Today Judge Juan Merchan will give instructions to the jury in the Trump hush money case and then they will begin deliberations. Some experts are predicting there will be a verdict today. I kind of doubt that, but what do know? A decision could certainly come this week.
Justice Merchan will describe the legal meaning of the word “intent” and the concept of the presumption of innocence. He will remind the jurors that they pledged to set any biases aside against the former president before they were sworn in, and that Mr. Trump’s decision not to testify cannot be held against him.
Then, according to a person with knowledge of the instructions that Justice Merchan plans to deliver, he will explain the 34 charges of falsifying business records that Mr. Trump faces. It will likely be the most important guidance that the judge offers during the trial. And it is no simple task.
Judge Merchan
In New York, falsifying records is a misdemeanor, unless the documents were faked to hide another crime. The other crime, prosecutors say, was Mr. Trump’s 2016 violation of state election law that prohibited conspiring to aid a political campaign using “unlawful means.”
Those means, prosecutors argue, could include any of a menu of other crimes. And so each individual false-records charge that Mr. Trump faces contains within it multiple possible crimes that jurors must strive to understand.
The moment that the jurors begin to deliberate will mark the first time that the complicated case will be assessed not by judges or a parade of commentators, but by everyday New Yorkers. The group may be aided by the two jurors who are also lawyers — though neither appears to have criminal experience, and one said during jury selection that he knew “virtually nothing about criminal law.”
Marc F. Scholl, who served nearly 40 years in the district attorney’s office, noted that jury instructions are often difficult to follow, particularly given that, in New York, jurors are barred from keeping a copy of the guidance as they deliberate. And he said that defendants are often charged with several different crimes, requiring even more elaborate instructions.
Still, Mr. Scholl said, one point of complexity stood out: “Usually you don’t have this layering of these other crimes,” he said.
Justice Merchan, according to the person with knowledge of his legal instructions, will proceed through each of the 34 charges count by count, explaining to jurors what each requires prosecutors to have proved.
The knotty legal instructions were the product of intense argument between the prosecution and the defense, culminating in a hearing last week in which each side sought to persuade the judge to make minor edits that could have had a major impact.
Read more details about those arguments at the NYT link.
People who have been covering the trial inside the courtroom, eg, Harry Litman, have expressed concerns about one juror who appears to be sympathetic to the defense. This is from Marc Caputo at The Bulwark: Trump Legal Team Pins Hopes on Hung Jury.
AS THE JURORS FILED into the Manhattan courtroom, day after day, almost none of them would look at Donald Trump. It’s one of those unsettling signs for defendants and their lawyers who worry about a guilty verdict.
Those worries have only grown in Trump’s orbit as allies have all but abandoned hope of acquittal. Even Trump, though he railed Monday on social media about the judge and the case, has privately sounded a note of resignation.
Trump sleeping in court
“Whatever happens happens,” Trump told one person recently. “I have no control.”
But there is one clear hope MAGAville clings to: a hung jury that results in a mistrial.
If that happens, Trump allies suspect that it will be chiefly due to the one juror who has made friendly eye contact with Trump from time to time as the jury enters the room and walks right past the defense table.
“There are eight people on that jury who definitely hate Trump. If there’s one person who doesn’t, it’s [this] juror,” said one court attendee who, like others for this story, relayed their observations on condition of anonymity to The Bulwark, which is also protecting the privacy and safety of the juror in question by not disclosing identifying details.
As the trial has progressed since April 15, these sources relate, this juror has appeared to nod along in seeming accordance with the defense at times. On other occasions, the juror has seemingly reacted favorably to and made eye contact with Trump’s congressional surrogates who began joining him in court in recent weeks.
I hope they’re mistaken. All we need it to have this end in a mistrial.
Donald Trump is not behaving like someone who expects to be found “not guilty.” In a series of posts over the Memorial Day weekend, the former president deviated from the norm of honoring soldiers who fought and died for the United States by instead posting on his website, Truth Social, about how unfair it is that standard courtroom procedures are not being bent in his favor.
Posting in all caps, Trump – facing 34 felony counts of falsifying business records to cover up a hush payment to an adult film star – on Monday raged against the order in which closing arguments will be made in his Manhattan trial. It is a “big advantage,” he said, and “very unfair” that the prosecution gets to go second. “Why can’t the defense go last?”
Whether he knows this and is just riling up gullible followers or if he simply never retained the information his defense counsel could surely provide, Politico’s Kyle Cheney noted that Trump is here complaining about a fact of life “in virtually every criminal court.” Per Cheney, “Prosecutors typically get a rebuttal during closings because [the] burden or proof lies with them, not [the] defense.”
Trump prosecutor Joshua Steinglass gives final arguments
Trump, then, is complaining about an order that exists because of the far higher standard that prosecutors must meet. The defense only needs to sow doubt about the government’s case, and it really only needs one juror to entertain the former president’s argument that the case is a “witch hunt”; the prosecution must show that its case is not just probable, but prove it beyond a reasonable doubt.
“Trump is finally being treated like every other defendant,” said Joyce Vance, a former U.S. attorney who has been following his hush money trial. “[R]eally,” she argued, “that’s what he objects to.”
In another weekend rant about the case, Trump again opined that it was wrong to bring a case against him while he’s running for president. If there was evidence of a crime, he wrote, referring to himself in the third person, “it should have been brought seven years ago, not in the middle of his Campaign for President.” [….]
Since Trump is no longer president, and can no longer pick those charged with enforcing the law, he is now just another man who must stand before and be judged by it. For a man who has long enjoyed impunity, it is intolerable. And while he may be able to evade financial penalties, at least for a time, in this case his actual liberty is at stake: it is not inconceivable that, when closing arguments conclude this week, jurors return a guilty verdict and Judge Juan Merchan decides that this particular defendant deserves some time behind bars.
George Conway, a conservative attorney turned harsh critic of the former president, believes Trump is reacting to his loss of control. “The defendant,” he posted on Threads, “is clearly in full panic mode.”
A couple of articles about the stalled Mar-a-Lago stolen documents case:
In the up-is-down world of the Mar-a-Lago classified documents case, prosecutors attempted to stanch Donald Trump’s vitriolic attacks on federal law enforcement – the kind of thing criminal defendants would not typically be allowed to engage in while on pre-trial release – and wound up themselves threatened with sanctions by the judge.
As Morning Memo recounted yesterday, the move by prosecutors to modify the terms of Trump’s pre-trial release came late Friday before the Memorial Day weekend and prompted a heated response from Trump.
