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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: More reactions to the Trump indictment [1]

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Date: 2023-04-02  

Lucian A. Truscott IV of Salon says that there will be very little extraordinary about Trump’s arraignment on Tuesday.

The only extraordinary thing about the entire matter will be the presence of at least one Secret Service agent, to which Trump is entitled as a former president. Everything else that will happen to Donald Trump next Tuesday will be pretty much the same thing that happens to any other defendant in New York City charged with a felony. Trump, accustomed to the gilded splendor of Mar-a-Lago and the wide, green fairways of his many golf courses, will walk through the plain-painted, linoleum-floored corridors of the Criminal Courts Building into an ordinary New York courtroom to be arraigned as an ordinary alleged criminal. Donald Trump may be a former President of the United States, but he is being criminally charged as a private citizen. [...] Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has made over 100 indictments for business fraud similar to the one he brought against Trump since taking office on January 1, 2022, adding to the ordinariness of the indictment announced yesterday. Apparently, it is commonplace in Manhattan for businesspeople to commit fraud by making personal or business payments and then lying about the purpose for which the payments were made in official documents or tax returns. At this point, there is a mystery about what the "up-charge" in the indictment might be. An "up-charge" is legal slang for the reason a misdemeanor crime is increased to a felony because of a twist in the law. Simply falsifying business records by lying about their purpose is a misdemeanor in New York. It becomes a felony if the purpose of the falsification was to cover up the commission of another crime. There has been speculation that the second crime Trump sought to cover up may have involved campaign financing or campaign fraud, in that the purpose of both the Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal payments was to gain an advantage in Trump's political campaign for president. In that scenario, the payments would be seen as illegal contributions to Trump's campaign, which was one of the charges Michael Cohen pled guilty to in 2018. Cohen's payments amounted to an illegal contribution "for the principal purpose of influencing the election," according to the charges against Cohen. Of course, Cohen's conviction was at the federal level, while Trump is being charged by the state. Tying the two cases would be a rather novel legal gambit.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo goes zen about all of the Trump indictment news.

...when I went on the Ari Melber show I made the point that Donald Trump has managed to cast a spell over so many of us that we can’t help living in his drama. We shouldn’t do that. And that’s what a huge amount of “Is this case big enough? Should this case go first?” is about. You can see that right here if you haven’t already. [...] x He's the point I was most interested to make on the Melber show. pic.twitter.com/wqH7kjuVyN — Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) March 30, 2023 For years Americans have debated the special status of the presidency and what standards should be applied to a president’s potential criminal wrongdoing, either during or after their presidency. While no president is above the law, we cannot deny that they are distinct creatures in the constitutional order. These are interesting and challenging discussions. But the current situation is not. Donald Trump hasn’t just broken the law. He’s done it in numerous and overlapping domains and consistently through his whole eight-year political career. He’s committed monetary crimes tied to his personal business. He’s repeatedly sought to corrupt public institutions, not least by obstructing justice and using the law as a tool of his personal vengeance. He’s incited violence and even orchestrated a multifaceted conspiracy to overthrow the government itself. He has committed crimes of a personal and pecuniary nature and other crimes of a public and political nature. Perhaps his most emblematic offense is confusing the matter by fusing the two in ways that make them almost indistinguishable.

Marianna Spring of BBC News gives us an online tour of the reaction to Number 45’s in (primarily) pro-Trump social media spaces.

On the sites like Telegram where Trump's most committed devotees gather, there's a different mood. This is where the sprawling, unfounded QAnon conspiracy theory thrives - it says the former president is waging a secret war against elite, Satan-worshipping paedophiles in government, business and the media. There are two competing narratives unfolding simultaneously in these channels. The first involves angry and sometimes violent rhetoric directed at the government, along with cryptic calls to action. Messages include "Here We Go!!" and "Their turn is coming soon". Others refer to false claims the 2020 election was rigged and Trump was the rightful winner, explaining "see if we'll stand against this fake government should Trump [be] arrested". The more extreme messages call for followers to "Kill the Deep State" but there is no visible evidence of plans to riot.

Cleve R. Wootson of The Washington Post reports that for Vice President Kamala Harris, her trip to Africa got personal.

For the last week, Harris’s official mission in Africa has been to convey the keen U.S. interest in the continent. She has announced billions in aid dollars, convened high-powered meetings and waved off worries that America’s interest in Africa is just part of its larger chess match with China. But as Harris clocked more than 4,000 miles between Ghana, Tanzania and Zambia, she has leaned into aspects of her identity and biography more than at any other point in her vice presidency. Her tone was particularly notable for a politician whose historic appointment embodies the country’s diversity but who has at times resisted being confined by the adjectives that describe her. Instead, this week, her identity was constantly on display, if not openly invoked — sometimes in searing and deeply personal ways. On Tuesday, at a former way station in Ghana for enslaved people, she was a child of the diaspora, fighting tears after laying a bouquet at a women’s dungeon and hearing a mournful song that was once sung by captives. Two days later, in Tanzania, she spoke about women’s empowerment while onstage with the nation’s female president, two “firsts” a few feet from each other.

Mark Stencel and Erica Ryan write for Duke Reporters’ Lab that there is a dearth of fact-checking of local elected officials by local news outlets.

