's insisting that the potential bad outcomes are other people's fault.

The exchange that's causing him the most trouble today is this one:

Let’s say there’s a 15-week ban.... Do you think states should monitor women's pregnancies so they can know if they've gotten an abortion after the ban?

Trump: I think they might do that. Again, you'll have to speak to the individual states....

States will decide if they're comfortable or not—

Trump: Yeah the states—

Prosecuting women for getting abortions after the ban. But are you comfortable with it?

Trump: The states are going to say. It’s irrelevant whether I’m comfortable or not. It's totally irrelevant, because the states are going to make those decisions.

As in the case of COVID, Trump might succeed in persuading people that bad outcomes aren't his fault, but because he's the most narcissistic person who's ever lived, he can't even bring himself to express concern about bad outcomes.* Hundreds of thousands of Americans die from COVID? Women are monitored by the state so they can't get abortions, or are thrown in jail if they try to obtain one? Trump can't make himself say he feels anyone's pain, because the only pain he can feel is the pain of being blamed for something that he's told us repeatedly is someone else's fault.

That's leadership, Trump style!


* Much less say that, as the president of the United States, he'd work to eliminate or minimize those bad outcomes.

THE GAZA PROTESTS MIGHT NEUTRALIZE JANUARY 6 AS A CAMPAIGN ISSUE

This happened overnight at Columbia University:

Dozens of protesters seized Hamilton Hall in the early hours of Tuesday morning, moving metal gates to barricade the doors, blocking entrances with wooden tables and chairs, and zip-tying doors shut.

Protestors carrying barricades entered Hamilton through the leftmost door of the building at approximately 12:30 a.m. Shortly after, a protester broke the window of the rightmost door of Hamilton as dozens more formed a human barricade directly outside the Hamilton doors. Within minutes, protesters sealed Hamilton while hundreds more flooded in front of the building.

News consumers will see broken windows a lot in the next day or two -- and possibly for much longer than that:

#NOW Glass doors into Hamilton Hall inside Columbia were smashed up, protesters stormed in occupying the building, barricading doors with metal gates, blocking entrances with wooden tables and chairs, and zip-tying doors shut.pic.twitter.com/dXxErABRWL

— Oliya Scootercaster 🛴 (@ScooterCasterNY) April 30, 2024

Does this remind you of anything?



The story of January 6 is contested. Republicans want you to see it the way Tucker Carlson did:



Only Republican zealots think January 6 was peaceful. But it will be harder to make the case that January 6 was intolerably violent when pro-Gaza demonstrators are doing things we associate with January 6 insurrectionists.

HAMILTON HALL HAS BEEN OCCUPIED @Columbia pic.twitter.com/xPWFdeEOX9

— Jessica Schwalb (@jessicaschwalb7) April 30, 2024

Republicans have been doing this kind of compare-and-contrast for years, of course. They've argued that the protests held in the wake of George Floyd's murder were riots led by Black Lives Matter and Antifa terrorists. In their own media, they cherry-pick the worst visuals, and contrast them with the most placid clips of January 6.

Obviously, that's persuasive to Republican voters and less persuasive to everyone else. But bad footage of the Floyd protests exists, and it undoubtedly has some impact on how middle-of-the-road voters see that time period, and January 6 in particular.



An argument that isn't made often enough is this: On some level it doesn't matter whether other protests were more violent than January 6, because January 6 was about overturning the results of a democratic election. As bad as the violence may have become in the worst of the George Floyd protests, those protesters seized temporary control of the streets -- they didn't attempt to seize ongoing control of the government in defiance of the will of voters. It may be bad to smash store windows or overturn police cars, but elections are fundamental to our system of government. The correct way to measure the seriousness of what happened is not the degree of violence, but the danger inherent in the potential outcome.

But we rarely hear that, so the protests are judged based on how unruly they look. And the campus protests are looking worse.

RIGHT-WING MEN HATE THE GAZA PROTESTS BECAUSE OF THEIR FRUSTRATED LIBIDOS

Kat Abughazaleh catches Jesse Watters of Fox News telling fellow panelists on The Five that the Gaza protests on campus are happening because female students don't have boyfriends:

JESSE WATTERS: Females -- I think I can speak for the women at the table -- are generally nurturing people. And when their professors are giving them better grades for their social activism, they're trying to appeal to their teachers, and they've been told they're oppressed as women, and they identify with the Palestinians, and they're trying to hug them and nurture them.

Because they're single, they're not nurturing their boyfriends. Their boyfriends have been described as toxic. So they're trying to nurture other people.