U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon weighed in Monday, denying the prosecution motion, chastising them for playing loose with the local court rules, and threatening to impose sanctions on them in the future. On small bright spot, if you can call it that, is that she didn’t accede to Trump’s request to sanction the prosecution team immediately. Cannon’s denial was without prejudice, meaning prosecutors can refile their motion:
Cannon insisted that prosecutors had not sufficiently conferred with the defense team before filing and ordered that all future filings contain a statement of no more than 200 words by the opposing side of its position.
In a normal case, I’d applaud a judge keeping a tight leash on the prosecution team. But we’re in such uncharted territory here that you can’t attribute this to i-dotting or t-crossing by Cannon. Given any chance to chide the prosecution, she takes it. Given deplorable behavior by Trump that would normally never fly, she finds herself mute again and again.
The judge’s routine has become so predictable that even the analysis by legal observers bakes in a certain Cannon quotient: Anything that DOJ does that even arguably deviates from the rules leaves an opening that Cannon will take. So DOJ ends up graded on a weird Cannon curve while the Trump’s dangerous and unprecedented conduct gets set to the side.
One pattern emerging with Cannon is that when prosecutors implore her to assert herself and take more control over the case like so many judges do, she retreats to treating everything as an adversarial contest that she merely referees. But when it’s a matter of importance to Trump, she regularly asserts herself, going so far as to raise issues on her own. It’s another way in her handling of the case is imbalanced to Trump’s advantage.
…[A]t seven public hearings over more than 10 months, Judge Cannon has left an increasingly detailed record of her decision-making skills and judicial temperament.
The portrait that has emerged so far is that of an industrious but inexperienced and often insecure judge whose reluctance to rule decisively even on minor matters has permitted one of the country’s most important criminal cases to become bogged down in a logjam of unresolved issues.
She rarely issues rulings that explain her thinking in a way that might reveal her legal influences or any guiding philosophy. And that has made the hearings, which have taken place in Federal District Court in Fort Pierce, Fla., all the more important in assessing her management of the case.
Aileen Cannon in court in stolen documents case
Regardless of her motives, Judge Cannon has effectively imperiled the future of a criminal prosecution that once seemed the most straightforward of the four Mr. Trump is facing.
She has largely accomplished this by granting a serious hearing to almost every issue — no matter how far-fetched — that Mr. Trump’s lawyers have raised, playing directly into the former president’s strategy of delaying the case from reaching trial.
It appears increasingly likely that the documents case will not go to a jury before Election Day, and that the only trial that Mr. Trump will face this year will be the one now ending in Manhattan, where jurors are expected to begin deliberating on Wednesday over whether he falsified business records in connection with hush money payments to a porn star.
Still, the next few weeks will bring Judge Cannon’s handling of the case in Florida into even sharper focus.
After a hearing in June, Judge Cannon will also have to make a significant decision on whether to give Mr. Trump’s lawyers access to communications between Mr. Smith’s team and top national security officials. The lawyers made that request hoping to bolster their contention that the so-called deep state colluded with the Biden administration to bring the charges.
The police in Fairfax County, Va., received an unusual phone call on Feb. 15, 2021. A young couple claimed they were being harassed by the wife of a Supreme Court justice.
“Somebody in a position of authority needs to talk to her and make her stop,” said the 36-year-old man making the complaint, according to a recording of the call reviewed by The New York Times. The officer on the line responded that there was little the police could do: Yelling was not a crime.
The couple placed the call after a series of encounters with Martha-Ann Alito, wife of Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., that had gone from uneasy to ugly. That day, Emily Baden, whose boyfriend (now husband) contacted the police, had traded accusations with Mrs. Alito, who lived down the street. In a recent interview, Ms. Baden admitted to calling her a lewd epithet.
The clash between the wife of a conservative Supreme Court justice and the couple, who were in their 30s, liberal and proud of it, played out over months on a bucolic block in Alexandria. It was the kind of shouting match among private citizens, at the height of tensions over the 2020 election, that might have happened in any mixed political community in America. But three years later, that neighborhood spat — which both sides said began over an anti-Trump sign — has taken on far greater proportions.
Interview with Ms. Baden:
Amid the controversy, Ms. Baden said she was surprised to find herself playing a central role in Justice Alito’s account about a war of words, political signsand a flag. “I never saw the upside-down flag, never heard about it,” she said.
The Alitos
To better understand the clash, The Times interviewed Ms. Baden, her mother and her husband, as well as other neighbors, and reviewed the texts that Ms. Baden and her husband sent to friends after the episodes. Justice Alito, who did not respond to questions for this article,has in recent weeks given his own explanation of what happened.
There are some differences: For instance, the justice told Fox News that his wife hoisted the flag in response to Ms. Baden’s vulgar insult. A text message and the police call — corroborated by Fairfax County authorities — indicate, however, that the name-calling took place on Feb. 15, weeks after the inverted flag was taken down….
The justice later elaborated in an interview with Fox News, saying that in January 2021 a neighbor on the block displayed a vulgar anti-Trump sign, near where children wait for the school bus. Mrs. Alito complained to the neighbor. “Things escalated and the neighbor put up a sign personally addressing Mrs. Alito and blaming her for the Jan 6th attacks,” tweeted the Fox News reporter who interviewed the justice.
While the Alitos were on a neighborhood walk, “there were words between Mrs. Alito and a male at the home with the sign,” the network reported. The justice said the man used “vulgar language, ‘including the C-word,’” After that exchange, “Mrs. Alito was distraught and hung the flag upside-down,” the Fox reporter relayed.
But in the Baden family’s version, the justice’s wife initiated the conflict. “Aside from putting up a sign, we did not begin or instigate any of these confrontations,” Ms. Baden said later.
During the Covid crisis, Baden moved in with Baden’s mother Barbara, who lives in the Alito’s neighborhood. Her boyfriend, who grew up in the area also moved back home.
The couple participated in Black Lives Matter protests in Washington, propped up Biden-Harris signs, and on the Saturday in November when the election was called, whooped and danced in the streets of the nation’s capital. When they got home, they displayed a political sign they had made from torn-up Amazon boxes, saying “BYE DON” on one side and “Fuck Trump” on the other….
Shortly after Christmas, as Emily Baden was with her dog in her front yard, an older woman approached and thanked her for taking down the sign, which had merely blown down. Ms. Baden realized that the woman was Martha-Ann Alito. The sign was offensive, Mrs. Alito said, according to both the justice’s account and a text message from Ms. Baden to her boyfriend.
