They’re Bluffing

By Noah Rothman

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

Democrats have settled on a new line in their effort to defuse the underlying claims against Joe Biden, which are increasingly substantiated by the details emerging from congressional Republicans’ investigations into Hunter Biden’s conduct.

The president’s son, you see, is just a con man.

That is reportedly what Hunter Biden’s former business partner, Devon Archer, told the House Oversight Committee. The younger Biden was merely dangling before his marks the “illusion” that, through him, they could have influence over Joe Biden and, therefore, shape American policy in ways financially advantageous to them. Knowingly or otherwise, President Biden tacitly served as the inside man to his son’s roper by joining phone in conversations and appearing at social events with Hunter’s prospective clients.

Democrats have not disputed this characterization. Rather, they’ve latched onto it as proof that the president remained at a legally safe remove from his son’s shady dealings. In the attempt to render this facially ridiculous spin believable, Democrats have ornamented their arguments with a lot of theatrical bluster.

“It appears that the House Republicans’ own much-hyped witness today testified that he never heard of President Biden discussing business with his son or his son’s associates,” said White House spokesman for investigations, Ian Sams, in a statement. Not only did Archer fail to indict Biden for engaging in any specific misdeed, he couldn’t even accuse the president of “doing anything wrong.”

The subjectivity of “doing anything wrong” aside, the New York Times already set the goalposts at which Republicans are aiming back in January. “Republicans have yet to demonstrate that the senior Mr. Biden was involved in his son’s business deals or took any action to benefit him or his foreign partners,” the outlet averred. Well, Republicans have yet to demonstrate that the president benefited financially from his assistance to Hunter, but they have proven definitively that Joe Biden was, in fact, “involved in his son’s business deals.” Indeed, as Jim Geraghty observed, the distinctions between the illusion of access and actual access are debatable. But if participating in a scheme to defraud Hunter Biden’s clients isn’t “wrong,” what is?

Democratic congressman Daniel Goldman has similarly tried to bolster these hollow defenses of Biden’s conduct with displays of garment-rending indignation. “This is the taxpayer-funded defense and political arm of Donald Trump,” he told CNN host Anderson Cooper of the House GOP’s investigations into Hunter Biden.

Goldman maintains that Joe Biden was himself a victim of his son’s incredibly charismatic influence. When his son dragged him to meetings with foreign clients, it “sounds like most of the time, now-president Biden didn’t even know who he was at dinner [with],” Goldman said yesterday. In a subsequent appearance on MSNBC’s Morning Joe, the ubiquitous frontman for Biden’s exculpation suggested even that Hunter Biden took advantage of his father’s grief following his son Beau Biden’s death. “He died in the spring of 2015, which was right in the middle when Devon Archer had his business dealings with Hunter Biden,” Goldman theorized.

Much as Hunter Biden’s now-defunct plea agreement maintained that he was a preternaturally competent business negotiator and too drug-addled to remember to pay his taxes, Democrats are making contradictory arguments about the president. Joe Biden could not have known about his son’s misconduct because he was beset by grief. At most, Goldman allowed, the president is “guilty of turning a blind eye to some of his son’s behavior.” Joe Biden wanted nothing more than to be as close as possible to his son. And yet, the elder Biden could not have possibly known or be expected to have known that his son was trading on his father’s connections and leveraging the power of the United States to enrich himself. “It has nothing to do with me and everything to do with my last name,” Hunter Biden admitted to Archer in an email when asked why a connected Chinese national had hitched himself to the Biden family’s wagon.

Democrats are bluffing. Their defenses of the president’s behavior are contradictory, fluid, and always very loud because they are improvising. To judge from their public statements, Democrats appear to think that we are as easily manipulated as Hunter Biden’s clients.

This Trump Indictment Shouldn’t Stand

National Review Online

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

The indictment of former president Donald Trump by Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith on four felony charges arising out of his efforts to undo President Biden’s victory in the 2020 election is momentous — not just in its potential impact on our politics, but in what it could mean for the rule of law.

We have on many occasions condemned Trump’s appalling actions in the aftermath of the 2020 election. They were impeachable. He came close to being convicted in a Senate impeachment trial; with 57 senators finding him guilty, he was saved only by the Constitution’s two-thirds supermajority mandate for conviction and disqualification.

Now, through a special counsel it appointed for this precise purpose, the Biden Justice Department is attempting to use the criminal process as a do-over for a failed impeachment. In effect, Jack Smith is endeavoring to criminalize protected political speech and flimsy legal theories — when the Supreme Court has repeatedly admonished prosecutors to refrain from creative theories to stretch penal laws to reach misconduct that Congress has not made illegal.

In our constitutional system, Congress is trusted with the duty to check egregious executive misconduct. Its failure to convict Trump understandably galls many of his opponents — left, right, and center. This feeling is accentuated by their sense both that Trump is unfit for the presidency and that there is a very real possibility that he could be elected president again.

Hence the pressure on the Justice Department to hold Trump accountable in a way the political system did not. But criminal prosecution is an inapt substitute for the congressionally driven political process that the Constitution set up to address gross abuses of power.

Public office is a privilege, not a right. That is why a president may be ousted, without all the protections of criminal due process, for violating the public trust. In contrast, criminal prosecution is designed to address private wrongs, not derelictions of public duty. It endows the accused with enhanced protections because at stake are rights — liberty, property — not the privilege of political power.

Whether misconduct rises to the level of an impeachable offense is indefinite, left to the people’s representatives to assess based on what the facts and circumstances say about a public official’s fitness for duty. Criminal offenses are the antithesis of that. They must be defined by statute with sufficient clarity so that the average person knows what is forbidden, and a defendant is presumed innocent. A guilty verdict must be supported by proof beyond a reasonable doubt — proof not only that the person performed the statutorily prohibited acts, but also did so knowing that his conduct was illegal.

