The face of rising American radical right authoritarianism

A Slate article articulates it quite well:

A Supreme Court Justice Gave Us Alarming New Evidence 

That He’s Living in MAGA World

The Supreme Court heard arguments Thursday in Trump v. United States, a challenge to special counsel Jack Smith’s indictment of Donald Trump for election subversion related to Jan. 6. The former president argues that he has absolute “presidential immunity” for the “official acts” he undertook while attempting to overturn the election, rendering the prosecution against him largely unconstitutional. Despite the total lack of any known constitutional basis for this theory, the Supreme Court’s conservatives received it favorably, suggesting that they will further delay and undermine Trump’s eventual federal trial.

Dahlia Lithwick: Justice Alito trotted out this theme that was kind of bone-chilling: He said “we all want” a “stable democratic society,” and nothing could be worse for democracy than holding a president to account, because that will “lead us into a cycle that destabilizes the functioning of our country as a democracy.” As if democracy requires giving immunity to criminal presidents because otherwise they won’t leave office. This was when I went through the looking glass—it literally felt like “don’t make me hit you again” democracy.

Pam Karlan: That was the moment where I felt like saying, “That’s what just happened!” This is not something that might happen in the future. It’s what already happened! And if you let people get away with it, what you’ve said to Donald Trump is, “If you win the 2024 election, don’t bother leaving office in 2029—just stay there.” I mean, that’s really what the Supreme Court would be saying: There’s not going to be any crime if you try to stay there. It wasn’t just through the looking glass. I thought, Did you hear what just came out of your mouth?

Mark Joseph Stern: This was a great example of Alito being fully brain-poisoned by Fox News. This is been happening for years; he used to ask famously great questions, but these days it’s just culture war grievances and stuff that falls apart upon even a little bit of scrutiny. He’s losing his edge. And that was clear in this bizarro question saying that actually, a functioning constitutional democracy requires us to let presidents off the hook when they engage in a criminal conspiracy to steal elections.

But it was also clear during his next round of questions with Michael Dreeben, who represented Jack Smith. Alito had Dreeben walk through the layers that protect a president from a frivolous or vindictive prosecution. Then he dismissed each one out of hand. So Dreeben said: First, you need a prosecutor who’s willing to bring charges; then you need a grand jury to indict; then there’s a criminal proceeding in open court where a jury of his peers decides whether he’s been proved guilty. And Alito just laughs it off as though it’s a big joke. Because we all know Justice Department attorneys are hacks who’ll do whatever they want, right? And a grand jury will indict a ham sandwich—nobody believes a grand jury will do anything worthwhile. And then, oh, sure a jury of his peers, like that’s going to do anything.

This is the justice who is, by far, the most friendly to prosecutors and hostile to criminal defendants in case after case. Who could not for the life of him find a violation of the right to trial by jury or due process. But when the defendant is Trump, he suddenly thinks this entire system of criminal prosecution is such a bad joke that the Supreme Court has to step in and essentially quash this prosecution, because we can’t trust the system to work. The system that is incarcerating so many other people whose convictions Sam Alito just rubber-stamps.  

Karlan: There was shock to it, but notice what’s underneath all of that. Which is Alito saying we’re worried about vindictive prosecutions and we haven’t seen any of this up until now, that no president has prosecuted the president who came after. For all of what Alito was saying to be true, he has to believe that this prosecution itself is vindictive. Which means he has to have bought Trump’s narrative of the case. And when he does this with Dreeben, he’s attacking the deep state, which is career-line prosecutors. Remember, Dreeben’s entire career has been as a nonpartisan civil servant who’s gotten up there and argued cases on behalf of the Bush administration, on behalf of the Trump administration, on behalf of the Obama administration.  

I mean, what Alito did is essentially say: “I’m living in MAGA world.” Which views this case as a totally bogus prosecution ginned up by totally bogus people as part of a vindictive prosecution by Joe Biden. And Alito is also implicitly saying that if Donald Trump gets reelected, you just know he’s going to prosecute people vindictively too. He really has lost faith in the entire system. Or at least he’s prepared to lose faith in the system enough to decide this case in Trump’s favor.