Martha-Ann Alito and Emily Baden
Ms. Baden told her the sign would stay up, she recalled in the interview. The family was taken aback: Though the Badens and the Alitos lived just a short distance apart, Barbara Baden couldn’t recall ever communicating with the justice’s wife beyond a neighborly wave. In the interview, Emily Baden could not remember whether she put the signs up again.
Then came Jan. 6. Rocked by the violence and threat to democracy, the couple soon put up new signs in their yard, saying “Trump Is a Fascist” and “You Are Complicit.” Emily Baden said in interviews that the second sign was not directed at the Alitos, but at Republicans generally, especially those who weren’t condemning the Capitol attack.
Soon afterward, her mother took them down, out of safety concerns. “Look what these people can do,” she said in an interview, recalling her fears at the time about the mob that had stormed the Capitol. “I do not want to mark my house.”
It’s not clear whether Mrs. Alito saw those signs, but the day after the Capitol riot, as the couple parked in front of their home, she pulled up in her car, they said. She lingered there, glaring, for a long moment, recalled the couple, who texted their friends about the encounter.
In another incident, the young couple drove by the Alito’s house.
Mrs. Alito happened to be standing outside. According to interviews with Ms. Baden and her husband, as well as messages they sent to friends at the time, Mrs. Alito ran toward their car and yelled something they did not understand. The couple continued driving, they said, and as they passed the Alito home again to exit the cul-de-sac, Mrs. Alito appeared to spit toward the vehicle.
The couple, still shaken by the Capitol riot, said the encounter left them feeling uneasy and outmatched by the wife of someone so powerful.
When Donald Trump met some of the country’s top donors at a luxurious New York hotel earlier this month, he told the group that a businessman had recently offered $1 million to his presidential effort and wanted to have lunch.
“I’m not having lunch,” Trump said he responded, according to donors who attended. “You’ve got to make it $25 million.”
Another businessman, he said, had traditionally given $2 million to $3 million to Republicans. Instead, he said he told the donor that he wanted a $25 million or $50 million contribution or he would not be “very happy.”
As he closed his pitch at the Pierre Hotel, Trump explained to the group why it was in their interest to cut large checks. If he was not put back in office, taxes would go up for them under President Biden, who vows to let Trump-era tax cuts on the wealthy and corporations expire at the end of 2025.
“The tax cuts all expire for wealthy and poor and middle-income and everything else, but they expire in another seven months and he’s not going to renew them, which means taxes are going to go up by four times,” Trump said, exaggerating the size of the cuts. “You’re going to have the biggest tax increase in history.”
Seconds after promising the tax cuts, Trump made his pitch explicit. “So whatever you guys can do, I appreciate it,” he said.
The remarks are just one example of a series of audacious requests by Trump for big-money contributions in recent months, according to 11 donors, advisers and others close to the former president, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to describe his fundraising. The pleas for millions in donations come as the presumptive Republican nominee seeks to close a cash gap with Biden and to pay for costly legal bills in his four criminal indictments.
Trump is completely corrupt. So what else is new? Read the whole thing at the WaPo.
That’s it for me today. I hope I’ve given you something worth reading while we wait for the verdict.
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A woman sewing blue denim pants, by “Master of the Blue Jeans.”
I’m going to begin today with a story that has nothing to do with politics or current events–just because I think it’s interesting. Did you know that people wore blue jeans way back in the 16th century? I didn’t. An art exhibit will soon open in Paris that will focus on a mysterious artist, known only as “Master of the Blue Jeans.”
An exhibition centered on the “Master of the Blue Jeans” is opening in Paris this month—and the work on display is not that of Levi Strauss, founder of the eponymous clothing company, but rather a 17th-century Italian painter.
The upcoming show at Galerie Canesso features two paintings by the mysterious artist, who was active in northern Italy in the 1600s and is known only by his “master” moniker. The painter’s oil canvases depict early iterations of the stiff blue fabric beloved today, as worn by Italian peasants. According to a statement, the pieces have proved to be important artifacts in garment history, “pushing back [blue jeans’] provenance by centuries.”
Speaking with Artnet’s Vittoria Benzine, Maurizio Canesso, an art collector and the gallery’s founder, says, “People are still not very familiar with the true history of blue jeans, as they confuse it with the material made by Levi Strauss.”
In truth, Canesso argues, when the American businessman behind Levi’s jeans started selling denim work pants in the late 1800s, he merely added metal rivets and structure to a fabric that already boasted a storied European past.
“Jeans come from Genoa, while denim comes from the French city of Nîmes,” says Canesso. Blue jeans were made with perpendicular stitches in northwest Italy, while denim was woven in chevron patterns in southern France. But the key component of the fabric’s history is its coloration.
“Until the 11th century, no one could wear blue fabric because they didn’t know how to make blue color adhere,” Canesso says. “Only in the year 1000 did this begin to happen using woad leaves, and at a very high cost. The genius of the Genoese was to find the indigo stone in India and make this an industrial and therefore low-cost process.”
The ten denim-themed paintings attributed to the master were previously thought to be the work of several different artists. But in 2004, curator Gerlinde Gruber reattributed the group of artworks to a single unnamed painter then dubbed the Master of the Blue Jeans. By 2010, Canesso had acquired all of the master’s works, and he presented them in an exhibition at his Paris gallery that same year.
“Unfortunately, we have no new theories about who the Master of the Blue Jeans was,” Véronique Damian, an art historian at Galerie Canesso, tells the Observer’s Vanessa Thorpe. Evidence indicates the artist spent the bulk of his career in Italy’s northern region of Lombardy, though he may trained elsewhere.
I’m including some of the artist’s work in this post, just because.
In the more painful world of politics, Trump had a bad day in New York yesterday, and he got some bad news in India; but he got some gifts from judges in Florida and Georgia.
As I’m sure you’re aware, Stormy Daniels testified in Trump’s hush money case yesterday.
Stormy Daniels, the adult-film actress at the center of Donald Trump’s hush money trial, testified Tuesday about a disturbing sexual encounter she says she had with him, leading to angry, profane muttering from the former president that alarmed the judge.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan called Trump’s lawyer Todd Blancheto a sidebar during a midday break to say that Trumpwas “cursing audibly” and possibly intimidating Daniels, who had begun testifying, according to a trial transcript.
