Heather Cox Richardson's Blog, page 91
July 19, 2024
July 18, 2024
July 18, 2024
Paul Manafort walking onto the floor of the Republican National Convention yesterday illustrated that the Republican Party under Trump has become thoroughly corrupted into an authoritarian party aligned with foreign dictators.
Manafort first advised and then managed Trump’s 2016 campaign. A long-time Republican political operative, he came to the job after the Ukrainian people threw his client,Viktor Yanukovych out of Ukraine’s presidency in 2014. Yanukovych was backed by Russian president Vladimir Putin, who was determined to prevent Ukraine from turning toward Europe and to install a puppet government that would extend his power over the neighboring country. Beginning in 2004, Manafort had worked to install and then keep Yanukovych and his party in power. His efforts won him a fortune thanks to his new friends, especially Russian billionaire Oleg Deripaska. Then in 2014, after months of popular protests, Ukrainians ousted Yanukovych from power in what is known as the Revolution of Dignity.
Yanukovych fled to Russia, and Putin invaded Ukraine’s Crimea and annexed it, prompting the United States and the European Union to impose economic sanctions on Russia itself and also on specific Russian businesses and oligarchs, prohibiting them from doing business in United States territories. These sanctions crippled Russia and froze the assets of key Russian oligarchs.
Now without his main source of income, Manafort owed about $17 million to Deripaska. By 2016, his longtime friend and business partner Roger Stone was advising Trump’s floundering presidential campaign, and Manafort stepped in to remake it. He did not take a salary but reached out to Deripaska through one of his Ukrainian business partners, Russian operative Konstantin Kilimnik, immediately after landing the job, asking Kilimnik how “we” could use the appointment “to get whole,” and he made sure that the Russian oligarch to whom he owed the most money knew about his close connection with the Trump campaign.
Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election explained at least one answer: Manafort and Kilimnick “discussed a plan to resolve the ongoing political problems in Ukraine by creating an autonomous republic in its more industrialized eastern region of Donbas, and having Yanukovych…elected to head that republic.” The report continued: “That plan, Manafort later acknowledged, constituted a ‘backdoor’ means for Russia to control eastern Ukraine.”
This policy was the exact opposite of official U.S. policy for a free and united Ukraine. Russia worked to help Trump win the White House, and immediately after his election, according to the Republican-dominated Senate Intelligence Committee, Kilimnick wrote that "[a]ll that is required to start the process is a very minor ‘wink’ (or slight push) from D[onald] T[rump] saying ‘he wants peace in Ukraine and Donbass back in Ukraine’ and a decision to be a ‘special representative’ and manage this process. The email went on to say that once then–Ukrainian president Petro Poroshenko understood this “message” from the United States, the process “will go very fast and DT could have peace in Ukraine basically within a few months after inauguration.”
The investigation into the Trump campaign’s ties to Russia slowed the consummation of this plan, and strong bipartisan support for Ukraine threw a monkey wrench into the works, prompting Trump’s cronies to try to smear Ukraine as the country that interfered in the 2016 U.S. election, a story that began to come out during Trump’s first impeachment hearing. Biden’s election meant an abrupt end to Russia’s quiet absorption of Ukraine’s eastern region, and in February 2022, Putin simply invaded the country and then claimed that the people there had voted to join Russia.
Trump seemed to bring this back up at a CNN event in June in which, referring to Putin’s invasion of eastern Ukraine in February 2022, he said: “Putin saw that, he said, you know what, I think we’re going to go in and maybe take my—this was his dream. I talked to him about it, his dream.” Trump has said he has a plan for “peace” in Ukraine that will stop the war in a day.
Republican vice presidential pick J.D. Vance is wildly inexperienced for such a position, but he has been staunchly in favor of ending U.S. assistance to Ukraine and was the pick of that party faction. Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov cheered Vance’s nomination, saying: “He’s in favor of peace, he’s in favor of ending the assistance that’s being provided and we can only welcome that because that’s what we need—to stop pumping Ukraine full of weapons and then the war will end” Russia needs this sort of help, for just this week Ukraine forced it to remove its last remaining patrol ship from occupied Crimea (when the 2022 invasion began, it held most of its 74 Black Sea Fleet warships at ports there).
Manafort was convicted of a slew of criminal charges for his work with Ukraine and obstruction of the investigation into the connections between the Trump campaign and Russian operatives, and was serving a seven-year sentence when Trump pardoned him in December 2020. Now he is back at the center of Trump’s MAGA Party.