Here, it is not even clear that Smith has alleged anything that the law forbids. The indictment relates in detail Trump’s deceptions, but that doesn’t mean they constitute criminal fraud. As the Supreme Court reaffirmed just a few weeks ago, fraud in federal criminal law is a scheme to swindle victims out of money or tangible property. Mendacious rhetoric in seeking to retain political office is damnable — and, again, impeachable — but it’s not criminal fraud, although that is what Smith has charged. Indeed, assuming a prosecutor could prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Trump hadn’t actually convinced himself that the election was stolen from him (good luck with that), hyperbole and even worse are protected political speech.

As for obstruction, Americans, presidents included, have a right to attempt to influence Congress, even based on dubious or imagined evidence. To establish obstruction, Smith must prove that Trump’s efforts at persuasion were corrupt — again, in the sense that he knew his badgering and lobbying had no factual or legal merit. The concept of corruption is meant to reach clearly criminal conduct, such as evidence manipulation or witness tampering. It has never been understood to reach wrong-headed legal theories. To apply it that way, as Smith proposes, would chill not only political speech, but the constitutional right of a defendant to mount a legal defense.

Finally, Smith is charging Trump with a civil-rights violation, on the theory that he sought to counteract the votes of Americans in contested states and based on a post–Civil War statute designed to punish violent intimidation and forcible attacks against blacks attempting to exercise their right to vote. What Trump did, though reprehensible, bears no relation to what the statute covers.

In his press conference announcing the charges, Smith — for good reason — did not dwell on his questionable charges. He instead emphasized the Capitol riot. Anyone witnessing his remarks would have believed that Trump had incited a forcible attack on the Capitol. Of course, Smith has not charged him with any such thing because he doesn’t have the evidence to tie him criminally to the riot. The prosecutor was making a political statement, clearly aimed at swaying the jury pool in blue Washington, D.C., where the Justice Department brags daily about having charged more than a thousand rioters.

There is a reason Smith does not have a solid statutory crime to rely on. To criminalize the conduct for which he seeks to convict Trump, Congress would have to write sweeping laws that could easily be wielded by one party against another to punish objectionable political conduct. That would undermine both electoral politics and the rule of law.

This indictment shouldn’t stand.

The Doom Poll

By Nick Catoggio

Monday, July 31, 2023

 

Do you guys ever think about dying?

 

As in Barbie, so too in life: Read through today’s New York Times survey of the Republican primary and you might find yourself suddenly thinking about dying.

 

Or feeling like you’re dying, even.

 

The pros will remind us that it’s just one poll but in this case the pollster enjoys an A+ rating from FiveThirtyEight. And the topline number happens to reflect the national polling average almost exactly. The Times has the race 54-17 for Trump over DeSantis; the RealClearPolitics average has it 54-18.3. The frontrunner has tripled the vote share of the only opponent who seemed to have a chance of defeating him. No candidate in the history of modern presidential polling has lost a lead of as much as 20 points at this stage of a campaign, let alone 37.

 

What makes this a “doom poll” and effectively a premortem of the DeSantis campaign isn’t the topline, though, as grim as that is. It’s the fact that, no matter how you slice and dice the Republican electorate demographically here, Trump is ahead—often handily. “He led by wide margins among men and women, younger and older voters, moderates and conservatives, those who went to college and those who didn’t, and in cities, suburbs and rural areas,” the Times says of its data. There are effectively zero “DeSantis constituencies” left within the party, only constituencies that prefer Trump to the governor a bit less emphatically than others.

 

The impression I’m left with after digesting it is that there was nothing DeSantis could have done realistically to defeat Trump, especially once the drumbeat of indictments began. The primary isn’t over. It never began.

 

***

 

This disaster has many fathers.

 

Almost obligatorily, there’s the boy-who-cried-wolf impact on Republican voters from institutions being caught with their pants down during the Trump era. It’s a familiar excuse for the right’s descent into madness, but there’s something to it. Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted; Trump didn’t collude with Russia to get elected; the dismissed and derided pre-election story of Hunter Biden’s laptop was true; the Alvin Bragg indictment in Manhattan is politicized nonsense. Each of these episodes reinforced populist beliefs that Trump and his supporters are victims of a long-running scam by the liberal establishment to maintain their grip on power by hook or by crook. The backlash has nurtured a defensive instinct on his behalf so intense that it can no longer be reasoned with.

 

And insofar as it might be reasoned with, right-wing institutional actors have been too cowardly or selfish to try. Republican politicians who refused to say that Trump lost the 2020 election for fear of how their voters might react have now neutered the argument that he’s unelectable in 2024. Pro-DeSantis media outlets that spent six years accusing the “deep state” of being out to get Trump persuaded primary voters not to care about him leaving top-secret material lying around at his home. A movement that spends every waking hour brainwashing its members to dismiss any criticism of its leader as illegitimate and improperly motivated will struggle to criticize him persuasively when the time comes for new leadership. Go figure.

 

Republican voters have been poorly served by institutions during the Trump years, which helps explain why the Times poll says what it says. But for those who still believe in personal responsibility, explanations aren’t excuses. For instance, there’s no excuse for this:

Even Trump doesn’t claim that there were no classified documents at Mar-a-Lago. But the right’s justifiable skepticism of certain institutional actors combined with the hyper-contrarian “question everything” sensibility of populist media has inculcated in many a willingness to assume that any—any—politically inconvenient fact must be a lie. Reality itself is now suspect insofar as it conflicts with political ends. The word “Orwellian” is overused, but it fits here.