Beggar Boy with a Piece of Pie (wearing a denim jacket)
“I understand that your client is upset at this point,” Merchan said to the defense attorney,according to the transcript,“but he is cursing audibly and he is shaking his headvisually and that’s contemptuous. It has the potential to intimidate the witness and the jury can see that.”
Blanche assured the judge he would speak to Trump.
“I am speaking to you here at the bench because I don’t want to embarrass him,” Merchan said. “You need to speak to him. I won’t tolerate that.”
The exchange punctuated a day of rage — sometimes whispered from the defense table, sometimes declared loudly by Daniels from the witness stand.
It was one of several surreal moments on the 13th day of the first criminal trial of a former U.S. president, including descriptions by Daniels of their alleged sexual encounter in 2006 that were so detailed that defense attorneys demanded a mistrial.
While Merchan rejected their request, Daniels at times seemed to be describing nonconsensual sex that could be considered highly prejudicial for the jury, which in turn could give Trump — the presumptive Republican presidential nominee — solid grounds to appeal if he is found guilty.
It sounds like the sex actually was nonconsensual though. Daniels’ description of what happened sounds very much like a date rape situation in which she was taken advantage of by a much older and more powerful man. She was 27. He was 60. He was much taller and stronger. She was invited for dinner, but there was no dinner. When she was ready to leave, she went to the bathroom. When she came back, he was on the bed in boxers. She tried to leave, but he blocked the door. This description is from Harry Litman on Twitter:
thought time to go. when opened the bathroom door, Trump had come in and was on the bed, in boxer shirts and a t-shirt. she was startled. felt like room spun in full motion. blood leaves my hands and feet. “ohmygod — what did I miss to get here?” she laughed nervously
The next thing I knew I was on the bed. opposite side of bed. missionary position. objection – sustained
I blacked out. but I was not drugged in any way, no alcohol. didn’t feel threatened physically “There was an imbalance of power for sure. but I was not threatened verbally or physically”
Had sex with him on the bed. Merchan sustaining objections to details. Staring at ceiling didn’t know how I got there. sustained. stricken touch his skin? objection sustained. he wasn’t wearing a condom. concerning to her but didn’t say anything.
sex was brief. remembers getting dressed. sitting on edge of bed, noticed completely dark outside. hard to get shoes on, hands shaking so hard. DJT: “oh it’s great, let’s get together again honey bunch.” I just wanted to leave. DVD she signed was on nightstand.
DJT: “We have to get together again soon” “we were so fantastic together. talked about the show” I just left as fast as I could. Didn’t express any concern about Melania. or mention her. didn’t have dinner. took cab back to hotel.
I felt ashamed I didn’t stop the sex so I didn’t tell many people about it. Remembered some additional details later. Merchan very stern about level of detail — wants to keep it spare.
It’s pretty clear from Daniels’ description that she was traumatized. I doubt if the judge understands that, but maybe some jurors will. Just because she is a porn actress doesn’t mean she can’t be raped. Her description is also reminiscent of E. Jean Carroll’s experience–Trump lifted her up against the wall and grabbed her genitals before she realized what was happening. It’s also reminisce of his own description in the Access Hollywood tape–how he can grab women “by the pussy. If you’re a star they let you do it.”
Daniels matters for reasons outside of the courtroom and the specifics of this hush-money trial. Daniels’ story is yet another reminder of what may prove to be Trump’s electoral downfall: His bottomless misogyny.
On the witness stand, Daniels reportedly spoke quickly and was apparently quite nervous. Initially, her story of meeting Trump sounded funny. She painted him as a pathetic older man trying — and failing — to impress the younger woman. When he first asked her to dinner, she replied “no,” but with an expletive. Her publicist eventually talked her into it, hoping Daniels could leverage the connection into a spot on “The Apprentice.” In his hotel room, she described him wearing “silk or satin” pajamas and asked him to put on real clothes. He allegedly used the “don’t even sleep in the same room” line when she asked about his wife, Melania, who had recently had a baby. Daniels described Trump as “pompous” and “arrogant.” She recounted how she jokingly spanked him with a magazine, hoping to tease him into being less of a jerk.
Then the tone of her story changed, as she described how they came to have sex. Trump waited until she was in the bathroom, Daniels said, and then he stripped down to boxer shorts and a T-shirt. “The room spun in slow motion,” she recalled on the witness stand. When she made for the door, “he was bigger and blocking the way,” she said of Trump. She denied it was sexual assault, however, because “I was not threatened either verbally or physically.” [….]
Whether or not Trump’s sexual encounter with Daniels was consensual in the legal sense, she describes it as unwanted.
“I didn’t say anything at all,” she told the court repeatedly. Claiming that she “blacked out” during the encounter, afterward, Daniels said, “my hands were shaking so hard” and “I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it and that I didn’t say ‘No.'”
Another painting by Master of the Blue Jeans
A person doesn’t have to be threatened in order for sex to be nonconsensual. Back to Marcotte’s piece:
Since the release of the “Access Hollywood” video in 2016, in which Trump can be heard bragging about sexual assault, the Beltway media has repeatedly tried to move on from the story of Trump’s legion of issues with women. Indeed, when Carroll’s accusations first came out in 2019, the press barely paid any mind. But the story of his rampant misogyny has never fully gone away. There was the Women’s March that overshadowed his 2017 inauguration. Then the over two dozen women who stepped forward with stories of being subject to the sexual harassment and assault Trump himself described so vividly. Trump, of course, is more responsible than any other person on the planet for the overturn of Roe v. Wade and the stampede of Republican state legislators banning abortion. He promised to stack the Supreme Court with anti-choice justices, and his three appointees provided the votes necessary in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health, which ended the legal right to abortion. While Trump has tried to make moderate-sounding noises on this issue, he keeps inadvertently revealing his anti-choice radicalism. In a recent Time interview, for instance, he indicated that he’s fine if states “monitor women’s pregnancies so they can know if they’ve gotten an abortion.”
On the stand, Daniels provided ugly details about how Trump treated her, and about how Trump treats, and views, women. These insights are notable, but they’re not new. In 2016, leaked audio of Trump making grotesque and sexist comments about women to Access Hollywood host Billy Bush almost derailed his presidential campaign. Last year, Trump was held liable for sexual assaulting and then repeatedly defaming advice columnist E. Jean Carroll.
But Daniels’s testimony is a reminder that contempt and mistreatment of women is a core theme of Trump’s life and politics. Both the press and Democratic opponents have struggled to make this issue central to 2024, even though abortion rights and women’s health care are the key issues of the campaign. It’s unclear whether the trial will spark more reporting and discussion of Trump’s treatment of and attitudes about women. But it should….