This is the language of the manosphere (demeaningly referring to women as "females," accusing them of misandry), with a slightly varied message (young women aren't having massive amounts of indiscriminate sex with tall, handsome "Chads," they're channeling that energy into activism instead). This is directed not at sexually frustrated young men, like most manosphere media content, but rather at the older men who are a large part of Fox's audience. Presumably some of these men are also sexually frustrated, but even the ones who aren't are likely to envy the protesters' youth and presumed sexual vigor -- and they're likely to be the kind of men who expect every woman to be flirty and smiley, especially toward men like themselves, rather than serious about a cause.

If you think this is just one isolated sexist riff, I refer you to NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway's weekend appearance on Bill Maher's show, which was lovingly written up in the New York Post:

NYU professor Scott Galloway said that college campuses were increasingly becoming reminiscent of Nazi Germany — and attributed the reason partly to young people not having enough sex.

“We need to enjoy sex,” Galloway offered to some initial confusion during an appearance on “Real Time” with Bill Maher Friday.

“I think part of the problem is young people aren’t having enough sex so they go on the hunt for fake threats and the most popular threat through history is [antisemitism].”

Galloway loves this argument. Here he is on CNN:

One reason for the rampant campus Israel protests, says NYU Professor Scott Galloway, is that "Protesting is the new sex....You get a dopa hit from gathering together in fighting off a perceived enemy [and] I think they're on the hunt for what I'd call a fake mortal enemy."

How sexually obsessed is Professor Galloway? Very sexaully obsessed:

If you think that sounds bad, trust me, the reality is worse:

Scott Galloway (⁦@profgalloway⁩) has a new show on Bloomberg’s ⁦@Quicktake⁩ streaming service and … this deleted video gives some … insight into what to expect? pic.twitter.com/IsUyFwend1

— Katie Robertson (@katie_robertson) July 2, 2021

This professor's obsession with young people's sex lives reminds me of T Bone Burnett's 1983 spoken-word song "The Sixties," particularly the second verse, about a frustrated man:

... after a while, he started hearing about free love
And he felt left out
And he tortured his imagination dreaming of pot parties
With those suntanned girls in halter tops with their cutoffs slit up to their belt loops
Then he saw a picture in Playboy of Ursula Andress on the arm of some hippie and that did it
He began his rebellion late
And now he's got a designer camper
And one time he even got to sleep in it with one of those girls in the cutoffs
But it made me feel awful
'Cause he had to pay her fifty dollars
And it was twenty for anybody else

I'll close with this guy, a troll who was posting briefly at Bluesky until he was banned:

In the master narrative of the manosphere, college-age women have indiscriminate sex with alpha males until time catches up with them at the advanced age of 30, or even 25, at which point they're shriveled-up old crones no man would be interested in -- childless, unattached, alone with their cats, full of antidepressants, and miserable. That's the narrative this troll seems to be invoking. Watters and Galloway rewrite the narraative, but this is it in its pure form. None of these guys seem capable of imagining that anyone could engage in protest because they believe in the cause.

THE MAINSTREAM MEDIA CAN'T EVEN COVER KRISTI NOEM'S DOG MURDER CORRECTLY

On Friday, The Guardian's Martin Pengelly reported that South Dakota governor Kristi Noem -- a top contender for the job of Donald Trump's running mate -- confesses to murdering a dog and a goat in her forthcoming memoir, No Turning Back. Noem says she shot the 14-month-old dog to death after it attacked a neighbor's chickens, and also killed a goat owned by her family that was, in her telling "nasty and mean" as well as foul-smelling.

According to the media, reaction to the story was swift -- and bipartisan. Politico's headline is "Dems, GOP Bash Kristi Noem for Shooting Her Dog." The headline at Salon is "'Cruel and Insane': Republicans Condemn Kristi Noem's Dog-Killing Revelation." The Daily Beast headline is "Republicans Pile On as Kristi Noem Cripples Her Shot at Being Trump’s VP."

Obviously, this story isn't about a major issue facing the country. But we're being told that the Republican response has bee similar to the Democratic response when, in fact, most of Noem's GOP critics are actually anti-Trump Republicans (or former Republicans), as the Daily Beast story makes clear:

Alyssa Farrah Griffith, the Trump administration’s former director of strategic communications, wrote that she was “horrified” by the story, in a post on X. “A 14-month old dog is still a puppy & can be trained. A large part of bad behavior in dogs is not having proper training from the humans responsible for them.”

... Sarah Matthews, a former Trump aide posted on X, saying she was shocked that Noem had told on herself in such an outrageous way.

Griffith and Matthews broke with Trump years ago, cooperated with the House January 6 committee, and continue to be Trump critics.