Well ladies & germs, there you have it. Full-blown American style radical right authoritarianism in all of its glory coming at you from the highest court in the land, the USSC. Unless you are a MAGAite, the hypocrisy, irrationality and sheer malice in it cannot be ignored, justified or denied. It is all right out in the open. But, if you are a MAGAite it is automatically ignored, justified and denied by default.

It is starting to seem reasonable to think that Trump is going to avoid facing justice in all of the federal trials. The authoritarian radical right Republican USSC is actually thinking about protecting him. 

Q: Is this actually a clear example of radical right Republican authoritarianism coming from the USSC, or is it merely idle, inconsequential chit-chat, or something else?

Why the Biden Administration Won't Stop Israel

Protests and mass arrests all across the US have become the leading story in most media outlets. But often the coverage neglects to explain WHY the students are protesting. The following video explains, in part, why protests in the US have reached a boiling point in recent weeks. In a nutshell, the Biden Administration has failed to respond to public opinion or to budge an inch for 7 months. Meanwhile, the  media that delivers its message have failed to report the US' role in the ongoing genocide and forced-starvation in a fair and accurate way, and have cast doubt on the motives of protestors rather than focusing on the topics they raise. I think this video (clocking in at  17 min. ) provides a factual account of how we got where we are--i.e. why so many Americans blame the Biden Admin for the ongoing genocide. Of course, not everything can be covered in the 17 min window. Among other things, I would remind viewers of the US government's active role in the genocide by its  de-funding  of UNRWA which was, in effect, a death sentence to 10's of thousands of Gazans trapped with no food, medicine or fuel. There has been no evidence given by Israel for the charges it made. Meanwhile, an independent UN investigation  found no evidence for the allegations. The UN asked Israel to share any evidence it has. Again, none was given to substantiate Israel's allegations. While other countries have resumed funding, the US Congress passed a law freezing any funding for UNRWA for the next year with no evidence of wrong-doing on its part. While we talk about protests, which are also important, Gazans continue to die in the grip of an induced famine, and will continue dying even if by some miracle massive aid reaches them tomorrow. Here is an AP article detailing the latest on the UNRWA investigations. Other than that, I think the video, made by Al Jazeera,  accurately details a lot of important historic and contemporary facts that have shaped the current disaster, and in particular, the Biden Administration's decisive role in it. If you take issue with any of the claims put forward in the video, it would be useful to provide evidence of the falsity of those claims.

Can the US Constitution save us from Trump?

A law professor at Boston College, Aziz Rana, and author of “The Constitutional Bind: How Americans Came to Idolize a Document That Fails Them” wrote an opinion essay for the NYT (not paywalled):

On Thursday, the Supreme Court gathered to consider whether Donald Trump, as president, enjoyed immunity from prosecution for attempting to overturn the 2020 election. Even if the justices eventually rule against him, liberals should not celebrate the Constitution as our best bulwark against Mr. Trump. In fact, the document — for reasons that go beyond Mr. Trump, that long preceded him and could well extend past him — has made our democracy almost unworkable.

For years, whenever Mr. Trump threatened democratic principles, liberals turned to the Constitution for help, searching the text for tools that would either end his political career or at least contain his corruption. He was sued under the Constitution’s emoluments clauses. He was impeached twice. There was a congressional vote urging Vice President Mike Pence to invoke the 25th Amendment to proclaim Mr. Trump unfit for office. More recently, lawyers argued that the states could use the 14th Amendment to remove Mr. Trump from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6 attack.

Each of these efforts has been motivated by a worthy desire to hold Mr. Trump accountable for his actions. Each of them has failed. As we head into the heat of an election season, we need to confront a simple truth: The Constitution isn’t going to save us from Donald Trump. If anything, turning the page on the man — and on the politics he has fostered — will require fundamentally changing it.