 

Which brings us back to the doom poll. Insofar as there’s good news in it, it’s that not all Republican voters have fallen into Orwell’s trap. The bad news is that enough have done so as to make it all but impossible for anyone else to win this primary.

 

There are four takeaways from the data.

 

Trump’s diehard base really does function more like a cult than a political bloc.

 

Nate Cohn of the Times sifted through the numbers and identified 37 percent of the party as constituting the “MAGA base,” as he describes it. How loyal is the MAGA base?

 

So loyal that not a single person in a group of 319 would concede that their hero had committed serious federal crimes. “The MAGA base doesn’t support Mr. Trump in spite of his flaws,” Cohn wrote. “It supports him because it doesn’t seem to believe he has flaws.”

 

How much of that loyalty is owed to ideology and how much to persona is hard to say. When the Times asked Republicans which candidate is more “fun,” Trump led DeSantis 54-16—almost precisely reflecting his overall lead in the primary. (In fairness, Trump clearly is the more fun of the two.) If you’re of the opinion that populist Republicans view politics as more like pro wrestling than a vehicle for policymaking and government, that result won’t dissuade you.

 

Yet it’s also true that the more ideological a right-winger is, the more likely he is to prefer Trump to DeSantis. The former president leads DeSantis 65-15 among “very conservative” Republicans versus 35-17 among self-described “moderate” and “liberal” ones. Which is absurd on its face: DeSantis was vastly more conservative than Trump in his pre-2015 incarnation as a congressman and has been a “high energy” populist conservative legislator as governor, much more so than Trump was as president.

 

However you define “conservative,” pre-Trump or post-Trump, DeSantis should hold the advantage. Unless, that is, you define “conservative” as synonymous with Trump himself, in which case all imitators will pale by comparison to the genuine article. Judging by the doom poll, that appears to be what most Republicans imagine “conservatism” to be nowadays. Actual conservatives should take note in considering whether this party still represents their interests.

 

And DeSantis fans should consider the possibility that the “MAGA base” really might not turn out for their guy in the general election if he wins the nomination. I’ve been skeptical of that in the past, but a bloc conditioned to view all of its leader’s failures as illegitimate might well hold a grudge against an opponent who causes such a failure in the primary.

 

DeSantis’ best pitches to Republican voters have fallen flat.

 

The governor began his campaign touting three supposed advantages over Trump. He was more electable against Joe Biden, as he proved with his landslide victory in Florida last fall. He was more aggressive in using executive authority to advance the populist agenda, walking the walk whereas you-know-who had mostly just talked the talk. And he would wage culture war against “wokeness” with special fervor relative to Trump, who cares far less about that issue than he does conspiracy theories about the 2020 election and the criminal charges against him.

 

The doom poll tested each of those subjects. DeSantis trails in each, badly in some cases.

 

Electability? Fifty-eight percent of Republicans say “able to beat Biden” describes Trump more accurately than DeSantis. Just 28 percent say the opposite. It’s hard to believe that a man who’s likely to be under four separate criminal indictments by the time of the first Republican debate might be a more formidable nominee for the GOP, but the RCP averages suggest that it’s true. Quite a testament to DeSantis’ own political liabilities.

 

An aggressive, proactive executive? Trump leads on that too. Asked whether the phrase “get things done” better describes the frontrunner or the governor, 67 percent say Trump versus 22 percent who say DeSantis. It’s hard for a never-been-president to beat a former president on this metric, it seems.

 

The war on “woke”? The Times didn’t test Trump and DeSantis head-to-head on that but it did ask Republicans whom they’d prefer in a contest between a candidate who promises to fight corporations that promote “woke” ideology and another who wants the government to stay out of deciding what corporations should support. Result: The hands-off candidate leads 52-38. Among voters who prefer DeSantis in the primary, it’s 55-38. Punishing “woke” businesses failed to draw majority support even among the most ardent populist voters, the so-called MAGA base.

 

Because the governor’s feud with Disney has linked him so closely in the right-wing imagination to battling those “woke” businesses, it’s possible that some Republicans surveyed by the Times recognized this question as a proxy for their feelings about DeSantis and answered accordingly. In that case, Trump supporters who back DeSantis’ crusade against Disney on the merits might have responded disapprovingly here to signal disapproval of the governor.

 

But either way, an issue that was supposed to give the challenger a leg up on the frontrunner has failed to do so. And it’s not the only one that has.

 

Young Republicans are Trumpier than their elders in important ways.

 

If you thought Friday’s newsletter about the next generation of Republicans was grim, buckle up.

 

It might not surprise you that, according to the doom poll, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. is now more popular among Republicans than Mike Pence is. The former VP enjoys a 44-45 favorability rating; for RFK it’s 53-23. That’s majority support on the American right for the nuttiest Democrat in the race and plurality disdain for a staunchly conservative Republican congressman turned governor turned vice president.

 

What might surprise you is that Kennedy’s strongest support comes from Republicans aged 18-29. It’s not baby boomers watching Fox News glassy-eyed at all hours who have taken the shiniest shine to frequent Fox guest RFK. It’s the kids.

 

Among that group his favorability stands at 67-1. (No typo.) In every other age group, he’s no higher than 56 percent favorable and no lower than 18 percent unfavorable. 

 

There’s a similar age gap on the question of sending military and economic support to Ukraine. A majority of Republican senior citizens, veterans of the Cold War, support sending that aid; middle-aged Republicans are less enthusiastic but even 40 percent of them are in favor. Only in the 18-29 group does support drop below 30 percent, clocking in at 28-64.

 

Go figure, then, that Trump’s lead over DeSantis among young Republicans is even more lopsided than it is among the primary electorate overall, a 59-15 advantage.