Meghan McCain also jumped on the South Dakota governor’s atrocious anecdote. “You can recover from a lot of things in politics, change the narrative etc.—but not from killing a dog,” McCain wrote.

McCain has been a Trump critic since Trump verbally attacked her father in 2015.

Salon's story surfaces the same names, as well as this one:

Lincoln Project cofounder Rick Wilson kept it simple, tweeting “Good morning to all you who didn’t shoot your puppy in the face.”

The only Noem critic named in these stories who isn't a professional anti-Trumper is Laura Loomer:

Even top Trump ally Laura Loomer was disgusted by this level of cruelty, tweeting, "She can't be VP now."

(People close to Trump have urged him to keep his distance from Loomer, so she's undoubtedly envious of Noem's status as a potential VP candidate.)

The only Republican in relatively good standing who addressed this did so obliquely, as Politico reports:

Florida governor and former Trump rival for the Republican presidential nomination Ron DeSantis pitched in with a call to action — and a dig at the southern border crisis.

“Essentia is a lab/shepherd mix who was rescued from the southern border, where the border crisis affects everyone — even our canine friends,” DeSantis tweeted. “Please consider giving Essentia a great home by adopting her from Big Dog Ranch Rescue.”

Contrast this with the responses by Democrats:

“Post a picture with your dog that doesn’t involve shooting them and throwing them in a gravel pit,” Minnesota Gov. Tim Walz wrote on X.... Alongside it was a picture of Walz feeding his dog a treat.

Michigan Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and New Jersey Gov. Phil Murphy also responded with pictures of their beloved pets....

“ACT NOW!” Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) wrote on X alongside an infomercial-style video in memoriam for Cricket. ”For just $.10 a day you can help us save a puppy from Kristi Noem.”

And, as Salon notes, Noem had aat least one high-profile defender on the right:

“The Daily Wire” commentator Michael Knowles took to Twitter to share his unpopular opinion.

“This story makes me like and respect her more,” the CPAC speaker said.

This is a trivial story, but once again the press is giving the GOP credit for beliefs its core membership doesn't really share.

*****

So why did Noem put the animal-murder stories in her book? New York magazine's Margaret Hartmann has theories:

Theory No. 1: Kristi Noem is an incredibly bad politician.

This is actually the reason Noem provides in the book. “I guess if I were a better politician I wouldn’t tell the story here,” she writes....

Theory No. 2: Kristi Noem is trying to impress Trump, and he hates dogs.

... Julie Alderman Boudreau, presidential-research director for American Bridge 21st Century, offered this explanation:

Theory No. 3: Kristi Noem wants off Trump’s VP shortlist.

Is Noem’s tale an intentional act of self-sabotage? That’s the theory put forth by Semafor’s Benjy Sarlin:

Theory No. 2 has some merit -- if Trump likes an inner-circle aspirant, he's fond of saying that the person is "a killer" -- but beyond that, I think the answer is simple. Noem was trying to send a favorite Republican message: I'm from a rural red state, and I've done things no soy-eating big-city liberal would ever do. This works if you're a Republican woman. Remember how we were told in 2008 that Sarah Palin knew how to field-dress a moose?

But a dog is not a moose. People love dogs. Noem miscalculated.

I expected Noem to say that she wishes the libs would get as upset about killing "the babies" as they do about killing dogs. But she knows Trump wants to downplay his party's abortion absolutism, at least until November, so she can't even play that card. She's cooked.

THEY FUCK AROUND, WE FIND OUT

The Republican-controlled Supreme Court is about to give U.S. presidents, or at least Republican U.S. presidents, a massive amount of leeway to commit crimes while in office. In The New Republic, Brynn Tannehill says that the Republican justices will someday regret what they're doing:

The conservatives on the Supreme Court have ... exposed their hubris, willful ignorance, and foolishness to the entire world in stark terms, and it will cost them and the nation dearly in the long run. They somehow presume that if Trump is elected and goes full dictator, that the power of the court, and their reputation, will save them. The truth is, Trump’s relationships with everyone he meets are completely transactional. If the court ever stops being useful to him, he will terminate it with prejudice if he thinks he can get away with it, and this court is doing everything it can to make him think he can get away with it.

... When Trump is president again, he is likely to believe that he has the option of “removing” any member of the Supreme Court who defies him. As long as the court doesn’t rule against him, they’re fine. From the justices’ perspective, they either end up neutered lap dogs of a despot, who do whatever they’re told out of fear, or they defy him and end up somewhere ... unpleasant (at best). Taking a dirt nap at worst. After all, if Trump can rub out a political opponent, can’t he do the same to an uncooperative jurist?

