The convicted felon pretends to back away from Project 2025; Commentary on the verdict

Hm, guess the verdict 

did come out so well?

Salon writes that the convicted felon (it feels so nice to write that) and kleptocratic dictator wannabe DJT claims he is backing away from Project 2025:

Trump is now trying to downplay Project 2025

Trump’s campaign issued a statement distancing the former president from a plan drawn up by former staffers

Project 2025 (and its auxiliary Trump’s “Agenda 47”) are a plan by right-wing extremists and other authoritarians to end America’s multiracial democracy and to replace it with a White Christian nationalist plutocracy.

A conspiracy is a plan by two or more people operating in private to advance their interests and goals above those of some other person(s) — or in this context the American people. Project 2025 is not a conspiracy. These plans are exhaustively detailed in a book titled “Mandate for Leadership: The Conservative Promise” and are regularly discussed at conferences, in interviews, and in other public forums. Project 2025 and its related plans, like Agenda 47, were not hatched overnight. As author and journalist Anne Nelson and other experts have been extensively documenting, Project 2025 and the other right-wing extremists’ and neofascists' plans to end America’s multiracial democracy have been years and decades in development:

But ignore it at your peril. The massive tome is the latest iteration of a four-decade-long process of crafting right-wing policies to dismantle the federal government, deregulate industry and eliminate consumer protections and public health measures, while installing a regime controlled by fossil fuel interests and the Religious Right. Not coincidentally, the members of its advisory board have been making headlines attacking American institutions at a grassroots level, in preparation for the big takeover—ranging from Moms4Liberty’s assaults on local public schools, to the Koch-founded Institute on Energy Research’s war on climate initiatives.

Project 2025 lays out specifics for hundreds of policy objectives affecting every area of public life. Many of them affect three primary areas: first, the dismantling of environmental regulations, clean energy measures, and climate policy; second, a rollback of civil and political rights for women and LGBTQ populations and the elimination of public health measures; and third, a massive purge of career civil servants and the concentration of power in the Executive branch in the White House, to consolidate an entrenched authoritarian regime.

Public opinion polls and other research have repeatedly shown that a large percentage of the American public remains unaware of the existential danger that Donald Trump and his MAGA movement and the other neofascists and authoritarians represent to the country’s democracy and freedom. It is the responsibility of the Fourth Estate to wake the American people up from their sleepwalking and political zombification. As an institution, the American news media has largely failed in this obligation.  

To awaken from and escape the Age of Trump and this worsening democracy crisis, the American people need more pro-democracy journalism that illuminates, informs, and gives them solutions. Unfortunately, such work is an outlier in American mainstream news media that largely remains ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the Age of Trump, the global democracy crisis, and what comes next with the 2024 election and beyond.

The Salon article is quite long. It points out the few MSM sources that have gone woke, see the threat and call it what it is, i.e., authoritarianism, neofascism, Christofascism, fascism, plutocracy, etc. So far, I am not aware of anyone calling the authoritarian radical right agenda kleptocracy or kleptocratic. However, that is also a key part of what the radical right wealth and power movement is all about. The radical right is not just about setting up a dictatorship-plutocracy-theocracy. It is also very much about accumulating a lot more wealth for the already wealthy people and interests who run our already seriously corrupted government.

Q: Why is the American mainstream news media largely ill-equipped to meet the challenges of the Age of Trump and the global democracy crisis? Media ownership by corrupt corporations and greedy plutocrats? 

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The NYT reports (not paywalled) on the verdict that made DJT a convicted felon:

Live Updates: Trump Lashes Out After Conviction in Misleading Speech

Donald J. Trump, the first U.S. president to become a felon, excoriated prosecutors and the judge in his criminal case and ran through a litany of false statements as he spoke to reporters and a small crowd of vetted supporters at Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan.

In a rambling and misleading 33-minute speech, derided the trial as “rigged” and attacked the judge in his first public comments since a Manhattan jury found him guilty of all 34 felony counts of falsifying records to cover up a sex scandal that threatened to derail his 2016 presidential campaign. He also made numerous misleading statements about the case and what took place at the trial.

Mr. Trump, who said he would appeal the verdict, continued to attack people who testified against him in the seven-week trial, specifically his former fixer, Michael D. Cohen, the star witness for the prosecution. He also admitted that he got “very upset” with his lawyers.

Good, he is upset with his lawyers. I hope he fires all of them and refuses to pay them. That would help in the DJT personal chaos department.

The WaPo reports (not paywalled) on an issue that is personally concerning, namely the overall impact of DJT on the rule of law:

Even as Trump is found guilty, his attacks take toll on judicial system

That the hush money trial happened at all is a sign of democracy working, analysts say, but Trump’s all-out offensive dealt a “body blow” to the judiciary

For months, top advisers to Donald Trump expected that he would be convicted by a New York jury on all 34 felony counts. So Trump and his team waged an all-out war against the judicial system before the verdict came in, hoping to blunt the political damage and position him as a martyr.

They sent hundreds of fundraising appeals attacking the prosecutors and the system, raising millions of dollars on false claims. They lined up allies outside the courthouse almost every day to question the fairness of the proceedings. Trump attacked the judge, the judge’s daughter and, finally, even the jury — ordinary, anonymous New Yorkers called to perform their basic civic duty.

But amid the relentless offensive by Trump and his allies on the legal infrastructure holding him accountable, the trial came with a substantial cost, according to those who study democracy, with the ultimate impact likely to be measured in November.

“The judicial system has taken a body blow from Trump’s assaults,” said Kim Lane Scheppele, a professor of sociology at Princeton University who studies the rise and fall of constitutional government. Forcing him to sit through the trial, follow orders and listen to evidence against himself meant that “his rage at being controlled by others is going to be directed at trying to bring the whole judicial system down with him.”

Indeed, Trump went on a long diatribe after his conviction was announced. “This was a disgrace,” he said. “This was a rigged trial by a conflicted judge who was corrupt.”

Time will tell how the damage manifests. We can only hope that it will not be crippling, e.g., by getting DJT re-elected, claiming false martyrdom. 

We cannot go back in time and undo to vast damage that Merrick Garland did by delaying any prosecution of DJT for so long. Garland failed miserably. What he did could easily turn out to be too little, too late. This New York state verdict alone may not be sufficient to protect the rule of law.