 

Twentysomething right-wingers aren’t more populist than older ones across the board. They’re more willing to legalize gay marriage than their Republican grandparents are and, remarkably, more willing to support a comprehensive immigration deal that would grant illegal immigrants a path to citizenship. They’re also more open to reforming entitlements in the name of reducing the deficit than retirement-age Republicans are, not very surprisingly.

 

Their preferences may be less a product of considered populist ideology than having been drawn to Trump’s anti-establishment persona as they came of age politically and adopting his passions—Kennedy-style paranoia and anti-anti-Putinism—as their own. And how else could it be, realistically? Any young voter who dislikes Trump, and there are many, decamped for the Democratic Party long ago. All that’s left of twentysomethings on the right at this point are MAGA true believers, the sort of people whose BS detector is sufficiently haywire that they don’t bat an eye at stuff like this:

If you’re worried about what the party will look like in 10 years, you should be.

 

A more centrist DeSantis campaign probably wouldn’t have fared much better.

 

As more bad news piles up for the governor, the second-guessing grows more intense. Why did he run to Trump’s right? Why didn’t he pitch himself to more mainstream Republican voters?

 

I’ve already answered that at length but the doom poll provides extra reason to doubt that a more mainstream DeSantis would have won this race. Here’s how Cohn divides the primary electorate from the Times data he’s seeing:

You can see the governor’s strategic dilemma at a glance. If Trump begins with an absolute floor of 37 percent, there’s hardly any margin for error for DeSantis in consolidating the remaining 63 percent. To do so he’d need to craft a message that appeals simultaneously to Republicans who are populist enough to consider supporting Trump again and to Never Trumpers who have ruled out supporting him. Is there any such message? Cohn elaborates on how tricky it would be to try to reconcile these two factions:

 

These two groups of voters don’t just differ on Mr. Trump; they disagree on the issues as well. Mr. Trump’s skeptics support additional military and economic aid to Ukraine, and comprehensive immigration reform, while they oppose a six-week abortion ban. The persuadable voters, on the other hand, take the opposite view on all of those issues.

 

Remember in March how DeSantis tried to have it both ways on Ukraine? There’s a reason: To satisfy Never Trumpers and Quite Possibly Trumpers, he needed to take two different positions, essentially. So he did. It didn’t work great.

 

I think the governor and his team calculated correctly that they couldn’t win by conceding the MAGA base to Trump and trying to thread a needle that somehow consolidated the remaining 63 percent. It’s impossible. There are too many candidates competing for that second group and too many factions with conflicting visions for the party to coalesce behind a single message. So DeSantis tried something bold—he attempted to win over part of the MAGA base itself with a “more Trump than Trump” message. He thought that if Trump fans began defecting from the cult leader to him, overjoyed Never Trumpers and Trump-skeptic persuadables would toss aside their misgivings about the governor’s hyper-populist pandering and rally behind him to slay the dragon.

 

It was a bold strategy, high risk and high reward. And he put in the work: The last two years of DeSantis’ tenure as governor were dedicated singlemindedly to trying to convince the MAGA base that he’s more Trump than Trump. From COVID to critical race theory, from trans rights to woke corporations, there’s no populist hobby horse DeSantis hasn’t saddled up and eagerly ridden to show the right that he meant business. No Republican since 2015 has made as compelling a case legislatively that he, not the leader of the party, is the most formidable populist in the party.

 

If he had suddenly backburnered all of that in order to run a more mainstream campaign, blathering about the economy or what have you, he’d still be far behind Trump but with a different coalition. There’d be more Never Trumpers behind him—and fewer populists. The second-guessing would be as loud as it is now, but instead of wondering why he wasn’t running further to the center, armchair quarterbacks would be wondering why he wasn’t running further to the right. What was the point of spending so much time on CRT, etc., in Florida if he was only going to end up positioning himself as a slightly more populist Nikki Haley? Trump voters hate him now!

 

So he ran to the right. He made a play for the MAGA base. It hasn’t worked: DeSantis trails Trump 62-31 in the doom pool head-to-head, the sort of binary choice where we would expect every Trump-skeptic in the party to hold their nose and support the governor. If that’s the best DeSantis can do while pandering his heart out to woo stubborn populists, what reason is there to think he might have done better by pandering to them less?

 

Are there some moderate Republicans who prefer Trump to a more-Trump-than-Trump Ron DeSantis, and who might have switched to the governor had he run a more centrist campaign? Sure, maybe. But how persuadable are those “moderates,” really, if they’re sticking with Trump in the present circumstances? Chris Christie put it starkly:

Consider the possibility that this party, including its so-called moderates, is entirely too far gone for any strategy to have successfully pried away a majority of Republicans from Trump. In fact, in the head-to-head question with DeSantis, the doom poll finds that 22 percent who believe Trump committed serious federal crimes still prefer him to the governor. Even college-educated Republicans, whom DeSantis was winning not long ago, now favor Trump by 17 points despite the fact that we’re at two indictments and counting.

 

It’s not primarily the MAGA base that has delivered us to this point in the right’s civic deterioration. It’s those not-very-persuadable “persuadables” who keep finding ways not to let themselves be persuaded who are to blame.

 

One voter, asked by the Times why he was sticking with Trump over the governor of Florida, answered memorably: “He might say mean things and make all the men cry because all the men are wearing your wife’s underpants and you can’t be a man anymore. You got to be a little sissy and cry about everything. But at the end of the day, you want results. Donald Trump’s my guy. He’s proved it on a national level.” There’s nothing Ron DeSantis can do about “logic” like that. He spent the last year in Florida exploring creative ways legislatively to target men who enjoy wearing women’s underpants and he got “results,” believing that doing so would flip precisely this type of voter into his column and away from Trump.