Before 2016 the Republican Party stood staunchly against Russia, and getting Republican voters to forget that history required adopting the argument of Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán, who is aligned with Putin and Trump, that democracy has ruined the United States. In this argument, the central principle of democracy—that all people must be equal before the law, and have a right to a say in their government—destroys a country by making women, people of color, immigrants, members of religious minorities, and LGBTQ+ individuals equal to heteronormative white men and permitting them to influence government. In place of democracy, they want to impose their version of Christianity on the nation, banning abortion, rejecting immigrants, and curtailing the rights of gender, religious, and ethnic minorities.
Josh Kovensky and John Light of Talking Points Memo picked up that in his speech at the Republican convention last night, Vance pushed back against President Joe Biden’s traditional idea that America is an idea, tying it instead to a place and a people. As Kovensky and Light note, this is “a somewhat-quiet, somewhat-obvious dog whistle, gesturing toward the idea there are, as some on the far-right contend, ‘heritage Americans,’” native-born Americans who have a deeper understanding than newcomers of what this country means. That view of nationhood is commonplace elsewhere, Kovensky and Light note, but its absence in the U.S. “has long made our country exceptional.”
This nationalist concept is at the heart of MAGA attacks on immigrants, which were in full display at the convention yesterday. From the podium yesterday, Thomas Homan, director of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) for Trump’s first two years in office, told undocumented immigrants: “You better start packing to go home.” Trump has promised to round up 11 million migrants (although he claims there are 18 million) currently living in the U.S., put them in camps, and deport them. There were actually preprinted signs at the convention for attendees to wave, which they did with apparent enthusiasm. The signs said: “MASS DEPORTATION NOW!”
The convention has also emphasized its opposition to women’s rights. Trump, who has proudly claimed responsibility for the Supreme Court’s overturning of the 1973 Roe v. Wade decision recognizing abortion as a constitutional right, walked out last night to the song “It’s a Man’s World.” By focusing on the Fourteenth Amendment to the Constitution, which gives Congress the power to enforce it, as the protector of “Life,” the Republican platform covertly endorses a national abortion ban.
Their rejection of democracy requires a strongman at the head of the government, and in Milwaukee that man is Trump, who will be the first convicted criminal nominated for president by a major party. He was convicted for trying to tip the 2016 election by hiding payments to an adult-film actress after they had sex, in order to keep the story from voters.
Conference attendees are honoring Trump with large bandages on their right ear as a tribute to an injury he sustained in a shooting attempt on Saturday, although—and this is very weird—there has been no information about that injury aside from his own comments and those of his inner circle, a lack the press seems willing to ignore despite their deep interest in every piece of medical information from President Biden. As he did at his criminal trial in Manhattan, Trump keeps nodding off to sleep at the convention.
The theme of the party has been unity, but that unity depends on everyone lauding Trump. Gone are the establishment Republicans that ran the party before 2016; even longer gone are the traditional Republicans who were chased out of the party in the 1990s as “Republicans in Name Only” because they believed government had a role to play in the economy and did not see tax cuts as the solution to everything. In the Philadelphia Inquirer, Will Bunch wrote: “Here in Milwaukee, the political pundits finally saw the thing they’ve been pleading for—unity—and what that really looks like. It looks a lot like Jonestown,” where a cult leader took the lives of his followers in 1978.
In 1959, veteran Robert Biggs wrote to Republican president Dwight D. Eisenhower, who had led the Allied forces in Europe during World War II, asking the president to make “direct statements” that would give people the confidence to “back him completely.” Americans needed “more of the attitude of a commanding officer who knows the goal and the mission and states, without evasion, the way it is to be done.”
Eisenhower answered that “in a democracy debate is the breath of life. This is to me what Lincoln meant by government ‘of the people, by the people, and for the people.’”
“[D]ictatorial systems make one contribution to their people which leads them to tend to support such systems—freedom from the necessity of informing themselves and making up their own minds concerning…tremendous complex and difficult questions,” Eisenhower wrote. “But while this responsibility is a taxing one to a free people it is their great strength as well—from millions of individual free minds come new ideas, new adjustments to emerging problems, and tremendous vigor, vitality and progress…. While complete success will always elude us, still it is a quest which is vital to self-government and to our way of life as free men.”
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/policy/international/4778359-russia-welcomes-vance-views-ukraine/
https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/documents/report_volume5.pdf
https://www.justice.gov/archives/sco/file/1373816/dl
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/06/14/vladimir-putin-demands-war-ukraine/
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/what-did-ex-trump-aide-paul-manafort-really-do-ukraine-n775431
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/11/02/magazine/russiagate-paul-manafort-ukraine-war.html
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/trump-pardons-former-campaign-chairman-paul-manafort
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/17/technology/jd-vance-tech-silicon-valley.html
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
https://www.inquirer.com/opinion/milwaukee-rnc-cult-donald-trump-20240718.html
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nhannahjones/status/1813960845220839439
July 17, 2024
July 17, 2024
On July 18, 1863, at dusk, the Black soldiers of the Massachusetts 54th Volunteer Infantry of the U.S. Army charged the walls of Fort Wagner, a fortification on Morris Island off Charleston Harbor in South Carolina. Because Fort Wagner covered the southern entrance to the harbor, it was key to enabling the U.S. government to take the city.