It is not just that Mr. Trump would never have been president without the Electoral College. Think about why those previous efforts to use the Constitution to hold Mr. Trump accountable failed. Impeachment processes collapsed in the Senate because it lopsidedly grants power to rural, conservative states. The Supreme Court was able not only to keep Mr. Trump on the ballot in Colorado, but also to narrow the circumstances in which disqualification could ever be used, because Republicans have been able to appoint a majority of the justices on the court, despite losing the popular vote in seven of the past eight presidential elections.

For years, liberals were squeamish about acknowledging these facts, perhaps out of habit. While most countries view their documents as rules for governing — rules that may become outdated and can be reworked if necessary — our own politicians routinely tell a story of American exceptionalism rooted in our Constitution. It is a sacred document that, as Barack Obama once put it, “launched America’s improbable experiment in democracy,” grounded on shared principles of equality, self-government and personal liberty.  

The shock to the constitutional system that Mr. Trump represents didn’t start, and won’t end, with him. The best — and perhaps only — way to contain the politics around him is to reform government, so that it is far more representative of Americans. The goal is to keep authoritarians from ever again gaining power without winning a majority and stacking powerful institutions with judges and officials wildly out of step with the public. But this requires extensive changes to our legal and political systems, including to the Constitution itself.

It now falls to Americans to avoid learning the wrong lessons from this moment. Mr. Trump may lose at the ballot box or be convicted in one of the four criminal cases he faces, including the one that started this month in Manhattan. If he is held accountable, it will not be because the Constitution saved us, given all its pathologies.

Q: Does Rana make a convincing argument to you that the Constitution cannot save us from Trump? 

Reconsidering the moral and legal culpability of bad political acts by well-meaning but deceived people

Mostly unknowingly, tens of millions of average American voters are seriously considering whether to get rid of democracy and the rule of law and replace that with comforting false promises from authoritarian demagogues and kleptocrats. The false promises include protecting democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law. The core deceit is that those people sincerely believe they are acting in good faith to protect democracy, civil liberties and the rule of law, but in fact are doing the opposite.

By now, evidence from social science is overwhelming that when it comes to politics and religion, most humans are usually more irrational than rational about many or probably most issues. These comments by expert scientists summarize the situation reasonably well:

“Republicans understand moral psychology. Democrats don’t. Republicans have long understood that the elephant [the biased, moralistic unconscious mind] is in charge of political behavior, not the rider [the often-deceived conscious mind], and they know how elephants work. Their slogans, political commercials and speeches go straight for the gut . . . . Republicans don’t just aim to cause fear, as some Democrats charge. They trigger the full range of intuitions described by Moral Foundations Theory. .... Western philosophy has been worshiping reason and distrusting the passions for thousands of years. .... I’ll refer to this worshipful attitude throughout this book as the rationalist delusion. I call it a delusion because when a group of people make something sacred, the members of the cult lose the ability to think clearly about it. Morality binds and blinds. The true believers produce pious fantasies that don’t match reality .... We do moral reasoning not to reconstruct why we ourselves came to a judgment; we reason to find the best possible reasons why somebody else ought to join us in our judgment. .... The rider is skilled at fabricating post hoc explanations for whatever the elephant has just done, and it is good at finding reasons to justify whatever the elephant wants to do next. .... We make our first judgments rapidly, and we are dreadful at seeking out evidence that might disconfirm those initial judgments.”

“.... the typical citizen drops down to a lower level of mental performance as soon as he enters the political field. He argues and analyzes in a way which he would readily recognize as infantile within the sphere of his real interests. .... cherished ideas and judgments we bring to politics are stereotypes and simplifications with little room for adjustment as the facts change. .... the real environment is altogether too big, too complex, and too fleeting for direct acquaintance. We are not equipped to deal with so much subtlety, so much variety, so many permutations and combinations. Although we have to act in that environment, we have to reconstruct it on a simpler model before we can manage it.”