 

He miscalculated. Only one candidate can own the libs to the satisfaction of most of the Republican Party, it seems. The governor is doomed. Do you ever think about dying?

The Incoherence of the Rally around Criminal Defendant Trump

By Dan McLaughlin

Monday, July 31, 2023

 

It often feels pointless even to argue with defenses of Donald Trump at this point, given the generally poor quality of the pro-Trump commentariat, most of which boils down to “Trump has a following so we should cater to it.” The rest is typically just reasoning backwards, rather than attempting to follow some line of thinking that the commentator actually believed before 2015. That said, Trump continues to have a following, so it is occasionally worth reviewing the arguments made in favor of following Trump. These aren’t straw men; they’re the actual arguments. Yossi Gestetner is a vocal Trump supporter on Twitter who has penned some of them in a Substack newsletter. Let us consider Gestetner’s case for why, in his view, the various criminal indictments of Trump are neither (1) a negative reflection on Trump, (2) a reason to be concerned about Trump’s capacity to win an election, nor (3) a sign that Joe Biden and the Democrats would very much prefer to run against Trump.

 

The most popular line these days by anti-Trump conservatives and Republicans is that the DOJ is indicting former President Donald Trump to help him win the 2024 GOP nomination to make it easier for Democrats to beat Republicans in the fall. Those conservatives also claim that Trump brought his legal troubles on himself. . . . If Trump is indicted for politics, how can one also claim he brought it upon himself? It’s either or. It makes no sense to be both.

 

It is not remotely inconsistent to believe both that Trump’s political enemies have political reasons to pursue him, and that Trump has actually made their job a lot easier by committing crimes and by doing unethical and/or stupid things. No less an authority on presidential self-destruction than Richard Nixon famously said as much in 1977 about his own downfall: “I brought myself down. I gave ’em a sword. And they stuck it in, and they twisted it with relish. And I guess if I’d been in their position, I’d a done the same thing.” In other words, Nixon had enemies and he made it easier for them.

 

Think of the old detective question: Does a suspect have motive, opportunity, and means? Democrats have a motive to destroy Trump in the 2024 general election. They have the means, via the Justice Department and the Manhattan County and Fulton County (Georgia) district attorneys’ offices and the New York attorney general and E. Jean Carroll’s lawsuit, to do so. But they have had these things before, with regard to Trump and prior Republican leaders. They still have it with other Republican contenders they hate, such as Ron DeSantis. Why have the rest not been indicted, or (in the Carroll case) found liable for sexual battery? Why was Trump himself not indicted in 2016? Lack of opportunity.

 

You can make the case, quite properly (as I and others have) that the Manhattan DA’s indictment is legally bogus in half a dozen ways, that the Mar-a-Lago boxes indictment applies a different standard of justice than what was used to justify not indicting Hillary Clinton, and that the Fulton County DA appears to be contemplating what may be a radical expansion of Georgia racketeering law. But none of that means that these prosecutors were inventing cases out of whole cloth, or (at least in the boxes case) that Trump is not actually guilty of serious federal crimes. The Manhattan DA’s case would not exist if Trump had not paid off a porn actress to cover up an affair, which he did. The Georgia investigation would not exist if Trump had not led a monthslong effort to overturn an election he lost and put improper pressure on the Georgia secretary of state, which he did. The boxes case would not exist if Trump had not deliberately chosen to take with him out of office documents with sensitive national-defense information that had not been declassified, which he did. Over and over again, like Nixon, he has given his enemies a sword.

 

The DOJ inserted itself in the politics of . . .

 

2012 by arresting the anti-Muslim filmmaker to fuel the Benghazi video talking point and by giving the IRS a pass on its anti-Tea Party abuses.

 

2016 by weaponizing what they knew all along was a Dem-funded Russia Hoax.

 

2020 by giving the Bidens a pass and discrediting the laptop.

 

It is essentially the opinion of anti-Trump Cons that this increasingly-political DOJ would suddenly be out of ideas if only Trump behaved differently or if someone else was the GOP nominee. Weird. Third, how do those Cons plan on defeating a DOJ that they claim is so corrupt? By insulting GOP voters that they are “too stupid” to “get” what’s going on here?

 

Again: Democrats and their allies in the press will try whatever they think they can get away with. But the simple reality is, sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t. It didn’t work against Reagan. It didn’t work against George W. Bush until after he’d won two national elections. More recently, there are scores of examples of hotly contested statewide campaigns for the Senate and governorships over the past decade in which it hasn’t worked (such as against Ron DeSantis in Florida and Glenn Youngkin in Virginia). The plan to win in spite of this is to pick candidates who don’t hand their enemies the sword.

 

Elections are decided at the margins. Voters who are on the fence are accustomed to hearing what both sides say, and they discount a certain amount of it. If you want to persuade those voters not to reelect a guy who is old, chronically dishonest, and surrounded by a stinking pile of corruption, you will have a better chance if you don’t pick a nominee who is all of those things himself — a nominee many of those people already voted out of office four years ago.

 

In analyzing whether the indictments are political in terms of helping Trump within the primary, by causing Republicans angry at the politicization of justice and the targeting of Trump to rally around Trump, Gestetner — characteristically of Trump supporters — ignores the evidence entirely. Democrats spent tens of millions of dollars in 2022 boosting Trump-endorsed and/or “stop the steal” candidates in Republican primaries. Those candidates mostly won their primary races, and every single one of them who did lost in the general election. It has been too extensively reported and openly stated from too many places to deny that Democrats not only believe that they overperformed in 2022 by running against Trump but prefer to do so again in 2024.