The 600 soldiers of the 54th made up one of the first Black regiments for the Union, organized after the Emancipation Proclamation called for the enlistment of Black American soldiers. The 54th's leader was a Boston abolitionist from a leading family: Colonel Robert Gould Shaw.
Shaw and his men had shipped out of Boston at the end of May 1863 for Beaufort, South Carolina, where the Union had gained an early foothold in its war to prevent the Confederates from dismembering the country. The men of the 54th knew they were not like other soldiers: they were symbols of how well Black men would fight for their country. This, in turn, would be a statement of whether Black men could truly be equal to white men under the country’s laws, once and for all, for in this era, fighting for the country gave men a key claim to citizenship.
The whole country was watching… and the soldiers knew it.
In the dark at Fort Wagner, the Massachusetts 54th proved that Black men were equal to any white men in the field. They fought with the determination that made Black American regiments during the Civil War sustain higher losses than those of white regiments. The assault on the fort killed, wounded, or lost more than 250 of the 600 men and made the formerly enslaved Sergeant William Harvey Carney the first Black American to be awarded a Medal of Honor. Badly wounded, Carney nonetheless defended the United States flag and carried it back to Union lines. United States soldiers did not take the fort that night, but no one could miss that Black men had proved themselves equal to their white comrades.
The Battle of Fort Wagner left 30 men of the 54th dead on the field—including Colonel Shaw—and hurt 24 more so badly they would later die from their wounds. Fifteen were captured; 52 were missing and presumed dead. Another 149 were wounded. Confederates intended to dishonor Colonel Shaw when they buried him in a mass grave with his men; instead, his family found it fitting.
In 2017 I had the opportunity to spend an evening in the house where the wounded soldiers of the 54th were taken after the battle.
It was a humbling thing to stand in that house that still looks so much as it did in 1863 and to realize that the men, carried hot and exhausted and bleeding and scared into it a century and a half before were just people like you and me, who did what they felt they had to in front of Fort Wagner, and then endured the boat ride back to Beaufort, and got carried up a flight of steps, and then lay on cots in small, crowded rooms and hoped that what they had done was worth the horrific cost.
I am not one for ghosts, but I swear you could feel the blood in the floors.
July 16, 2024
The Republican National Convention is a moment to reintroduce Trump and MAGA Republicans to voters who have not seen them up close since at least 2021. So far, the convention has proved that the Republican Party is now the MAGA Party. It has not been a smooth unveiling.
Yesterday, just after House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that delegates were formally nominating Trump as the Republican Party’s presidential candidate, the teleprompter failed. Unable to continue without it, Johnson quickly left the stage. This was awkward, since two weeks ago, Johnson said on the Fox News Channel of President Joe Biden: “Unless the president is reading off the teleprompter, I don’t think he’s capable of making these big decisions and that is something that should alarm all of us….”
The teleprompter having been fixed, Johnson returned forty-five minutes later to introduce Iowa’s attorney general, Brenna Bird, who in turn began the process of nominating Ohio senator J. D. Vance for vice president. The last time a Republican vice presidential nominee has been named so late was 1988, and while announcing at the convention has the benefit of generating enthusiasm for the novel story, it has the downside of bringing an avalanche of opposition. Vance brought the latter.
He is very young—just 39—and has held an elected office for just 18 months, making him notably inexperienced for someone in contention for the vice presidential slot, especially behind a 78-year-old presidential nominee. In the past, he was a never-Trumper, saying that Trump “might be America’s Hitler,” “might be a cynical a**hole,” and is “cultural heroin,” “noxious,” and “reprehensible,” but he came around to embrace the Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen and to say that if he had been vice president on January 6, 2021, he would have done what former vice president Mike Pence would not: he would have refused to count the certified electoral ballots for President Joe Biden.
Former Wyoming representative Liz Cheney, who was drummed out of the party for standing against Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, wrote: “JD Vance has pledged he would do what Mike Pence wouldn’t—overturn an election and illegally seize power. He says the president can ignore the rulings of our courts. He would capitulate to Russia and sacrifice the freedom of our allies in Ukraine. The Trump GOP is no longer the party of Lincoln, Reagan or the Constitution.”
Both ends of the Republican spectrum have also expressed concerns about Vance. The far right has been vocal today about their disdain for Vance’s wife, who is the American-born daughter of Indian immigrants. “Do we really expect that the guy who has an Indian wife and named their kid Vivek is going to support white identity?” Nick Fuentes asked.
