Mostly Monday Reads: Just Another Manic Monday

The Trump Legal Team is prepared to start the Manhattan Election Interference Trial and provide a robust defense against Donald’s continuing offenses. John Buss, @repeat1968

Good Day, Sky Dancers!

Donald’s getting all the attention in the world right now, but is it the kind he really wants? My Saturday Night Last Walk with Temple, the Poland Avenue Greeter, usually means dog biscuits, scratchies, and attention from the locals sitting on the sidewalk outside the local bars. It’s fest season, so we’re filled with tourists. We met the most pleasant young women from Australia, England, and France! The conversation eventually turned to all the ado about Trump, as it ultimately does. We’re worried about you,” they said. “Nous sommes tellement inquiets pour toi.”  Happy Earth Day!

These folks come from countries where most of us have family members who fought beside their family members. My Father, John, fought in the skies of England and France; he was named after his Uncle John, who fought in the trenches of France and Belgium. I can say that I’m worried about us, too, as our electoral and judicial systems churn through all the detritus that Donald has put us through.

Timothy O’Brien knows Trump just about as well as anyone. He has written books about him and endured the ordeal of Donald dragging him through the court system. He won. This is his analysis for Bloomberg. Trump’s Trial Is the Reality Show He Never Wanted. he former president faces weeks of challenging witnesses and tawdry stories.” 

Prosecutors and defense attorneys will make opening statements today in a criminal fraud trial in New York that Donald Trump has tried mightily, and unsuccessfully, to delay.

He continuously savaged Juan Merchan, the judge presiding over the trial, and belittled the charges he faces. He mocked the jury selection process that consumed the case’s first week, and, when awake, appeared so determined to rattle prospective jurors that Merchan was forced to remind Trump that he wouldn’t “have any jurors intimidated in this courtroom.”

Trump’s allies at Fox News and on right-wing social media platforms put the court and jurors in their crosshairs as well. “This isn’t the pursuit of justice, it’s a political persecution that is tearing our country apart,” noted Vivek Ramaswamy, floating atop the flotsam of his failed presidential bid. Elon Musk, fashioning himself as a legal scholar, concurred. He told the 181.5 million people who follow him on X, the social media platform he owns, that “this case is obviously a corruption of the law.”

Jurors felt the heat. Some dropped out, saying they feared for their well-being. That’s a phenomenon usually confined in the US to mob or terrorism prosecutions, but in an era when a former president glowingly compares himself to “the great gangster” Al Capone, here we are. Still, scores of jurors were reviewed and by Friday 12 of them, along with six potential alternates, had been empaneled.

Even then, Trump’s lawyers took a final long shot. They asked a New York appellate court to delay the trial and change the venue because they felt that jury selection seemed rushed. The appellate court swatted down that effort in less than an hour. And now, with a jury seated, the fireworks start. Witnesses will testify, many of them well-known figures from Trumplandia. Trump himself may or may not take the stand.

Trump is veering from rage to petulance, and from slumber to intimidation, in the courtroom because he’s the star of a lurid Manhattan reality show he isn’t producing or directing. He doesn’t control the narrative and others are writing the scripts. And some of the scripts say nasty things about him, his sex life, his bookkeeping and his attempts to bury stories that might have derailed his 2016 presidential campaign.

A televised trial would show us much more about Trump than the sketch artists and people in the room where it happens can explain. Also, we know that televising that trial would put a lot of folks in danger, too. I’ve already seen potential jurors cower at the thought of Trump’s crazed cult and its obsession with guns and violence. I  hope their stories are having an impact. A  lot of our closest friends around the world are worried about us. We are concerned about us.

And he’s already asleep again.

Today, we will get transcripts of opening statements. We also saw Judge Marchan’s decisions on what the prosecution may present that could damage the defense case. Yesterday, we learned the first witness will be David Pecker of the National Inquirer. Doesn’t this feel like an ad for a reality show from Bizzaro World?

This is from the Washington Post’s live coverage. It is being continually updated. “Prosecution calls first witness in Trump hush money trial.”

Prosecutors on Monday called their first witness, former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker, in Donald Trump’s criminal trial for allegedly falsifying business records to hide a hush money payment during the 2016 presidential election campaign. Pecker allegedly helped broker the payment as part of a “catch and kill” scheme to bury negative stories about Trump while he was running for president. Earlier in the day, the prosecution and defense lawyers delivered opening statements.

Dahlia Lithwick and Anat Shenker-OSorio have an interesting piece up at Slate. “The Trump Trial Is Already Influencing Public Opinion. Pundits are reading these shifts completely wrong—this is exactly the kind of movement that could determine the election.”

Four days in, and with the jury just selected, those in the commentariat class are already ready to offer their closing arguments in Donald Trump’s New York criminal trial. Most of the naysayers are lawyers. Some of them doubt that Trump will be found guilty of even a misdemeanor, much less a felony, for his alleged crime of illegally offering hush money payments to hide an affair he had before the 2016 presidential election. They question the soundness of what they deem a rather novel legal theory—elevating the minor crime of falsifying records into the more serious charge of doing so in furtherance of another crime. Others are just exhausted. Our Slate colleague Richard Hasen, in the L.A. Times, declared, “I have a hard time even mustering a ‘meh.’ ” It’s understandable to feel jaded by what has been a yearslong process, with Trump seeming to evade accountability every time—but dismissing this case is precisely the category error that holds that what lawyers believe about legal verdicts is somehow predictive of political and electoral outcomes.