 

And thus far, it has worked like a charm. Look at the RealClearPolitics national poll average:

Trump’s commanding lead over DeSantis in October 2022 was cut significantly after the election, as people evaluated the great success of DeSantis and the across-the-board failure of so many Trump-backed candidates. DeSantis remained around 30 percent in the polls, and Trump below 50 percent — until Alvin Bragg indicted Trump near the end of March, which was swiftly followed by Trump pulling away and continuing to do so through this writing, four months and two indictments later. Occam’s razor suggests that Democrats getting exactly what they want, following actions by Democratic prosecutors, is a sign that Trump’s voters are the ones being played for the marks here.

 

Gestetner’s only response, after assiduously avoiding the specifics of 2022:

 

The loss by Trump in a few states and the loss by some of “his” candidates in 2022 was narrower than the impact that anti-Trump Cons have on politics. If not for GOP saboteurs and self-righteous cons criticizing Trump . . . and then sitting out elections in the name of country over party, many states would have gone differently. In other words, Dems “want” Trump to be the face of the GOP because of the expectation that GOP Saboteurs and Self Righteous Cons (the ones who claim that Dems want Trump . . .) will again lead to more GOP losses. Those Cons don’t notice that they are the mark!

 

There are so many things wrong with this. First, notice the double standard: “Some voters won’t vote for Trump or his candidates” is the voters’ fault, but the behavior of Trump’s voters is never their fault, and the actual reality of Trump’s political problems is a thing to be solved just by yelling at people to get in line. Second, it ignores reality. Consider Georgia. Donald Trump’s acid criticisms of Brian Kemp were far more public and went far beyond what any leading Republican said during the election about Herschel Walker. Kemp rolled to victory, while Walker lost — yet we’re supposed to believe that Walker’s problem was being sabotaged? Kari Lake told McCain voters not to support her — in the face of the simple math that a large majority of Arizona Republican voters had backed McCain in past elections — and somehow it’s other people who drove those voters away?

 

It’s always somebody else’s fault that, since 2017, Republicans have lost the White House, the House, the Senate, and crucial elections in state government in Arizona, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, Michigan, Minnesota, Maryland, Massachusetts, and Kansas. They got back only the House, only narrowly, and no thanks to Trump ousting Republican incumbents in favor of primary challengers who lost their general elections. All of this operates on the assumption that the reader has somehow failed to notice anything Donald Trump says or does, or anything his allies say or do.

 

I’m sorry, I live in a world where reality actually matters, and if you are losing, you don’t just keep doing the same thing and expecting a different result. In 2016, Trump was something different. But it’s not 2016 anymore. Trotting out the same guy at age 78 and expecting him to win back people he’s alienated is not realism, it’s just a refusal to accept that the world has moved on.

The Anti-Trump Field’s Big Psychological Roadblock

By Noah Rothman

Monday, July 31, 2023

 

The latest New York Times/Sienna survey of the Republican political landscape tells a familiar tale: Donald Trump remains the dominant figure in the GOP with the support of roughly half (54 percent) of the primary vote, and roughly half of (52 percent) of that half comes from Republican primary voters who will consider voting for no other candidate. We’re left with a race in which about a quarter of the GOP won’t vote for anyone other than Trump, another quarter won’t vote for him under any circumstances, and a vast middle of the Republican primary electorate is persuadable but leans toward Trump. That is the state of play that has pertained for months, and the persuadable vote remains unpersuaded by the non-Trump options.

 

Even beyond the headline horse-race numbers, the Times/Sienna poll makes especially clear the problem faced by those who hope to move the party past Trump. Fifty-six percent of Republican voters said that they believe that Trump “did not do anything wrong” in relation to the allegations of criminal misconduct brought against him by the Justice Department. And 71 percent said Trump had “not committed serious federal crimes.” Another 71 percent said it was imperative that the GOP “stand behind Trump.” Among those who think the Republican Party is obliged to support Trump’s criminal defense are 83 percent of voters who are “open to Trump” in the primaries, 63 percent of GOP voters who are backing DeSantis in the primaries, and nearly one-third of Republicans who describe themselves as not being open to pro-Trump arguments. In other words, believing that Trump is being persecuted isn’t exclusive to Trump supporters; it’s a GOP-wide phenomenon.

 

There is a nascent effort among Trump’s Republican opponents to accuse the former president of wasting his donors’ contributions by dedicating a wildly disproportionate amount of campaign cash to his legal-defense fund. The assumption in that line of attack is that Trump’s supporters will regard that as a misallocation of resources, but we have no indication that Republican voters will see it that way. In fact, it seems most Republican voters view Trump’s legal woes as contributing to his overall appeal as a candidate, which renders the distinctions between his campaign’s coffers and his legal-defense fund negligible.

 

The Times write-up of the poll featured a colorful argument in Trump’s favor made by a 69-year-old retail manager who mocked the “little sissy” milksops who “cry about everything.” There is, however, a lot to be gleaned from this categorization of Trump support in the rawest, most emotional terms. In poll after poll, Republicans have expressed in no uncertain terms that they are not evaluating Donald Trump’s performance analytically as they would (and do) for other Republican politicians. They will not stomach even rhetorical criticisms of the former president, and they are inclined to dismiss as illegitimate the consequences Trump’s conduct invites.

 

The Times/Sienna poll doesn’t just paint a portrait of a primary race that has been static over the course of this year. It illustrates a dynamic around Trump’s political persona that has been static for the better part of a decade.

 

Trump’s legal woes are interchangeable with any number of persecutions to which the former president has been supposedly subjected. Their specifics never matter much because, by the time his supporters are finished transforming them into allegories for the conditions they resent in their own lives, the issue is no longer Trump.