On the other side of the Republican spectrum, those who opposed Trump because of his extremism, especially on abortion, are unlikely to have their fears relieved by Vance, who has advocated no-exceptions abortion bans, that people stay in violent marriages, and said: “We are effectively run in this country…by a bunch of childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made. And so they want to make the rest of the country miserable too.”
But for all the talk of unifying the country since last weekend’s shooting, Trump did not pick Vance to bring Republicans together. His selection of Vance reinforces that the MAGAs have taken over the Republican Party with an ideology that rejects democracy in favor of Christian nationalism. Vance has repeatedly elevated Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán’s destruction of democracy in favor of a strong leader imposing Christian family structures, ending abortion rights, enforcing anti-LGBTQ+ policies and encouraging attacks on immigrants, and seizing universities. Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, who is also aligned with Orbán and was key to the production of Project 2025, which echoes Orbán’s co-called “illiberal democracy,” cheered Vance’s selection.
On Monday the convention approved a platform, the document that outlines the party’s position for the administration they hope to put into power. The evolution of Republican platforms since 2016 shows the evolution of the Republican Party. The 2016 platform fell pretty much within the norms of the genre, celebrating the nation and attacking the opposition before calling first for tax cuts—standard fare for Republicans since 1980—open markets, and deregulation of business and finance, as well as a smaller government. It called as well for an end to gay marriage, protection of gun ownership, and opposition to abortion.
In 2020 the Republican Party did not write a platform, simply saying “[t]hat the Republican Party has and will continue to enthusiastically support the President's America-first agenda.”
In 2024 the Republican Party platform reiterates the points of a Trump rally. Its capitalization is erratic, as his is, and it is full of sweeping and often incorrect statements. Rather than celebrating the country, it warns that “we are a Nation in SERIOUS DECLINE. Our future, our identity, and our very way of life are under threat like never before.” It promises that, under Trump, “We will be a Nation based on Truth, Justice, and Common Sense.”
The only real sign of the old party is the platform’s promise to make the Trump tax cuts, which have already added $2.5 trillion to the national debt, permanent. Otherwise, the platform is a MAGA document. It portrays a world that reflects Trump’s dystopian vision rather than reality, then promises to fix that dystopia either with vague promises or with culture war victories. In odd passages, it promises to do what Biden has already done: conquer inflation, bring supply chains home, revive manufacturing, and save the auto industry.
The speakers at the convention have largely been MAGA extremists, and the picture they painted of the United States echoed Trump’s. They portrayed a country in decline from the heady days of the Trump presidency, but their image was not based in reality. Virginia governor Glenn Youngkin, for example, claimed that “Women, Black Americans, Hispanic Americans, Asian Americans all saw record low employment under Donald J. Trump,” when in fact those record lows have come under Biden. Former CEO of Yammer, South African David Sacks, echoed Russian talking points when he blamed Biden for provoking Russia to invade Ukraine. Tennessee senator Marsha Blackburn attacked “racist DEI requirements.”
CNN fact checker Daniel Dale has been kept busy correcting the Republicans’ repeated lie that there is a violent crime wave in the U.S. under Biden; the opposite is true. Both violent crimes and property crimes have plummeted since the Trump administration. Republicans are also saying that Democrats “have eroded the American energy dominance that President Trump delivered.” In reality, while Biden is trying to shift the U.S. to renewables, Dale noted that “the U.S. under Biden is producing more crude oil than any country ever has… the U.S. is setting fossil fuel world records under this administration. The U.S. produced a global record 12.9 million barrels of crude oil per day in 2023, easily beating the Trump-era high of 12.3 million barrels.”
Today’s speakers included Nikki Haley, a last-minute addition to the program after the events of the weekend in an apparent attempt to create a sense of unity. She made a good pitch but didn’t convince everyone: there were scattered boos at her appearance. Her speech was the high-water mark of the unity effort tonight; the rest of the speakers hammered the idea that the country is divided in two and that Trump’s opponents are persecuting him. They singled out the media as a key enemy.
The bitter rift between establishment and MAGA Republicans has been evident in other ways, as well. Attendees booed Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) when he pledged Kentucky’s votes to Trump, from whom he has kept his distance. MAGA congressman Matt Gaetz (R-FL) interrupted CNN journalist Kaitlan Collins when she was interviewing former House speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA) to taunt McCarthy by pointing out that he had not been asked to speak, adding that if he had been, “You would get booed off the stage.” Gaetz was behind the move to throw McCarthy out of his office, and he resigned from Congress shortly thereafter. McCarthy reacted by noting that there is an ethics complaint against Gaetz for sleeping with a minor.