Or, are most people cognitively incapable 

of dealing with inconvenient truth?

If one accepts the argument that most people who support Trump and his Republican Party are decent and well-meaning but fundamentally deceived, then one question that pops up is what are those people? There is a lot of empirical evidence that supports my assertion of profound deceit and false beliefs by most average Trump voters. My estimate based on poll data, at least about 70% hold one or more significant false beliefs, e.g., stolen election, the Great Replacement Theory, Democrats are responsible for the immigration mess, despite Trump and congressional republicans successfully blocking efforts to fix it, or one of a slew of debunked crackpot conspiracy theories that Trump says are true.

Some Trump see themselves as decent middle class folk who just don't like the direction of the country. Does that absolve them of culpability if they hold significant false beliefs about it and act accordingly? Poll data indicates that most of those people are seriously deceived about something or another. Is it possible to be decent and support an authoritarian monster who clearly intends to take the country where they claim to not want it to go? 

Or are they some combination of fascists, bigots, deceived fools, intolerant Christian nationalists, conspiracy theory crackpots, etc.? From a cognitive biology and social behavior point of view, one can see that their own minds can convince those supporters that they are patriots defending democracy, truth and the rule of law, all of which is solidly false. 

Exactly what are well-meaning people who literally support corruption and immorality or evil (in view of solid evidence) but act in sincere, good faith belief that they are supporting good against corruption and evil (contrary to solid evidence)? Are adults not responsible for their actions? Or, is democracy, reliance on truth and the rule of law morally no better than authoritarianism (dictatorship, theocracy, plutocracy), lies and the rule of the kleptocratic dictator, plutocrat and/or Christian Taliban elite? 

Most Trump supporters, probably ~95%, consider themselves to hold the moral high ground. Most think that most or nearly all liberals and Democrats are immoral at best, evil at worst. Moral superiority is part of the thinking behind support for Trump and his morally rotted party, despite Trump's proven track record of immorality and evil. Some poll data indicates that Republicans believe Trump represents their moral values either "some" (41%) or "a great deal" (38%). One can only wonder what those moral values actually are. Respect for inconvenient truth? Nope. Respect for democracy or the environment? Nope. Respect for political opposition. Hell no.

Then what are their political moral values exactly? Respect for authoritarianism parading as democracy? Yup. Virtue signaling to the tribe or cult, e.g., bigotry directed at the LGBQT community? Yup. What else? 

Q: How do you personally define or characterize most Trump supporters, or is than an unfair and/or counterproductive question? 

An arrested President

 Just imagine this scenario:

A President breaks the law. To make it worse, it's a black officer that informs him he has broken the law. The President promises not to break the law again.

Next day he does it again. The same black officer arrests the President. Takes him to a police station. Officials there are unsure whether to formally charge the President, OR..................... wait for him to be impeached first. 

This must be an analogy, or a what if story, speculative at best, right?

Guess again:

151 years before Trump was indicted, Ulysses S. Grant was arrested for speeding on a horse-drawn carriage

https://www.businessinsider.com/can-a-president-be-indicted-ulysses-s-grant-was-once-arrested-for-speeding-2018-12

In 1872, President Ulysses S. Grant was arrested for speeding on his horse-drawn carriage in Washington, DC, which was highlighted by the Washington Post back in 2018 as Trump's legal woes were growing. This was not an impeachable offense, but Grant still faced consequences. 

The police officer who arrested him was a black man who fought in the Civil War named William H. West.

On the first occasion, the president was somewhat sassy with the officer as he stopped his carriage. The city was having problems with speeding at the time, and a mother and child had recently been injured as a result. 

Grant apologized and told the officer it would not happen again. 

But on the very next day Grant was speeding so fast through Georgetown in an area West was patrolling it took the officer an entire block to slow the president down. 

The president and other speeders were taken to the local police station. Officers at the station were reportedly unsure if they could charge a sitting president if he'd not been impeached.