And it’s not just the lawyers. The pundits are also certain they know how the public will think about a trial that’s barely begun. They’re sure they understand how it will affect a vote that remains 200 days away, and they are bringing in survey data to back up their claims. ABC News thus declared, “The polls suggest that a guilty verdict would be unlikely to have a big influence come November,” citing as evidence the fact that “just 35 percent of independents and 14 percent of Republicans” believe that Trump is guilty in the New York criminal case. As further proof that Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s efforts are going to be electorally inconsequential, they go on to reference a Quinnipiac poll showing that only 29 percent of voters would be less likely to support Trump upon a conviction in this criminal trial.

And, sure, all of these are in fact numbers, and they are indeed less than 50 percent, and, yes, we’ve been told many, many times that it takes that plus one to win an election. But this is where so many political analysts have either memory-holed how presidential elections actually work in the U.S. or are demonstrating that motivated cognition is one hell of a drug. Because for Trump to lose this election, it does not require over 50 percent of people to say that this trial would flip their vote. Many people are already absolutely determined not to vote for the criminal defendant. As in 2016 and 2020, the 2024 election will come down to margins of 1 or 2 percentage points in just six states. In this game of winner takes all, even by a hair, dropping “only” 9 percent of your base upon a Bragg conviction—as the most Trump-favorable poll testing the stakes of this case reports—means you would lose the election.

Thus, while it is absolutely the case that 36 percent of independents saying that a guilty verdict would move them away from Trump is less than the 44 percent saying it wouldn’t, when your vote total is presently neck and neck and electoral precedent says it will come down to the wire, you cannot afford to lose anyone, let alone over a third of the gettable voters. That 36 percent matters greatly.

And so, those who are dismissing the electoral consequences of this criminal trial by declaring that events in Manhattan over the next few weeks will merely animate Trump’s base—a base that will see this trial as yet more proof of the Deep State’s (™) persecution of their Lord—are also demonstrating a fundamental misunderstanding of electoral math. You cannot mobilize the voters who are already absolutely voting for Trump to any greater heights. No matter how rabid their fury, and how bottomless their sense of shared grievance, they still get only one vote each—at least until they figure out how to commit the voter fraud they love to decry on a broader scale. The rank and file in the tank for MAGA cannot become more impactful.

Tom Toles Editorial Cartoon

Politico’s Erico Orden reports on the opening statements by the Defense. “Trump’s lawyer kicks off his opening statement to the jury with four words: ‘President Trump is innocent.’ And he said he’ll be referring to his client as “President Trump” because “he earned it.” Does this reek of white male entitlement, or is it just me?

Trump lawyer Todd Blanche began his opening statement with these words: “President Trump is innocent. President Trump did not commit any crimes,” he said, speaking slowly. “The Manhattan district attorney’s office should never have brought this case.”

Blanche told jurors that he and others would refer to Trump as “President Trump” because he “earned it.”

“We will call him President Trump out of respect for the office that he held,” Blanche said.

Blanche continued: “He’s not just our former president. He’s not just Donald Trump that you’ve seen on TV…he’s also a man, he’s a husband, he’s a father. He’s a person, just like you and just like me.”

As he spoke, Trump turned his body slightly in the direction of the jury box, the first time he has done so since the jurors entered the courtroom.

The People call Pecker. John Buss, @repeat1968

The New York Times reports this in its Live Updates. ” prosecutors Allege’ Criminal Conspiracy’ as Trump’s Trial Opens. David Pecker, the longtime publisher of The National Enquirer, will continue testifying Tuesday about what prosecutors say was a plot to cover up a sex scandal involving Donald J. Trump. The former president is charged with falsifying business records.”

I will try to keep an eye out to post the transcripts when they become available later today.

I would like to mention the vote in the House to provide continued support to Ukraine. This is from Reuters. “US  House advances $95 billion Ukraine-Israel package toward Saturday vote’.”

The U.S. House of Representatives advanced a $95 billion legislative package on Friday providing aid to Ukraine, Israel and the Indo-Pacific in a broad bipartisan vote, overcoming hardline Republican opposition that had held it up for months.

Friday’s procedural vote, which passed 316-94 with more support from Democrats than the Republicans who hold a narrow majority, advanced a package similar to a measure that passed the Democratic-majority Senate in February.

Democratic President Joe Biden, Democratic Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, top Senate Republican Mitch McConnell and top House Democrat Hakeem Jeffries had been pushing for a House vote since then. Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson had held off in the face of opposition from a small but vocal segment of his party.

In addition to the aid for allies, the package includes a provision to transfer frozen Russian assets to Ukraine, and sanctions targeting Hamas and Iran and to force China’s ByteDance to sell social media platform TikTok or face a ban in the U.S.

The legislation provides more than $95 billion in security assistance, including $9.1 billion for humanitarian aid, which Democrats had demanded.

If the House passes the measure, as expected, the Senate will need to follow suit to send it to Biden to sign into law.

Schumer on Friday told senators to be prepared to come back over the weekend if needed.

Wow. What a Newsday!   I promise to try to keep up with some updates!

What’s on your reading and blogging list today?