Trump has appeared at the convention with a large bandage on the ear he says was pierced by a bullet on Saturday. Journalists have begun to note that there has been no medical report of Trump’s injuries, an odd omission after the intense recent scrutiny of President Biden’s health.
Trump seemed oddly subdued on Monday and appeared to fall asleep during the proceedings. His wife Melania has not yet appeared at the convention.
Today, presidential candidate Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s son Bobby Kennedy III posted a video of a call Trump made to his father in which Trump appeared to try to win Kennedy’s support first by appearing to support Kennedy’s opposition to vaccines and then by suggesting that he could get Kennedy a job. “I would love you to do something,” Trump said. “And I think it’ll be so good for you and so big for you. And we’re going to win.” He also noted that Biden had called him after the shooting, saying “it was very nice, actually,” and that the cause of the injury he sustained on Saturday felt like “the world’s largest mosquito.”
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Notes:
https://thehill.com/homenews/campaign/4773366-mcconnell-rnc-2024-kentucky-trump-jd-vance/
https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/2024/07/17/trump-vance-project-2025-orban-hungary/
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2016-republican-party-platform
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/resolution-regarding-the-republican-party-platform
https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/2024-republican-party-platform
https://www.crfb.org/blogs/how-much-did-president-trump-add-debt
https://www.politico.com/news/2024/07/16/nikki-haley-rnc-2024-milwaukee-00168894
https://newrepublic.com/post/183841/project-2025-overjoyed-trump-vice-president-vance
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/16/us/politics/rfk-trump-call.html
https://www.cnn.com/politics/live-news/rnc-republican-national-convention-07-16-24/index.html
https://x.com/nickmmark/status/1813324111697019002
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https://x.com/Acyn/status/1812982393827172506
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1813337419233832998
https://x.com/Liz_Cheney/status/1813182588476952702
https://x.com/RpsAgainstTrump/status/1813193709028098451
https://x.com/atrupar/status/1812984870353969601
https://x.com/IsaacDovere/status/1813237902739931455
https://x.com/DWUhlfelderLaw/status/1813339080874446892
https://x.com/meridithmcgraw/status/1813201574518288387
https://x.com/Acyn/status/1813415749245096172
July 16, 2024
July 15, 2024
July 15, 2024
This morning, after a day of Republicans insisting that it is political polarization to suggest that Trump is a danger to our democracy, U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, who was appointed by Trump in the last days of his presidency, dismissed the classified documents case against the former president. She wrote that “Special Counsel Smith’s appointment violates the Appointments Clause of the United States Constitution.”
Other federal courts have tested this argument and dismissed it, but Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas, whose wife Ginni was part of the attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election, suggested earlier this month that it could be the basis for getting rid of Jack Smith. Cannon cited Thomas repeatedly in her decision.
When he left office in January 2021, Trump took with him to Mar-a-Lago hundreds of pages of classified national security documents, some of which bore the highest level of classification. The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), where by law presidential papers must be deposited, noted that many documents were missing from the materials Trump released to them and, in May 2021, emailed Trump’s lawyers to get them back.
When his lawyers tried to push him to do as the law required, they told FBI investigators, Trump answered: “It’s not theirs, it’s mine.” Finally, in December 2021, after Trump had personally gone through the documents, a Trump representative told NARA that they had found “some records,” and in January 2022, NARA retrieved 15 boxes from Mar-a-Lago. Archivists found more than 150 documents marked classified, making up hundreds of pages of classified national security information.
By April the Justice Department had convened a grand jury to investigate Trump’s removal of the documents. Trump’s lawyers tried to keep those documents out of the hands of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) by claiming they were covered by executive privilege, but in May 2022, NARA gave the FBI access to the records. In June 2022, Trump representative Christina Bobb certified that “a diligent search” at Mar-a-Lago had turned up nothing more and that they were returning “any and all documents” they had found. Concerned about the sheer number of documents turning up, the Department of Justice subpoenaed security video tapes, which showed people moving the documents.
Federal officials obtained a search warrant for Mar-a-Lago. When they executed it in August 2022, they found 13 more boxes with classified documents: a total of more than 11,000 government documents and photographs. They also found 48 empty folders labeled “classified,” but they did not check a locked closet on which Trump had recently changed the lock, or a “hidden room” in Trump’s bedroom. They found that the boxes, which contained the most valuable intelligence of the United States government, had been stored haphazardly in public areas, including a ballroom stage and a bathroom.
In November 2022, after Trump announced his presidential candidacy—an early announcement that many thought was an attempt to avoid criminal prosecution—Attorney General Merrick Garland appointed a special counsel to oversee the two federal investigations that touched on the former president, thus deliberately moving those investigations outside the department so they could not be seen as part of the presidential race.