 

When Trump is accused of paying off a pornographic actress to keep silent about their extramarital tryst, the Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins insists that the real issue is that America treats Christianity like a “welcome mat” on which “people can just stomp their feet,” and he says he’s just “glad that there’s somebody on the playground that is willing to punch the bully.” When Trump’s property is searched by the FBI because he allegedly mishandled classified documents and misled investigators, former Arkansas governor Mike Huckabee says the real story is that “it can and it will ultimately happen” to average voters, too.

 

Trump himself has entertained the validity of the claim that he is “the most persecuted person in the history of our country,” but that might not go far enough for some. He may be “the most persecuted man since Christ,” depending on whom you ask. Trump’s latest legal troubles have been subsumed into this psychologically unhealthy rubric. “Any Republican that doesn’t act on Democratic fraud should be immediately primaried,” Trump said at a weekend rally, transforming his prosecution into a political litmus test. And this strategy is likely to work, as it has in the past, to make the president’s biggest liabilities in a general election into core strengths in the primary.

 

The task before a Republican who hopes to defeat the former president in the primary will be to disabuse the party’s voters of the vague impression that his problems are a validation of their own circumstances. It’s understandable why Republican candidates would shrink from such a monumental undertaking: These are not rational conclusions, so they are impervious to rationality. Moreover, it’s hard to imagine how a Republican candidate could engage in that effort in a way that didn’t appear to indict voters for having bad judgment or being susceptible to motivated reasoning. But if the GOP’s other aspirants cannot convince Republican voters that Trump has personal agency, is as flawed and fallible as any man, and does not exist as an abstract proxy for a variety of unrelated circumstances, there is no point to their presence in this primary campaign.

 

So many Republican officials have foolishly lent credence to the notion that Trump’s unique and constant struggles are the most visible signs of a sub-rosa conspiracy against individual voters that it may be impossible to debunk that notion now. But the job is still to try. If Trump’s Republican opponents run against Trump only by criticizing his policy preferences or his flare for the dramatic, they will lose. Of course, if Republican voters cannot help but see in Trump and his predilection for self-inflicted wounds a reflection of themselves, they were destined to lose anyway.

Joe Biden Is Donald Trump’s Best Friend

By Rich Lowry

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

 

Donald Trump doesn’t look, at the moment, like he needs any help winning the Republican nomination, but he’s getting an assist from President Joe Biden.

 

The incumbent president — rather than being the indispensable political antidote to Trump that Democrats imagine him as — may well prove the key to his predecessor’s return to the White House.

 

Biden is an asset to Trump’s primary campaign and could, through his weakness and ineptitude, end up electing him in 2024.

 

Biden is indicting Trump; he’s making Republicans pine for the days when Trump was president; and he’s lackluster in prospective head-to-head polling matchups.

 

All of which is boosting his adversary’s prospects. The indictments, of course, create a rally-around-the flag effect among Republicans. It was the shoddy indictment from Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg that launched Trump onto a new, higher trajectory in the primary race. But the federal indictments from special counsel Jack Smith have reinforced the effect.

 

That the indictments come with a split screen of the Biden Department of Justice coddling Hunter Biden only makes Trump’s argument that there’s a two-tier system of justice that’s been weaponized against him more potent.

 

Meanwhile, Biden’s poor record in office drives GOP nostalgia for the Trump presidency, a significant benefit to the former president looking for a restoration.

 

Finally, Governor Ron DeSantis and other Republicans want to argue that Trump isn’t electable, but Biden’s dismal political standing vitiates this case. Every time there’s a poll showing Trump competitive with Biden, it’s harder to portray him as a sure loser. The RealClearPolitics polling average has Biden leading Trump by less than a point, and a recent Marquette University poll had the two tied 50–50.

 

Democrats may figure that all this is good — Trump is so toxic that he’s the weakest of the plausible Republican candidates, no matter what polls more than a year before the election might say. Biden beat him once before, right?

 

Yes, but it’s not as though he trounced Trump the first time around. Biden’s Electoral College victory was built on a series of razor-thin victories in places such as Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin. Who’s to say that in the right circumstances for Trump they couldn’t tip the other way? Trump narrowly won in 2016 and narrowly lost in 2020, so why is another narrow victory supposed to be out of the question?

 

It’s often said that Trump hasn’t done anything to win one swing voter back to his side since 2020. True enough, but Biden, who hasn’t been the norm-honoring moderate as advertised, has certainly done things to shed voters.

 

Democrats act as if Biden is a once-in-a-generation political talent when he’s an 80-year-old man whose foremost political achievement is beating an unpopular incumbent in the midst of a pandemic with a basement campaign. In Biden’s tenth quarter in office, Gallup has his approval rating at 40 percent, the lowest rating for post–World War II presidents at that point with the exception of Jimmy Carter.

 

As the 2016 election demonstrated, running two candidates who are deeply unpopular is a recipe for volatility. And Trump–Biden would make Trump–Hillary look like the halcyon days of widely admired, consensus political leaders. A CNN poll from June found that 36 percent of respondents didn’t view either Trump or Biden favorably, and only about a third had a favorable view of each of them.

 

Indeed, the 2016 vibe is strong. Back then, Democrats hoped to run against Trump and put up their own incredibly weak candidate with barely a serious internal fight (Bernie Sanders was never going to win the nomination) or second thought. One of Clinton’s serious vulnerabilities, the email scandal, was ruled off-limits, just as Biden’s age and his family’s influence-peddling scandal are verboten topics among Democrats now.

 

How did that turn out?

 

If Trump would have lots of baggage heading into 2024, he’d also presumably have a beatable incumbent standing between him and a second term.