In the end, Grant paid a $20 bond but didn't show up to court.

Rethinking the New York election fraud case, again

I do not understand the New York state lawsuit against Trump for election fraud in connection with the hush money payment to Stormy Daniels, or whatever the crime(s) is called. This is the clearest explanation I have seen so far. 

Writing for Lawfare, Quinta Jurecic laid out the legal reasoning behind prosecutor Alvin Bragg’s lawsuit based on opening arguments and other information made publicly available so far. This summarizes most of her analysis:

Charting the Legal Theory Behind People v. Trump

The mechanics of the case as District Attorney Alvin Bragg is prosecuting it

Bragg had charged Trump under New York Penal Law § 175.10, falsifying business records in the first degree. The falsification of business records alone is a misdemeanor under § 175.05—but Bragg had boosted the charge to a felony by alleging that Trump fudged the records with the “intent to commit another crime and aid and conceal the commission thereof.” But what other crime? The indictment didn’t say.

Perhaps the charges against Trump are difficult to follow in part because the underlying facts are so byzantine. The 34 counts against Trump—all under § 175.10—each correspond to a business record allegedly falsified in service of covering up Trump’s link to the hush money payment provided to Stormy Daniels, an adult film actor and director, in October 2016. That month—at Trump’s instruction, Bragg argues—Trump’s fixer Michael Cohen paid Daniels $130,000 to remain silent about a past sexual encounter with Trump. The Trump Organization then paid Cohen back in increments from February through December 2017, with Cohen submitting invoices fraudulently labeled as charges for legal services under a retainer. The “business records” at issue in the indictment comprise Cohen’s invoices, the checks cut to repay him, and the internal records kept by the Trump Organization of these transactions—all of which were mislabeled, Bragg argues, to conceal the nature of the repayments.

So those are the business records. What about the “object crime”—that is, the crime that Trump allegedly intended to commit or conceal in such a way as to transform the underlying misdemeanor offense into a felony?

If you’re looking for the clearest statement of Bragg’s legal theory, you can find it in a November 2023 court filing opposing Trump’s motion to dismiss the case, along with Merchan’s ruling on that motion. Notably, in that ruling, Merchan clarified that § 175.10 “does not require that the ‘other crime’ actually be committed”—“all that is required is that defendant … acted with a conscious aim and objective to commit another crime.”

 

Tax Fraud (looks like the weakest charge to me)

The potential tax fraud arises from the particular method by which the Trump Organization reimbursed Cohen for his payments to Daniels. Bragg alleges that “defendant reimbursed Cohen twice the amount he was owed for the payoff so Cohen could characterize the payments as income on his tax returns and still be left whole after paying approximately 50% in income taxes.” Here, Bragg points to federal, state, and local prohibitions on providing knowingly incorrect tax information.

The twist here is that because Cohen reported his income as greater than it actually was, he paid more in taxes, rather than less—which is probably not what most people have in mind when they think of tax fraud. On this point, Bragg argues that “[u]nder New York law, criminal tax fraud in the fifth degree does not require financial injury to the state” and that “[f]ederal tax law also imposes criminal liability in instances that do not involve underpayment of taxes.” Merchan seems to have been convinced, rejecting Trump’s argument “that the alleged New York State tax violation is of no consequence because the State of New York did not suffer any financial harm.” He does not explain further, simply writing, “This argument does not require further analysis.”

Federal Election Law (intermediate strength charge?)

More central to Bragg’s legal theory are violations of federal election law under FECA (Federal Election Campaign Act). 

Bragg is arguing that Trump falsified the Trump Organization’s business records with the intent to criminally violate FECA. Ruling on Trump’s motion in limine, Merchan held that Bragg may not point to Cohen’s guilty plea or the Justice Department or FEC agreements with AMI as themselves evidence of Trump’s guilt, but that the district attorney may offer “testimony about the underlying facts … provided the proper foundation is laid.”