In June 2023 a federal grand jury indicted Trump on 37 criminal counts under the Espionage Act, including scheming to conceal documents; three more charges were added the following month. Trump allegedly compromised national security documents from the Central Intelligence Agency, the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (surveillance imagery), the National Reconnaissance Office (surveillance and maps), the Department of Energy (nuclear weapons), and the Department of State and Bureau of Intelligence and Research (diplomatic intelligence). He was a one-man wrecking ball, aimed at our national security.
The case fell randomly to Cannon, who has appeared to be trying to delay the case since it came into her hands. Today, she threw it out altogether.
Former attorney general Eric Holder called Cannon’s dismissal “so bereft of legal reasoning as to be utterly absurd.” Legal analyst Mark Joseph Stern called it “an extreme outlier view with no basis in precedent” and noted that “Cannon’s indefensible opinion will still serve its purpose of delaying this trial indefinitely.”
Global politics scholar Brian Klaas wrote “Trump appoints judge. Trump does something that virtually all legal experts—including Trump’s own former Attorney General—see as a clear-cut felony. Judge that Trump appointed dismisses case.” Washington Post global affairs columnist Ishaan Tharoor wrote: “if this happened in another country, the DC establishment would immediately point to the erosion of the rule of law and the independence of the judiciary.”
Special Counsel Jack Smith has said he will appeal Cannon’s ruling.
Trump responded to the news exactly as yesterday’s Republican demands that Trump’s opponents stop calling out his lawlessness suggested he would. He posted: “As we move forward in Uniting our Nation after the horrific events on Saturday, this dismissal of the Lawless Indictment in Florida should be just the first step, followed quickly by the dismissal of ALL the Witch Hunts—the January 6th Hoax in Washington, D.C., the Manhattan D.A.’s Zombie Case, the New York A.G. Scam, Fake Claims about a woman I never met (a decades old photo in a line with her then husband does not count), and the Georgia “Perfect” Phone Call charges. The Democrat Justice Department coordinated ALL of these Political Attacks, which are an Election Interference conspiracy against Joe Biden’s Political Opponent, ME. Let us come together to
END all Weaponization of our Justice System, and Make America Great Again!”
The Thomas opinion on which Cannon relied was his concurrence in the July 1, 2024, decision in Donald J. Trump v. United States. In that decision, the Supreme Court overturned the central principle of American democracy when it said that the U.S. president cannot be prosecuted for crimes committed as part of a president’s “official duties.” Cannon’s decision echoes the idea that Trump cannot be held accountable even for what is allegedly the most serious breach of our national security in our history. Indeed, MAGA Representative Matt Gaetz (R-FL) posted a picture of Cannon on social media with the heading: “Future Supreme Court Justice Cannon.”
Legal analyst Keith Boykin listed the many excuses and arguments Trump enablers have made over the years. “He can’t be prosecuted in office,” Boykin wrote. “He can’t be impeached because the courts should decide. He’s immune from prosecution after office. He can’t be prosecuted by Biden’s DOJ because that’s ‘lawfare.’ And he can’t be prosecuted by a special counsel. We have created a dictator.”
Legal analyst Norm Eisen noted that Cannon’s decision will boost Trump on the first day of the Republican National Convention, held in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, from Monday through Thursday of this week. So will the weekend’s shooting, which has inspired MAGA Republicans to insist that all their party members must rally around Trump.
While Trump has been the presumptive nominee for years, that anointment was contested. Around 20% of Republican primary voters, who tend to be the most loyal and fervent partisans, consistently voted for former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley rather than Trump. Those voters seemed to be concentrated in the suburbs, thus making up a constituency Trump needs to win.
On the other end of the party’s spectrum, the fringe right has been saying that Trump is too soft for them. Antisemitic white nationalist Nick Fuentes has told his followers that he and his “groypers” are fed up with Trump because they are sick of “battling the Jews in the White House, battling the neocons, battling the Israel-firsters.”
Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and right-wing provocateur Ivan Raiklin have speculated for months that removing Trump from the running—they speculated about assassination—would open the way for Trump’s far-right former national security advisor Michael Flynn, and appeared to be putting pressure on Trump to name Flynn as vice president. Yesterday, Raiklin posted on social media a “Trump/Flynn 2024” graphic with the legend “FAFO,” under the words “Assassination-Proof.”
This afternoon, perhaps in hopes of avoiding an embarrassing floor fight, Trump dashed the hopes of both ends of the Republican spectrum by naming Ohio senator J.D. Vance as his vice presidential pick. Vance is 39 and was elected to the Senate in 2022 with the help of $10 million from right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. In the short time he has been in office, he has echoed Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential race was stolen, has said that he does not believe in rape or incest exceptions for abortion bans and that people should stay in violent marriages, and has praised Project 2025. He is pro-Russia and against the North Atlantic Treaty Organization.