Or, alternately, the Court will be neutered by Democrats, according to Tannehill:

If Democrats nearly universally see the court as a corrupt rubber stamp for an autocrat, what happens if Republicans push too far on an issue? Like, say, an effective 50-state ban on abortion from the moment of conception with no real exceptions, which is almost certainly coming despite Republican claims to the contrary. Well, when the court upholds this, or implements it, it becomes highly likely that blue state governments tell the court, and the administration, to go f--- yourself.

But the bet being made by the Court's Republicans, and Republicans in general, is exactly the opposite of this. They're assuming that they'll never be at cross purposes with Trump or any other Republican president, at least not in a way that's serious enough to expose them to risk. And they assume -- probably correctly -- that Democrats are too institutionalist to defy the federal government in a way that threatens the Court's power.

Right-wingers routinely use power in ways that seem reckless, and likely to cause profound damage to America. Whenever they do, they seem to ask themselves a simple question: Is this likely to cause harm to anyone we care about? When they conclude that the answer is no, they just go ahead and do what they please.

A tax system that's significantly less progressive than the one we had in the pre-Reagan era, resulting in the kind of economic inequality not seen since the Gilded Age? Conservatives made a bet that there wouldn't be riots in the streets, and that even if inequality revived the labor movement, the workers wouldn't be at the capitalists' homes and factories with brickbats and torches, ready to kill, or burn it all down. So far, that's been a good bet.

A massive campaign to prevent a transition from fossil fuels, even as the planet burns? Elite conservatives gambled that the planet wouldn't become too unlivable, and that they'd always be able to retreat to the spots on the globe that remained pleasant. That's still working out for them.

A ban on abortions? Right-wing elitists know that the women and girls in their families will always be able to jet off to places where they can receive reproductive health services discreetly. A firearm free-for-all? The elite schools right-wingers' children attend don't seem to have a lot of mass shooters. Handing over the GOP's messaging to conspiracy-mongering propagandists? Right-wing elitists didn't suffer much harm as a result of rumors that Bill Clinton was a murderer and a drug dealer, or rumors that Barack Obama was a Kenyan-born gay communist, so how much of a problem could it be for them if the voters of their party believe the crazy talk of QAnon, Alex Jones, and Donald Trump?

You might argue that Republicans bet wrong on handing the Supreme Court over to abortion-banners. But the Dobbs decision merely put a limit on the number of House seats the GOP was able to win in 2022 -- the party still took control of the House from Democrats. Republicans still control most of the purple-state legislatures they carefully gerrymandered over the last decade or so. And the former president who made Dobbs possible still has an excellent chance of becoming president again.

So the bets are paying off. The bet that Trump wouldn't disturb right-wing elitists' comfort and leisure, and would in fact make life even cushier for them, paid off from 2017 to 2021. Elitists on the right are once again betting that while Trump might destroy democracy and the rule of law, the suffering will fall on other people, and they'll be fine.

I suppose someday they'll bet wrong, but Republican elitists are assuming that day hasn't arrived. And you can't blame them.

A FEW THOUGHTS ON SUPREME COURT REPUBLICANS' LATEST CONSTITUTION REWRITE

News reports suggest that the Supreme Court is about to grant Donald Trump a massive amount of immunity from prosecution for acts committed while in office, but probably not absolute immunity. After opening arguments, The Atlantic's Ronald Brownstein wrote:

The arguments showed that although the Court’s conservative majority seems likely to reject Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, four of the justices appear predominantly focused on limiting the possibility that future presidents could face such charges for their actions in office, with Chief Justice John Roberts expressing more qualified sympathy with those arguments. Among the GOP-appointed justices, only Amy Coney Barrett appeared concerned about the Court potentially providing a president too much protection from criminal proceedings.

Even the (understandably) alarmist Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern at Slate believe that Trump probably won't get everything he's asking for:

The prospect of a criminal trial for a criminal president shocked and appalled five men: Thomas, Alito, Kavanaugh, and Gorsuch suggested that Smith’s entire prosecution is unconstitutional; meanwhile, Roberts sounded eager at times to handle the case just a hair more gracefully: by cutting out its heart by preventing the jury from hearing about “official acts” (which lie at the center of the alleged conspiracy).

I called it in early March:

I think the Court will grant Trump, and all future presidents, "limited" immunity from prosecution for acts committed while in office....

I think the Court will grant partial immunity while greatly reducing Trump's legal jeopardy. The Court doesn't want to give presidents blanket immunity because, obviously, that would also apply to Democratic presidents, and we can't have that. The Court will toss out some of the charges because it can, and because fuck you, liberals, that's why.