Trump has leveled multiple legal challenges against Bragg’s use of FECA as an object offense, arguing in his motion to dismiss that a violation of federal law can’t serve as the “other crime” under § 175.10. Merchan, however, held it could. Trump also argued that FECA preempts state law and thus rules out prosecution under § 175.10 with FECA as the object offense. Merchan rejected this argument as well, relying on a ruling last July to that effect by Judge Alvin Hellerstein of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York in the context of rejecting Trump’s attempt to remove this case to federal court.

New York Election Law (the strongest charge?)

The final potential object offense, and the one that seems to bear the most weight in Bragg’s presentation of the case so far: New York Election Law § 17-152, a misdemeanor offense that prohibits “conspir[ing] to promote or prevent the election of any person to a public office by unlawful means.” Trump has sought to challenge Bragg’s use of this statute as well, arguing that it applies only to state and local elections, rather than presidential elections—which Merchan rejected. The former president likewise argued in federal court that FECA preempts § 17-152 in federal elections, but Judge Hellerstein held this to be “without merit.”

During opening statements on April 22, prosecutor Matthew Colangelo emphasized the role of § 17-152 in the district attorney’s case, declaring, “This was a planned, coordinated long-running conspiracy to influence the 2016 election, to help Donald Trump get elected.” Senior Trial Counsel Joshua Steinglass further underlined the importance of the statute the following day, describing § 17-152 as “the primary crime that we have alleged” as an object offense. “The entire case is predicated on the idea that there was a conspiracy to influence the election in 2016,” Steinglass said.

But § 17-152 requires that a conspiracy be carried out by “unlawful means”—so what “unlawful means” is Bragg alleging? Here, the legal theory loops back around to point to the other three potential object offenses: FECA violations, tax fraud, and AMI’s and Cohen’s misdemeanor falsifications of business records under § 175.05. (Note that while Merchan ruled out these third-party § 175.05 violations as object offenses for Trump’s violation of § 175.10, they’re still available to Bragg as a means by which to get to § 17-152.) Again, Bragg sets this out in his opposition to Trump’s motion to dismiss. Colangelo also gestured at this during his opening statement, describing the conspiracy as carried out “through illegal expenditures … using doctored corporate records and bank forms to conceal those payments along the way.”

Understanding this emphasizes the importance of the underlying FECA violations to Bragg’s case. The wrongdoing under federal campaign finance law supports two out of three remaining object offenses. Seen in a certain light, that makes it all the stranger that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York itself never brought federal charges against Trump under FECA—a decision for which there has never been a public explanation.
 

Summing It All Up

Let’s return to our chart for a moment. Once we incorporate the “unlawful means” needed to reach the § 17-152 object offense, it looks like this:

Clear as mud?

In all seriousness, what this deep dive has hopefully shown is that Bragg’s legal theory is genuinely tangled—though the district attorney’s office is doing its best to clarify matters. The next few weeks will show whether he’s able to walk the jury through it.

Well, that clears things up quite a lot? Not sure. But at least I’m now confident that I do not understand how to weigh various bits of evidence as the jury will see it in view of the underlying legal arguments that Bragg is asserting. It all boils down to how well Bragg can explain himself to the jury and whether Trump can sow enough confusion with at least one juror to avoid legal liability. 

Yup, clear as mud.

What about the rule of law?

This again raises the matter of laws being inadequate to deal with sophisticated white collar criminals like Trump. I keep seeing what looks to me to be major holes in both federal and state laws that allow smart criminals like Trump to avoid legal liability for their activities. It is starting to look to me like more actions that were intended to be illegal fall under various exceptions, ambiguities and loopholes than are found to incur legal liability or guilt. It’s like the exceptions and loopholes have swallowed up most of the actions that were supposed to trigger convictions for civil liability or criminal guilt.

No wonder this is costing DJT millions to defend against. A non-rich person could never mount the defenses that rich people like Trump can.