Daniels’s testimony is intended to establish the background facts of the payment. It also, though, paints Trump as a liar, a bully, and a sexual manipulator. Daniels said while she was in Trump’s hotel room, she went to the bathroom, and when he came out he was in his boxer shorts, a moment Daniels describes as “like a jump scare.” She said, “the room spun in slow motion” and she realized “I’ve put myself in this bad situation.”
Daniels is careful to emphasize that Trump did not physically coerce her. He did, however, according to Daniels, suggest that if she cooperated with him he could help her career through his connections and a possible appearance on the Celebrity Apprentice reality show, where Trump was the star. She eventually agreed to have sex even though Trump did not use a condom — she was adamant about using condoms in her adult film shoots.
By Master of the Blue Jeans.
She testified that during sex she stared at the ceiling and tried to think of something else, and afterwards she had trouble dressing because her hands were shaking. She said, “I felt ashamed that I didn’t stop it and that I didn’t say no.”
Daniels kept in touch with Trump for some time because he was still offering her the chance to appear on Celebrity Apprentice, which would have been a huge mainstream boost to her career. She met with Trump once more in Los Angeles, at which point “he kept trying to make sexual advances, putting his hand on my leg, scooting closer.” She rebuffed him, and in a later phone call he admitted he was not going to put her on his television show. At that point she ceased communicating with him.
Again, Daniels has not accused Trump of sexual harassment or violence, and she says their encounter was consensual. Her testimony makes clear, though, that Trump was pressuring her for sex in return for business opportunities — a variation on the ugly tradition of the Hollywood casting couch. We don’t know if Trump ever had any intention of keeping his promises or of helping Daniels. But whether he did or not, his actions as she describes them were sleazy at best, and she found the experience painful and traumatic enough to leave her literally shaking.
The encounter doesn’t sound consensual to me. As I said above, it sounds like date rape.
The judge presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal case in Florida — on charges that he hoarded classified secrets at his Mar-a-Lago estate after his presidency — has indefinitely postponed the trial, once scheduled for May 20.
The date had been widely expected to move amid a tangle of pretrial conflicts between special counsel Jack Smith and Trump’s attorneys. Smith had urged Judge Aileen Cannon to reschedule the trial to begin on July 8, but an order from the judge on Tuesday afternoon suggested that she is unlikely to even decide on a new trial date before late July.
Cannon, a Trump appointee who took the bench in late 2020, indicated in the order that, before setting a new trial date, she intends to resolve the backlog of other issues in the case that have piled up on her plate. Smith’s defenders have criticized Cannon for what they see as a plodding pace in resolving pretrial matters, and tensions between the special counsel and the judge have flared in recent months over a series of puzzling rulings that threatened to derail the case.
“[F]inalization of a trial date at this juncture — before resolution of the myriad and interconnected pre-trial and [classified evidence] issues … would be imprudent and inconsistent with the Court’s duty to fully and fairly consider the various pending pre-trial motions,” Cannon wrote in the five-page order.
That reshuffling further clouds the picture for Smith, who is also awaiting a Supreme Court ruling on presidential immunity that could determine whether his other case against Trump — charges in Washington D.C. for attempting to subvert the 2020 election — can move forward this year….
Trump has sought to delay all of his criminal cases until after this year’s election. If he wins, he could shut down the two federal cases brought by Smith, and the state cases in New York and Georgia also might have to be frozen.
The Georgia Court of Appeals on Wednesday decided to hear an appeal of a judge’s ruling allowing District Attorney Fani Willis to remain at the helm of Fulton County’s election interference case against former President Donald Trump.
The court’s decision almost certainly means a significant delay of a trial here for Trump and his 14 co-defendants and signals that Willis’ leadership role isn’t guaranteed. It is unclear how long the appeals court will take to decide the issue but they are not known for moving swiftly.
Farmers wearing jeans, 1930s
“There’s no way this case gets to trial this year,” said Atlanta defense attorney Andrew Fleischman, who is closing following the case. “I would expect the appeals court to issue its opinion some time next year.”
On March 29, Superior Court Judge Scott McAfee issued a “certificate of immediate review,” which allowed the defendants to appeal his ruling to the Georgia Court of Appeals before a trial begins.
Under Appeals Court rules, such a pretrial — or interlocutory — appeal is typically assigned to a three-judge screening panel. And all it takes is for one of those judges to decide whether the court accepts the appeal. The court’s order one-page order did not divulge which judge voted to grant the application.
In his order granting the pre-trial review, McAfee said he will continue working on the case, resolving pending motions, while the appeals court takes up the removal issue.
The bad news for Trump is that he is losing a significant percentage of Republican voters in the primaries, which are still going on. Niki Haley is still getting votes. Adam Wren and Madison Fernandez at Politico: Unexpected warning signs for Trump in busy Indiana primary.
In 2016, Indiana put Donald Trump on the doorstep of the GOP presidential nomination. But eight years later, the state he called “Importantville” delivered his campaign some flashing red warning signs as Nikki Haley cleaned up in the suburbs.
By virtue of its late-in-the-nominating-calendar primary, the Hoosier state has always occupied a unique and occasionally powerful perch to make or break candidacies: Sen. Ted Cruz and then-Ohio Gov. John Kasich dropped out immediately after Trump’s victory that year. But the barn-red state also often acts as a pace car for Republicans nationally.
And in a primary that saw a record-breaking $98 million splash across the state, according to AdImpact, Tuesday was no exception.
A zombie Haley candidacy continued to punch above its weight in the Trumpiest of states: The former South Carolina governor is on track to break 20 percent for the first time since she dropped out of the race two months ago.
Read more at the link.
I don’t know if you’ve been following the reporting about New York Times editor Joe Kahn and his pathetic explanations for why his paper seems to be rooting for another Trump presidency.
Joe Kahn, after two years in charge of the New York Times newsroom, has learned nothing.
He had an extraordinary opportunity, upon taking over from Dean Baquet, to right the ship: to recognize that the Times was not warning sufficiently of the threat to democracy presented by a second Trump presidency.
But to Kahn, democracy is a partisan issue and he’s not taking sides. He made that clear in an interview with obsequious former employee Ben Smith, now the editor of Semafor.