The Italian Option

By Dalibor Rohac

Tuesday, August 01, 2023

 

Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, recently visited Washington, with the aim of aligning her country more closely with the United States — and laying the groundwork for pulling out of the China-led Belt and Road Initiative. American conservatives should take note.

 

Many in the Republican Party, encouraged by the election of Donald Trump in 2016 and by the success of “populist” and “far-right” parties across Europe, would like to reshape American conservative politics in the European image. National conservatives, integralists, and many others are trying to put policy meat on the bones of Trump’s moment in American politics. All of them would be well advised to take a closer look at Meloni and right-wing leaders in countries such as Sweden, Finland, and Poland, instead of remaining fixated on Meloni’s influential Hungarian counterpart, Viktor Orbán.

 

Orbán has received much acclaim from supporters of Trump and Ron DeSantis. He’s been given a rock star’s welcome at various CPAC conferences, and in fact one of his government-funded NGOs, the Center for Fundamental Rights, hosted such a conference in Budapest this year. With his unique ability to “own the libs” and fund visiting fellowships, university chairs, and swanky conferences, Orbán has seized the imaginations of the New Right’s opinion leaders — not least Tucker Carlson and Rod Dreher — like no other European politician.

 

Arguably, the combination of Orbán’s outsized influence and his pro-Russian positions — rejection of lethal aid to Ukraine, opposition to sanctions against Russia, and deepening of Hungary’s energy ties to Russia — has played some role in the decline of Western support for helping Ukraine in its war.

 

That is just one reason why America’s New Right must move beyond its current Hungarian fixation. And as Meloni’s example underlines, Orbán is not the only game in town.

 

Forget about policies on Russia and Ukraine for a moment. If America’s conservatives, old or new, care about our geopolitical competition with China, they cannot ignore the role that Hungary has played as a vehicle for Chinese interests in Europe. It has served as a long-standing logistical center for Huawei, and its government has opposed all European efforts to hold Beijing accountable for human-rights violations. In fact, it takes pride in being a “a pillar of the Belt and Road Initiative,” as Orbán put it.

 

There is also Hungary’s flourishing relationship with Iran, whose students enjoy privileged access to Hungarian universities, with around 2,000 of them studying in Hungary at the moment, and whom Hungary’s foreign minister praised last year for its “constructive role” in the current war in Ukraine.

 

Orbán is skillful at telling different audiences, including American conservatives, exactly what they want to hear. Yet, in reality, the relatively secular Hungary is not a particularly exciting model for social conservatives. Like in most European countries, abortion is legal up to twelve weeks (20 in special circumstances), and the government has made little effort in its 13 years in office to tighten the existing restrictions. Although new legislation banning displays of homosexuality in materials targeted at minors made headlines in the West in 2021 and was even compared to an earlier “gay propaganda” law in Russia, Hungarians of all political stripes seem distinctly relaxed about the subject. With little fuss, the country introduced same-sex partnerships — still nonexistent to this day in neighboring Slovakia, Romania, and Serbia — in 2009. It is telling that Orbán has not used his overwhelming political mandate to roll the institution back.

 

In the crisis of 2015, Orbán portrayed himself as an arch-enemy of illegal immigration, particularly from Muslim-majority countries. Yet, unlike Italy, Hungary has never been a target destination for asylum seekers and illegal migrants. Meloni has to do more than just bloviate, and besides draconian punishments for people-smugglers, she has pushed the EU to negotiate a hard-nosed deal with Tunisia to stop the flows across the Mediterranean.

 

To be sure, Meloni’s Italy recognizes same-sex partnerships, too, but the government is keen to push back the existing legal protections, and has recently revoked the birth certificates of children born to lesbian couples. Accused by activists of pursuing a “medieval vision” of family life, Meloni delivers at least as much on the culture-war front as Orbán, if not more. Yet, she manages to do so without his geopolitical toxicity. In fact, on Ukraine, she has grown into one of Europe’s most impassioned supporters of arming the country, as “Ukrainians are defending the values of freedom and democracy on which our civilization is based, and the very foundations of international law.”

 

America’s New Right may also look at Poland, governed by the Law and Justice Party (PiS). Arguably America’s premier European ally, Poles are poised to spend over 4 percent of their GDP on defense this year. Ninety percent Catholic, it features a self-styled Catholic integralist as a member of its government’s cabinet (Zbigniew Ziobro, the justice minister), abortion is effectively banned, and there is no recognition of same-sex partnerships — not even those concluded elsewhere in the EU, as the European Court of Justice ordered member states to do. Needless to say, Poland has provided home to millions of Ukrainian refugees and aid that far outpaces, in relative terms, U.S. assistance, and its political leadership and opposition are essentially unanimous about the importance of Ukraine’s eventual victory.

 

Alternatively, New Right conservatives may ask members of the Sweden Democrats or the Finns Party, both “far-right” parties currently in governing coalitions in their respective countries, about their plans on immigration or crime. They will hear a rejection of illegal migratory flows, an intention to restrict asylum (to essentially zero, in the case of Sweden Democrats), and a commitment to stronger law enforcement. In both Nordic parties, as in PiS and Meloni’s Brothers of Italy, there is also good will toward the United States and a clear-eyed understanding of Russia, Vladimir Putin, and the stakes of the war in Ukraine — all of them absent in Orbán’s FIDESZ.

 

On either side of the Atlantic, there is no putting the populist genie back into the bottle. But populist politics can take on more or less responsible forms, particularly in areas of foreign affairs and security. The sooner American acolytes of the New Right break with of their current obsession with Orbán’s Hungary and find an alternative avatar — at a minimum, one who is friendly to the United States, like Meloni — the better for them and for the future of our nation.