It “will be interesting to see how the RNC attempts to spin Vance as a candidate of Unity,” journalist Anne Applebaum wrote. The Fox News Channel helpfully reminded viewers that Vance has, in the past, said that Trump “might be America’s Hitler,” “might be a cynical a**hole,” and is “cultural heroin,” “noxious,” and “reprehensible.”
Still, factional differences might not matter in today’s Republican Party. This afternoon, in the hall of the RNC convention, attendees chanted, “Fight, fight, fight,” as they punched an arm in the air, in an eerie echo of Germany in the 1930s.
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Notes:
https://www.npr.org/2024/07/15/g-s1-10379/trump-documents-case-dismissed
https://talkingpointsmemo.com/news/judge-cannon-dismisses-mar-a-lago-case-against-trump
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/16/us/politics/trump-cipollone-philbin-interviews-fbi.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/22/us/politics/trump-mar-a-lago-documents.html
https://www.nytimes.com/2022/08/23/us/politics/trump-classified-documents-fbi-letter.html
https://www.voanews.com/a/timeline-of-the-trump-documents-inquiry-/6734453.html
https://abcnews.go.com/US/special-counsel-probed-trump-mar-lago-trip-aides/story?id=111334156
https://abcnews.go.com/US/special-counsel-questioned-witnesses-2-rooms-fbi-search/story?id=106826552
https://www.cnn.com/interactive/2023/07/politics/trump-indictments-criminal-cases/
https://www.msnbc.com/trump-trials-documents-library
https://apnews.com/article/trump-classified-documents-smith-c66d5ffb7ba86c1b991f95e89bdeba0c
https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/what-does-jd-vance-want/
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July 14, 2024
Shortly after 6:00 yesterday evening at a Trump rally in Butler, Pennsylvania, a shooter on the roof of a building about 400 feet from the stage appears to have shot eight bullets at the former president and into the crowd. Trump appeared to flinch and reach for his right ear as Secret Service agents crouched over the former president. When the agents got word the shooter was “down,” they lifted Trump to move him out. He asked to get his shoes and then to put them on.
With that apparently accomplished, Trump stood up with blood on his face, exposed to the crowd, and told the agents to wait. He raised his fist in the air in front of an American flag in what instantly became an iconic image. He appeared to yell, “Fight, fight, fight!” to the crowd before being ushered offstage.
Pennsylvania firefighter Corey Comperatore, 50, was killed. David Dutch, 57, was injured and is hospitalized in stable condition. James Copenhaver, 74, was also injured and is in stable condition.
The FBI has identified the shooter as 20-year-old Thomas Matthew Crooks, who was killed by a Secret Service agent. Crooks used an AR-type semiautomatic rifle that apparently belonged to his father. Crooks was wearing a gray Demolition Ranch tee shirt advertising a YouTube channel for gun enthusiasts and people interested in explosive devices. The channel has more than 11 million followers. Crooks appears to have been a registered Republican.
Trump said he had been “shot with a bullet that pierced the upper part of my right ear.” So far, no doctors have briefed the public.
In the confusion immediately after the shooting, MAGA Republicans blamed the Democrats for the violence. “Today is not just some isolated incident,” Ohio senator J.D. Vance, who is in the running to be Trump’s vice presidential pick, posted on social media. “The central premise of the Biden campaign is that President Donald Trump is an authoritarian fascist who must be stopped at all costs. That rhetoric led directly to President Trump’s attempted assassination.” Representative Mike Collins of Georgia called for a Republican district attorney to “immediately file charges against Joseph R. Biden for inciting an assassination.” Indeed, he said, “Joe Biden sent the orders.”
Edward Luce of the Financial Times noted, “Almost any criticism of Trump is already being spun by Maga as an incitement to assassinate him. This is an Orwellian attempt to silence what remains of the effort to stop him from regaining power.” Indeed, MAGA Republicans appear to be trying to stop discussion of their extremist plans— which are enormously unpopular— by claiming that such a discussion is polarizing.
The idea that Democratic opposition to authoritarian plans like those outlined in Project 2025 caused violence might convince MAGA Republicans, but it will likely be a hard sell for Americans who remember things like:
•Trump’s own suggestion in 2016 that “Second Amendment people” could solve the problem of Hillary Clinton picking judges; or his 2020 attacks on Michigan governor Gretchen Whitmer, who became the target of a kidnapping plot; or election workers bombarded with death threats as Trump lied that the 2020 election was stolen;
•the October 2022 tweet by Trump’s son Donald Trump Jr. mocking then–House speaker Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul after a home intruder hit him in the head with a hammer; or Georgia representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s 2022 campaign video in which she promised to “blow away the Democrats’ socialist agenda” as she took aim with a rifle;
•in 2023, House Republicans wearing AR-15 lapel pins on the floor of Congress; Representative Don Bacon (R-NE) saying his wife slept with a loaded gun after he voted against Representative Jim Jordan (R-OH) for House speaker; or Republican representatives sending Christmas cards showing the whole family toting guns;
•in 2024, the Kansas Republican Party’s March fundraiser where attendees could donate to kick and punch an effigy of President Biden; or Don Jr.’s reposting an image of Biden bound and gagged in the back of a pickup truck;
•or Lieutenant Governor Mark Robinson of North Carolina, who is running for the governorship and who is scheduled to speak at the Republican National Convention starting tomorrow, saying just two weeks ago: “Some folks need killing! It’s time for somebody to say it.”