An extensive review by the Duke Reporters’ Lab of candidates and races that were fact-checked found only a small percentage of politicians and public officials were held accountable for the accuracy of what they said. The results were striking. Governors were the most likely elected officials to face review by fact-checkers at the state and local level. But still fewer than half of the governors had even a single statement checked (19 out of 50). [...] The smaller the office, the smaller the chance of being checked. Out of 7,386 state legislative seats, just 47 of those lawmakers were checked (0.6%). And among the more than 1,400 U.S. mayors of cities of 30,000 people or more, just seven were checked (0.5%). These results build on an earlier Reporters’ Lab report immediately after the election, which showed vast geographical gaps in fact-checking at the state and local level. Voters in these “fact deserts” have few, if any, ways to keep up with misleading political claims on TV and social media. Nor can they easily hold public officials and institutions accountable for any inaccuracies and disinformation they spread.

Enric González of El País in English wonders if the left has become as puritanical as the right.

Every era has its incoherencies. In A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens makes this point to his Victorian readers in the novel’s very first paragraph, conveying that in the 18th century, the century of the French Revolution, conditions were as complex as they seemed in 1859: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times […] it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair.” These lines from Dickens still apply today: we are more informed than ever, and more uninformed than ever; more connected than ever, and more isolated than ever; oblivious to morality and, at the same time, stubbornly moralistic. The term “nagging left” has become popular (the Spanish writer Javier Cercas used the term just a few days ago) in reference to the supposedly puritanical attitudes of progressives and their apparent propensity to meddle in other people’s personal lives. Faced with this “nagging left,” the right, traditionally the political persuasion most associated with “moralism,” has taken a more libertarian position. Has the world turned upside down? […] The internet and social media are an important factor in understanding the phenomenon. Spanish psychologist and writer Edu Galán compares the development of the internet to the invention of the printing press, and concludes that both technological advances had similar disruptive effects. “With social media, people are trying to attract attention,” he says, “and there’s no better way to do this than to practice individualistic exhibitionism and to morally criticize others.”

Interesting question since I don’t think that any era can get much more “puritanical” than the centuries-long Spanish Inquisition or even the Franco era in spite of the statement by one of the Spanish journalists interviewed by González that “Anglo-Saxon ‘cancel culture’“ will not catch on in Spain.

Then again, Spain isn’t canceling Michelangelo’s “David.” And neither is “The Left.”

Finally today, Rachel Rizzo of Lawfare grades the first six months of Giorgia Meloni’s tenure as Prime Minister of Italy.

In February I spent a few days in Rome, where I held a series of conversations with various policymakers and thought leaders on Italy in the EU, NATO, and the U.S.-Italian relationship. One thing struck me: I didn’t hear anything bad about Meloni. Not even from people who disagree with her. I even tried to coax people, in a way, to be critical. It didn’t work. Coming from the U.S., I was surprised. These days, it’s hard to have conversations here that don’t include barbs being thrown at one party or another. The overall impression I took away is that Italians want her to do a good job, which I respect. A strong Italy that gets along with Brussels and has a good relationship with the United States means an Italy that is more relevant on the world stage. The broader picture, however, is more complicated. [...] Thus far, however, she’s been shockingly transatlanticist in her approach to foreign policy and has deftly managed her coalition government at home. At the risk of losing popularity (given that only 40 percent of Italians approve of Italy supplying weapons to Ukraine), she’s been very public about the need to provide long-term support for the country, even while Berlusconi has gone so far as to blame Ukraine for the war. Since the invasion began, Italy has provided weaponry and taken in more than 170,000 Ukrainian refugees, policies that Meloni has not only not reversed or publicly criticized, but championed. In fact, As Ivan Krastev and Mark Leonard wrote in Foreign Policy, the support of Meloni points to a broader theme in Europe: “The war reconciled many European nationalists to the idea of a stronger and more united EU, while at the same time forcing many pro-European liberals to discover the mobilizing power of anti-imperial nationalism.” Meloni has even tried flexing her global muscles. In a recent trip to India (the first by an Italian prime minister in five years), she pushed for Prime Minister Narendra Modi to help facilitate a “just peace” in Ukraine.[...] Meloni does deserve credit for proving her detractors wrong thus far, at least in terms of foreign policy. But I kept trying to square Meloni’s performance on the international stage with her conservative social policies at home. She’s taken an approach to migrants in the Mediterranean Sea that many would call inhumane—France, for example, let an Ocean Viking rescue ship carrying hundreds of migrants dock in Toulon after Italy refused it. Additionally, there are very real and legitimate fears among Italy’s LGBTQ+ community given that Meloni “presents herself as a defender of Christian values and an enemy of what she calls ‘gender ideology’ and the ‘LGBT lobby’.” Same-sex adoption is also on the chopping block; this month, the government instructed the city of Milan to to stop registering children of same-sex parents. The intricacies of Italian domestic laws require the U.S. and Brussels to continue to watch this disconnect between Meloni’s foreign and domestic policies.

Have the best possible day, everyone!

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2023/4/2/2161468/-Abbreviated-Pundit-Roundup-More-reactions-to-the-Trump-indictment

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