Kahn accused those of us asking the Times to do better of wanting it to be a house organ of the Democratic party:
To say that the threats of democracy are so great that the media is going to abandon its central role as a source of impartial information to help people vote — that’s essentially saying that the news media should become a propaganda arm for a single candidate, because we prefer that candidate’s agenda.
But critics like me aren’t asking the Times to abandon its independence. We’re asking the Times to recognize that it isn’t living up to its own standards of truth-telling and independence when it obfuscates the stakes of the 2024 election, covers up for Trump’s derangement, and goes out of its way to make Biden look weak.
And to the extent that Kahn has changed anything in the Times newsroom since Baquet left, it’s to double down on a form of objectivity that favors the comfortable-white-male perspective and considers anything else little more than hysteria.
Throwing Baquet under the bus, Kahn called the summer of the Black Lives Matter protests “an extreme moment” during which the Times lost its way.
“I think we’ve learned from it. I think we found our footing after that,” he said.
I translate that to mean that the old guard has reasserted total control over the rabble.
Read the rest at Press Watch.
I’ll wrap this up with a couple of creepy stories about Robert Kennedy Jr.
In 2010, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. was experiencing memory loss and mental fogginess so severe that a friend grew concerned he might have a brain tumor. Mr. Kennedy said he consulted several of the country’s top neurologists, many of whom had either treated or spoken to his uncle, Senator Edward M. Kennedy, before his death the previous year of brain cancer.
Several doctors noticed a dark spot on the younger Mr. Kennedy’s brain scans and concluded that he had a tumor, he said in a 2012 deposition reviewed by The New York Times. Mr. Kennedy was immediately scheduled for a procedure at Duke University Medical Center by the same surgeon who had operated on his uncle, he said.
While packing for the trip, he said, he received a call from a doctor at NewYork-Presbyterian Hospital who had a different opinion: Mr. Kennedy, he believed, had a dead parasite in his head.
The doctor believed that the abnormality seen on his scans “was caused by a worm that got into my brain and ate a portion of it and then died,” Mr. Kennedy said in the deposition.
Gross. Maybe that explains some of his weird ideas?
A right-wing social media influencer hired by Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign who previously said Jan. 6 was “Democrat misdirection” appears to have himself been on the restricted grounds of the U.S. Capitol during the attack.
Marilyn Monroe in blue jeans
NBC News first reported that Kennedy’s campaign hired Zach Henry’s firm, Total Virality, for “influencer engagement” in March. Henry had worked as deputy communications director for Republican Vivek Ramaswamy’s presidential campaign, as well as for Blake Masters during his Senate run in Arizona.
Henry, as NBC News reported, had posted that Jan. 6 was “no MAGA insurrection Just more Democrat misdirection” and appears to have embraced conspiracy theories about the Capitol attack, including posting that “antifa” was behind it, which is false.
But photos and videos uncovered by NBC News and online “sedition hunters,” who have aided the FBI in hundreds of cases against Capitol rioters, appear to show Henry among the mob outside the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, beyond the previously established police lines, although it is unclear whether any of the barricades and “restricted” signs remained by the time he arrived.
There is no indication that Henry entered the Capitol or that he engaged in assaults on police officers or in destruction of property. Federal prosecutors have almost entirely focused their resources on Jan. 6 participants who either went inside the building or committed violence or destruction outside it, so there is little chance that Henry would be charged; the few nonviolent Jan. 6 defendants who were charged solely for going on restricted Capitol grounds were generally charged with misdemeanors.
But Henry’s presence on Capitol grounds would be significant given his previous social media posts about Jan. 6 and his new position on Kennedy’s campaign as Kennedy runs for president as an independent against former President Donald Trump.
That’s it for me today. What stories have you been following?
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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.
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?
BREAKING: Judge Merchan drops a bombshell on Donald Trump in his criminal hush money trial, reveals a slew of damaging information that prosecutors can mention.
This is from the Washington Post’slive 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.
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?
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“New York Attorney General Letitia James makes a statement.” John Buss, @repeat1968
Good Day, Sky Dancers!
Well, it’s another Monday, another Trump court appearance, and more drama. I’m wondering what all those TV court lawyers would do with all these cases! Trump has already tweeted that he’s like Jesus with a Psalm reference that predates the story of Jesus by about 600 years. I haven’t been a Christian for about 30 years, so please refresh my memory. Isn’t blasphemy a big deal? So, today’s courtroom drama is about the bond to be posted to secure the Trump family’s fraud verdict and the Hush Money. There’s just so much criming with these people that it’s hard to keep up. Anyway, the Jesus comparison came up during the Stormy Daniels case. The trolling on the social media platforms is epic.
He took to his social media platform to share a post an unidentified person sent him comparing him to Jesus in relation to his separate civil business fraud case, sharing the Bible verse, Psalm 109:3–8.
“Received this morning — Beautiful, thank you! ‘It’s ironic that Christ walked through His greatest persecution the very week they are trying to steal your property from you. But have you seen this verse…?'” he wrote.
Trump faced a Monday deadline to pay the $454 million fine or post bond in his business fraud case after Judge Arthur Engoron in February ordered him to pay $355 million after siding with New York Attorney General Letitia James in a civil suit. The payment shot up past $450 million with interest.
James accused Trump and top executives at the Trump Organization of conspiring to increase his net worth by billions of dollars on financial statements provided to banks and insurers to make deals and secure loans. Trump maintains that he did not engage in any wrongdoing, accusing James of targeting him for political purposes.
Trump received some good news from an appeals court on Monday, which reduced his bond to $175 million dollars, substantially lower than the $454 million bond ordered by Judge Engoron, and gave him 10 more days to pay those funds. Trump has not yet commented on the ruling.
He previously faced an end of the day deadline to pay the larger bond or James could have started seizing his properties and assets. The former president has been sharply critical of her handling of the case, on Monday releasing several statements on Truth Social accusing her of election interference.
Would you see this in a Perry Mason episode or a Matlock script? No crime writer would even dream up these storylines. David Cay Johnson wrote this today for The New Republic. “GAME OVER. Today Is the Day That 50 Years of Grifting Finally Comes to an End. Unless Donald Trump comes up with $454 million, he’s in deep doo-doo. But will his backers ever wake up to reality?” You’d think getting a break on this bond would hurt the brand more than the case itself. His big enterprise is unbondable!
Have you ever seen a millionaire begging for $5? Me neither. Yet I just watched Donald Trump in an internet video pleading for $5, or $10, or “even $25” from his supporters. That’s a pitch aimed at the people Trump says he loves, “the poorly educated,” who, after all, don’t have much money.