Indeed, in March 2024, in Vance’s home state, Trump said: if I don’t get elected, it’s going to be a bloodbath for the whole…country,” and a 2022 campaign ad by Representative Collins himself showed him shooting a rifle at Nancy Pelosi’s “agenda” and at a cardboard rhinoceros he says is a “RINO,” a Republican in Name Only.
Republicans under Trump have increasingly advocated violence as a way to gain power because they know their unpopular positions cannot lead their candidates to victory in free and fair elections. In this moment, when there is still little evidence about yesterday’s tragedy, it appears they are projecting their own behavior onto Biden and the Democrats, blaming them for advocating violence when in fact, Biden and the Democrats have tried hard to enact commonsense gun safety laws and have consistently condemned the violent language and normalizing of political violence by Republicans.
Republicans’ embrace of violence is a hallmark of authoritarian leaders; by definition it undermines democracy. In Nashville, Tennessee, today, neo-Nazis shouting “Hitler was right!” were involved in fights in the streets. Ending that resort to violence, which never advances society and always injures it, is key to restoring the guardrails of democracy.
Biden spoke to the nation tonight, warning that Americans need to “lower the temperature in our politics and to remember, while we may disagree, we are not enemies. We’re neighbors. We’re friends, coworkers, citizens. And, most importantly, we are fellow Americans. And we must stand together.” He condemned yesterday’s violence, noting that “[a] former president was shot” and “an American citizen killed while simply exercising his freedom to support the candidate of his choosing…. There is no place in America for this kind of violence or for any violence ever. Period. No exceptions. We can’t allow this violence to be normalized.”
The framers of the Constitution, he said, “created a democracy that gave reason and balance a chance to prevail over brute force. That’s the America we must be, an American democracy where arguments are made in good faith, an American democracy where the rule of law is respected, an American democracy where decency, dignity, fair play aren’t just quaint notions, but living, breathing realities.”
Biden rejected the idea that criticizing the Republicans’ extremism was polarizing. While they can “criticize my record and offer their own vision for this country,” he said, “I’ll continue to speak out strongly for our democracy, stand up for our Constitution and the rule of law, to call for action at the ballot box, no violence on our streets. That’s how democracy should work.”
Biden paused all campaign ads and events after the shooting and told staffers to “refrain from issuing any comments on social media or in public.” Trump is fundraising off the attempt on his life, but he spent the day golfing rather than campaigning.
The Secret Service has launched an investigation of how a shooter could get so close to Trump; Biden has ordered an independent investigation as well. Biden said he has also directed the Secret Service to review the security measures in place for the Republican National Convention, which starts tomorrow in Milwaukee.
Within hours of the shooting, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) announced that “THE HOUSE WILL CONDUCT A FULL INVESTIGATION OF THE TRAGIC EVENTS TODAY,” saying, “The American people deserve to know the truth.” Although the FBI investigation has barely gotten underway and Congress has no law enforcement power, Johnson promised to have officials from the Secret Service, the Department of Homeland Security, and the FBI “appear for a hearing before our committees ASAP.”
Observers noted that it sounded like MAGA plans to have yet another investigation designed to spread a narrative, in this case, that the “Deep State” was involved in the shooting.
—
Notes:
https://apnews.com/article/trump-vp-vance-rubio-7c7ba6b99b5f38d2d840ed95b2fdc3e5
https://www.thedailybeast.com/trump-just-created-one-of-the-most-iconic-photos-in-us-history
https://www.cnn.com/2024/07/14/politics/what-was-said-on-stage-after-trump-was-shot
https://apnews.com/article/secret-service-trump-rally-4e3415b1461f5acefbc8e1fadad0375b
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/donald-trump/trump-bloodbath-loses-election-2024-rcna143746
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2023/02/03/assault-rifle-pins-gop-clyde/
https://www.cnn.com/2020/10/27/politics/trump-gretchen-whitmer-kidnapping-michigan/index.html
https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/31/politics/donald-trump-jr-paul-pelosi-reaction/index.html
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/section/campaign-of-fear/
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