And obviously, if a future Republican president's Justice Department wants to prosecute a former Democratic president, the scope of "official acts" will magically narrow, again because fuck you, liberals.

Trump won't get absolute immunity but, as I've been saying on social media today, he'll tell us he did:

If the Supreme Court gives Trump partial immunity, which seems very likely, he'll say he was given "absolute immunity." He'll say this over and over again, often in all caps, the way he used to repeat "no collusion," and at least 45% of the country will believe it's true.

— Steve M. (@stevemnomoremister.bsky.social) Apr 26, 2024 at 7:03 AM

*****

Remember this charming story from last year?

In 2018, after a teenage gunman murdered 14 students and three faculty members at a high school in Parkland, Florida, Jennifer Birch, fearing for the safety of her own children, decided to join the fight against gun violence.... Birch’s mission, as part of a volunteer force for the gun safety group Moms Demand Action, has been to identify Santa Ana, California, firearm regulations from the 1800s and earlier—all part of an effort to satisfy the Supreme Court’s increasingly preposterous whims about what’s necessary to prove a firearm regulation is constitutional....

In 2022’s Bruen decision, the Supreme Court struck down bans on concealed carry and expanded upon the previous standard for determining the constitutionality of gun regulations, declaring that authorities had to find analogous gun laws that existed prior to 1900. Justice Clarence Thomas, writing for the court, found that before that date, concealed carry bans were not part of America’s history and traditions, and they were thus unconstitutional....

Birch is one of about 20 volunteers with Moms Demand Action, part of the gun safety group Everytown, who are scouring archives across the United States for historical firearm regulations.

(The researchers have found many pre-1900 gun laws that greatly resemble modern gun restrictions. Of course, the Supreme Court doesn't care.)

If you were extraordinarily naive, you'd think the Court might apply this "historical tradition" standard to every case. But as Jamelle Bouie notes, presidents were historically understood not to be above the law, but the Republican justices (apart from Amy Coney Barrett) don't want to know that:

In a detailed amicus brief submitted in support of the government in Trump v. United States, 15 leading historians of the early American republic show the extent to which the framers and ratifiers of the Constitution rejected the idea of presidential immunity for crimes committed in office....

“In America the law is king,” Thomas Paine wrote in his landmark pamphlet, “Common Sense.” “For as in absolute governments the King is law, so in free countries the law ought to be King; and there ought to be no other.” ...

Years later, speaking on the Senate floor, Charles Pinckney of South Carolina — a delegate to the Constitutional convention in Philadelphia — said outright that he and his colleagues did not intend for the president to have any privileges or immunities: “No privilege of this kind was intended for your Executive, nor any except that which I have mentioned for your Legislature.”

What’s more, as the brief explains, ratification of the Constitution rested on the “express” promise that “the new president would be subject to criminal conviction.”

“His person is not so much protected as that of a member of the House of Representatives,” Tench Coxe wrote in one of the first published essays urging ratification of the Constitution, “for he may be proceeded against like any other man in the ordinary course of law.”

James Iredell, one of the first justices of the Supreme Court, told the North Carolina ratifying convention that if the president “commits any misdemeanor in office, he is impeachable, removable from office, and incapacitated to hold any office of honor, trust or profit.” And if he commits any crime, “he is punishable by the laws of his country, and in capital cases may be deprived of his life.”

Yes, you read that correctly. In his argument for the Constitution, one of the earliest appointees to the Supreme Court specified that in a capital case, the president could be tried, convicted and put to death.

Originalism? Textualism? Not this time.

*****

Bouie is cautious about predicting how all this will affect the timing of Trump's election interference case:

... the Supreme Court has directly intervened in the 2024 presidential election in a way that deprives the electorate of critical information or gives it less time to grapple with what might happen in a federal courtroom. And if the trial occurs after an election in which Trump wins a second term and he is convicted, then the court will have teed the nation up for an acute constitutional crisis. A president, for the first time in the nation’s history, might try to pardon himself for his own criminal behavior.

The Republicans on the Court didn't come this far only to allow the possibility of a trial after the election. They want this over and done with. The zealots will take their sweet time writing up their ruling, or, if Roberts writes the ruling, they'll dawdle on their much more zealous partial concurrence. They'll get the case sent back down to the lower courts, and they'll force Jack Smith and his team to pull their case apart and put it back together with the few pieces left to them. The trial won't happen this year, and if it ever happens, it will be a pale echo of what it should have been. The Republicans on the Court want nothing to stand in the way of victory for their party's presidential standard-bearer, obviously, but they also want to minimize any embarrassment to their party even if he loses.