The supposed business genius with the Midas touch looked desperate—a better-dressed version of one of those troubled souls hanging out near traffic intersections hoping to cadge a dollar or two from people waiting for the light to turn green.
After more than 50 years of grifting, Trump has reached the end of his faux-gold brick road. Today, unless Trump somehow produces the cash to cover his bond, Letitia James, the elected New York State attorney general, is going to start grabbing up Trump properties like she landed on his Monopoly squares. That will constitute a kind of end, although Trump’s journey is never finished. He still enjoys solid support from malefactors of power who openly declare their intent to rend our Constitution and end our freedoms. Incredible as it seems, he still could move back into the White House.
Think of James as Dorothy, whose little dog Toto pulls back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. There’s another cinema analogy that’s even more on point, which we’ll get to shortly. But with respect to Oz, the script from that delightful 1939 classic perfectly describes the con job Trump has pulled off for a half-century—until now. Millions of Americans—like the naïvely happy-go-lucky residents of the mythical Emerald City—believe he has godlike powers, so we should fear him and submit to his whims. “Do not arouse the arouse the wrath of the great Oz,” the magical image proclaims to Dorothy and her three friends amid smoke, lights, and loud noises.
Eventually, of course, Toto pulls back the curtain and reveals the traveling snake oil salesman from Kansas, who continues dissembling even when the fraud is uncovered. “Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain,” he says, trying to cover his naked lies before admitting, yes, it’s true. “I’m a humbug,” he acknowledges, a pure fraud through and through.
Trump will never admit he’s a fraud. His mentor, the notorious lawyer Roy Cohn, taught him never to give an inch. When challenged by law enforcement or anyone else, Cohn taught Trump, attack them as corrupt, dishonest, and jealous enemies of an honest and successful man.
For nearly a month, Trump has been trying everywhere to get someone with deep enough pockets to cover the roughly half-billion dollars he needs to post to prevent the seizure of his bank accounts, real estate, and other assets to pay the judgment against him for persistent fraud.
Meanwhile, we have this Washington Post Live Coverage over the Trump N.Y. Hush money case.
New York Supreme Court Justice Juan Merchan appeared deeply skeptical during a hearing Monday morning about claims by Donald Trump’s defense lawyers in his hush money criminal trial.
Trump’s lawyers said a late release of more than 100,000 pages of potential evidence should delay the case significantly, and they asked that the prosecutors be sanctioned. Merchan admonished Trump’s attorneys for making what he called very serious allegations and questioned why the defense did not seek the records from federal officials sooner.
A key question for Monday’s hearing is whether the judge will set a new trial date, after delaying jury selection until at least mid-April. The hearing stopped for a break shortly before 11:15 a.m. and is expected to resume around noon.
In an attempt to better understand what we are witnessing with Donald Trump’s behavior, I recently spoke with Dr. Elizabeth Zoffman, a forensic psychiatrist and an Associate Clinical Professor of Forensic and General Psychiatry at the University of British Columbia. Dr. Zoffmann shares her evidence-based preliminary conclusion that Donald Trump is displaying a range of behaviors that suggest cognitive challenges if not impairment. The former president appears to be suffering from Behavioral Variant Fronto-Temporal Dementia, Dr. Zoffmann concludes, and needs to be evaluated by neurologists who specialize in the condition.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity:
What do you see when you look at Donald Trump through a clinical lens?
My observations are garnered from viewing the phenomenon of Mr. Trump for the past decade. Also, observations from viewing old videotape interviews and coverage of Mr. Trump as a younger man form part of my impression that Mr. Trump might benefit from a thorough evaluation by a neuropsychiatrist with expertise in neurodegenerative disorders. My observations are as follows:
Changes in speech patterns with many fewer and simpler words (decline in vocabulary) with fewer adjectives and adverbs.
A decline in cognitive focus on speech subjects with incomplete sentences and an inability to focus on a topic long enough to complete a sentence when not reading from a teleprompter.
Difficulty pronouncing words, word substitution and nonsense words – known as paraphasia
Tangential thinking where the topic switches mid-sentence to some unrelated topic.
Frequent repetition of words and phrases as if his mind is stuck in a loop.
Disinhibition and an inability to control verbal outbursts.
Socially inappropriate behavior – mocking a man with muscular dystrophy, disrespecting fallen soldiers as losers.
Lack of self-awareness in that he apparently cannot see how inappropriate his behavior has become and use his judgment to stop himself.
Changes in movement and gait. His walk appears wide-based and he has developed a swing of his right leg. He appears glued to the floor when he “dances” for his audience. If caught on camera standing still, he appears unnaturally immobile.
The changes in judgment and impulse control have uncovered and perhaps worsened underlying personality traits that others have characterized as narcissistic and antisocial. The changes have led some experts to suggest a diagnosis of “malignant narcissism.”
Mr. Trump has stated that he passed a cognitive that he described in terms that suggested either the Mini-Mental Status Exam (MMSE) or the Montreal Cognitive Assessment (MOCA) scale. These are both simple screening tests for suspicions of Alzheimer’s Disease.
Democratic Women in Louisiana are about troll James Carville just the way LSU evidently did when he quit his job. Mr Carville appears to have a woman problem. He wants them to shut up. Perhaps he should take it up with his wife, Mary Matalin. “James Carville ended LSU teaching gig after souring on campus culture, he tells New York Times.”
James Carville, the outspoken, ever-entertaining political consultant known for his love of New Orleans and his LSU Tigers, ended a teaching gig at his alma mater after souring on a campus culture that made him “scared to death in my job.”
The Ragin’ Cajun, who rose to fame as a top aide to President Bill Clinton during his 1992 campaign, told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that complaints from a student about an off-color joke in his class a few years ago earned him a visit from a dean — and prompted him to take it up a notch by reciting the famously raunchy “Aristocrats” joke.
The experience led him to step back from teaching, he said.
This was L.S. freaking U., not Oberlin,” Carville told the New York Times. “It was terrible. I wouldn’t take the coeds to dinner after class. I would take the male students. I was scared to death in my job. I was like: ‘I don’t need L.S.U.’s money. I don’t need to drive up there and listen to that crap.’ I just said: ‘That’s it. I’m done. This is not for me.’”
Democratic strategist James Carville argued “too many preachy females” in the Democratic Party could be to blame for President Biden’s bleeding support from key voters.
In an interview published Saturday with New York Times opinion columnist Maureen Dowd, Carville voiced concerns about the culture of the Democratic Party and how it could be impacting Biden’s support among voters, especially those that are male.
“A suspicion of mine is that there are too many preachy females … ‘Don’t drink beer, don’t watch football, don’t eat hamburgers, this is not good for you,’” he said. “The message is too feminine: ‘Everything you’re doing is destroying the planet. You’ve got to eat your peas.’”
Carville, who was a strategist for former President Clinton’s 1992 presidential campaign, argued this culture and rhetoric is not addressing the concerns of male voters.
“If you listen to Democratic elites — NPR is my go-to place for that — the whole talk is about how women, and women of color, are going to decide this election. I’m like: ‘Well, 48 percent of the people that vote are males. Do you mind if they have some consideration?” Carville said.
When it comes to Biden’s low approval ratings, Carville quipped, “When I look at these polling numbers, it’s like walking in on your grandma naked. You can’t get the image out of your mind.”
Carville in recent weeks has also expressed concerns about Biden’s falling support among voters of color and called it a “problem” for the incumbent last week.
Like Carville, Ronna Romney McDaniel has that sweet gig with MSNBC/NBC. Maybe it’s time for the company to take a big brand hit. We were a Huntley Brinkley family when I was a kid, but this is ridiculous. She appeared on Meet the Press yesterday, and Kristen Welker and Chuck Todd apologized for the appearance. It’s an odd day when Chuck Todd is the stand-out guy.
This is Philip Bump’s analysis from today’s Washington Post. “Ronna McDaniel quickly demonstrates that her view isn’t worth the cost.”
There’s not a lot of value for journalists in interviewing an echo. Instead of standing inside a canyon trying to ask follow-up questions of the words bouncing off the walls around you, better to just go to the source.
Ronna McDaniel’s tenure as chair of the Republican Party unfolded in the Donald Trump era of American politics. She assumed the position a day before Trump was inaugurated in 2017 and remained there until Trump decided it was time for her to go. As the titular head of a party actually led by the former president, McDaniel’s Linda Yaccarino-like role was largely centered on having the party do the things it normally does and then appearing at news conferences to nod along with the things Trump was saying.
He’d shout; she’d echo. But last week NBC News decided it was worth paying her money to hear what she had to say.
McDaniel debuted her role as a contributor to the network on Sunday’s episode of “Meet the Press.” She tried to explain to host Kristen Welker that she did have a point of view that did extend beyond serving as Trump’s hypeman.
The article continues to cite example after example, ending with this thought.
(Among the social media posts identified as misinformation — unfairly, according to Jordan — was one from Newt Gingrich. It used the Pennsylvania Supreme Court’s decision that signature-matching could be set aside to argue that “Pennsylvania democrats are methodically changing the rules so they can steal the election.” Untrue then, untrue now — and an obvious contributor to the false idea that the 2020 results should be considered suspect.)
Not only was Jordan’s interview recorded, allowing for corrections, he was treated as someone who could not be relied upon to offer unbiased information. He’s a politician, acting politically. McDaniel, in theory, is a private citizen free to speak her mind. But her debut on NBC News still resulted in familiar echoes of Trump. Viewers were presented with McDaniel doing what she has done for seven years, making Trump’s approach more palatable.
At one point, Welker asked McDaniel whether she’d facilitated Trump’s lies about the 2020 election. McDaniel claimed that her support for the nonsense that emerged in the wake of the election was simply her doing due diligence about the claims being elevated by Trump’s allies.
“So [from] where I was in 2020, and the quotes that are being taken from a very long time ago,” she said, “three and a half years ago, to where I am today, you’ve got to allow that process to play out.”
Less than a minute before, she had claimed that the results in Pennsylvania that year were dubious, which they weren’t. This is what NBC News is paying for.
This has been a challenging political environment for all of us. It does not help that all forms of media do not self-regulate themselves and question their role in our democracy. I can only hope the NBC family of companies and its stock takes a huge hit. For most of these businesses owned by billionaires, market discipline is the only thing that cleanses the rot. The justice system appears to have taken on the same stench of too much money and not enough justice. To watch yet another white man commit crime after crime and dodge it with the same ease as he did the draft back in the Vietnam War days is appalling.
Too many billionaires with only money on their minds own huge businesses, big politics, and the justice system these days. It’s time to make them pay. Pitchforks anyone? Guillotines?
What’s on your reading and blogging list today?
This is for my blogging buddy and RL friend Adrastos, whose wonderful cats have names from the show. Perry is cute. I miss Della Street and Paul Drake. My mother watched this show like a pious church lady going to church on Sunday.
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The Sky Dancing banner headline uses a snippet from a work by artist Tashi Mannox called 'Rainbow Study'. The work is described as a" study of typical Tibetan rainbow clouds, that feature in Thanka painting, temple decoration and silk brocades". dakinikat was immediately drawn to the image when trying to find stylized Tibetan Clouds to represent Sky Dancing. It is probably because Tashi's practice is similar to her own. His updated take on the clouds that fill the collection of traditional thankas is quite special.
You can find his work at his website by clicking on his logo below. He is also a calligraphy artist that uses important vajrayana syllables. We encourage you to visit his on line studio.
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.
Would you see this in a Perry Mason episode or a Matlock script? No crime writer would even dream up these storylines. David Cay Johnson wrote this today for The New Republic. “GAME OVER. Today Is the Day That 50 Years of Grifting Finally Comes to an End. Unless Donald Trump comes up with $454 million, he’s in deep doo-doo. But will his backers ever wake up to reality?” You’d think getting a break on this bond would hurt the brand more than the case itself. His big enterprise is unbondable!
Meanwhile, we have this Washington Post Live Coverage over the Trump N.Y. Hush money case.
Democratic Women in Louisiana are about troll James Carville just the way LSU evidently did when he quit his job. Mr Carville appears to have a woman problem. He wants them to shut up. Perhaps he should take it up with his wife, Mary Matalin. “James Carville ended LSU teaching gig after souring on campus culture, he tells New York Times.”
Like Carville, Ronna Romney McDaniel has that sweet gig with MSNBC/NBC. Maybe it’s time for the company to take a big brand hit. We were a Huntley Brinkley family when I was a kid, but this is ridiculous. She appeared on Meet the Press yesterday, and Kristen Welker and Chuck Todd apologized for the appearance. It’s an odd day when Chuck Todd is the stand-out guy.
The article continues to cite example after example, ending with this thought.
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