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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: The Zen of being a Trump reporter [1]

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Date: 2023-04-03  

x With the historic & unprecedented indictment of a former President coming this week, I think we should recognize the media titan who's publication earned the Pulitzer Prize in 2019 for the big story that first exposed it:



Rupert Murdoch.https://t.co/5Keqy1QbAY — Michael Socolow (@MichaelSocolow) April 2, 2023

Check out the first paragraph in this Associated Press piece by Matt Sedensky:

New York, city of Trump’s dreams, delivers his comeuppance His name has been plastered on this city’s tabloids, bolted to its buildings and cemented to a special breed of brash New York confidence. Now, with Donald Trump due to return to the place that put him on the map, the city he loved is poised to deliver his comeuppance.

And check out the second:

x THIS should have been the lead.



Not too late to put out a 2nd lead-write through, @JuliePace https://t.co/S3yh2xLI8Q — S.V. Dáte (@svdate) April 2, 2023

Bloomberg:

Trump Weighs Bid to Shift NY Criminal Case to Staten Island Former president’s lawyers may seek move out of Manhattan

Legal experts say defendants don’t have right to friendly jury

Actually, Donald Trump would like the court venue moved to Texas. He has several judges in mind.

x NEW: The teachers at the Nashville school where three students and three teachers were killed 🚨WERE ARMED🚨



Police hit a moving target less than 30% of the time, but MAGA extremists want us to believe teachers should be sharpshooters. https://t.co/bPqjC2FUAj — Shannon Watts (@shannonrwatts) April 2, 2023

The Moscow Times:

Evan Gershkovich's Arrest Means No Journalist Can Feel Safe in Russia Today Foreign correspondents in Russia have been forced to develop a very sophisticated early warning system for danger in the two decades since Vladimir Putin came to power. In a country where the letter of the law matters only when someone powerful decides to use it, this mechanism has been the only way most journalists have been able to continue operating safely inside the country. Under Putin, Russia very rapidly reverted to the tried and tested methods employed by police states for dealing with foreign journalists, namely threatening to withhold visas, and thus access to the country, as leverage in an attempt to coerce them to provide more positive coverage. Even as early as 2002, when Putin had only been in power for two years, 31 foreign journalists had their press passes revoked for alleged “illegal journalistic activity,” 18 of whom were subsequently refused re-entry to Russia and had their Russian visa applications rejected. The early warning system for journalists involved two key institutions: the Foreign Ministry and Dmitry Peskov, Putin’s spokesperson. The FSB also played a role in the Kremlin's cat-and-mouse game with foreign journalists as it was the agency's counterintelligence department that formally revoked press visas. It also fell to the FSB to look out for any “missteps” by foreign correspondents (entering one of Russia's many "prohibited zones" was always the transgression most beloved by the Chekists) and then to use those mistakes to approach and recruit.

Journalism is a difficult job, and sometimes a very dangerous job. We can admire those who do their jobs under difficult and dangerous circumstances and still think the Trump whisperers are … not in that category. Hence my annoyance to those who suck up to power in trade for access.

But enough of that. What does Ivanka think?

x All of Evan’s reporting is now free to read. https://t.co/3kXPOTjS8t — Matthew Rose (@MtthwRose) April 1, 2023

Both the Pulitzer for hush money (see above) and Gershkovich’s reporting are a reminder that at The WSJ, reporting ≠ opinion section. And at Fox, their polling is very good.

POLITICO:

The data’s clear: The indictment makes Republicans like Trump more There were a number of public surveys conducted in the lead up to the indictment. And they all showed a similar story. Pollsters will likely go back into the field now, but the protracted run-up to charges being filed against the former president allowed a number of pollsters to gauge Americans’ opinions about the matter. In a number of surveys released over the past two weeks, most Americans said the then-rumored charges against Trump were fair and serious. In an NPR/PBS NewsHour/Marist College poll released last week, 56 percent of Americans said, taken together, the investigations into Trump’s conduct were fair, and 55 percent of voters in a Quinnipiac University poll out this week said the probe into Trump’s alleged hush-money payments to porn star Stormy Daniels was serious. But among Republicans, those numbers were all reversed. They believed Trump was being unfairly targeted — 80 percent of Republicans in the Marist poll said Trump is facing a “witch hunt” — and New York County District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s office was bringing charges for conduct that is either legal or not serious enough to merit criminal indictment.

The similar story is bolded above and shown below:

x Americans believe many of Trump’s actions were criminal or wrong, including:



➡️ Stormy Daniels payments (76%)



➡️ Using campaign funds for personal expenses (73%)



➡️ Georgia election obstruction (73%)



➡️ Obstructing Jan. 6 vote count (70%) pic.twitter.com/cK6P8afr0r — Navigator Research (@NavigatorSurvey) March 31, 2023

Interestingly, in this survey, Stormy Daniels ranks highest of the charges, which might be familiarity. Or, it might be clarity, since it’s very easy to understand.

What I found remarkable is that lawyers think the Mar-a-Lago documents case is the strongest open and shut one; Georgia/Jan. 6 are more “serious” and the public thinks those are bad but, well, the Stormy Daniels thing is just wrong.

I get that some will vote for him anyway (and some will change their mind under pressure from Republican leaders), but if you are running for office, this is not good.

x It's okay to say that the United States is "deeply" split by Trump, so long as you also make clear that is *NOT* "evenly" split by Trump. — David Frum (@davidfrum) April 1, 2023

See also Ron Brownstein/The Atlantic:

Trump’s Legal Problems Are Putting the GOP in a Vise The investigations highlight all the aspects of his political identity that have alienated so many swing voters. The dilemma for the Republican Party is that Donald Trump’s mounting legal troubles may be simultaneously strengthening him as a candidate for the GOP presidential nomination and weakening him as a potential general-election nominee. In the days leading up to the indictment of the former president, which Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg announced two days ago, a succession of polls showed that Trump has significantly increased his lead over Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, his closest competitor in the race for the Republican nomination. Yet recent surveys have also signaled that this criminal charge—and other potential indictments from ongoing investigations—could deepen the doubts about Trump among the suburban swing voters who decisively rejected him in the 2020 presidential race, and powered surprisingly strong performances by Democrats in the 2018 and 2022 midterms. “It is definitely a conundrum that this potentially helps him in the primary yet sinks the party’s chances to win the general,” says Mike DuHaime, a GOP strategist who advises former New Jersey Governor Chris Christie, a potential candidate for the 2024 Republican nomination. “This better positions [in the primary] our worst candidate for the general election.”

David Rothkopf/The Daily Beast:

Why The World Looks at the Trump Case and…Yawns It is hard to find a major country as reluctant to require its leaders to face the legal music as we have been. In the eyes of the world’s media, the indictment of Donald Trump was not the big freaking deal many Americans might expect. Save for a handful of English-language websites and newspapers, the story ranked beneath most regional and local concerns and in more than a handful it was found alongside or just above the coverage of other celebrity news items like the denial of parole to Paralympic sprinter Oscar Pistorius and the Gwyneth Paltrow ski accident trial. There’s a reason for this and it may be hard for many Americans to hear. For all our chest-thumping about our world-leading democracy, we lag the world in living up to the idea that no one is above the law, particularly when it comes to heads of state and government. While, as much coverage at home and abroad noted, the indictment of a president is unique in American history, to the rest of the world, holding leaders to account is much more commonplace.

Richard Nixon’s legacy. Ronald Reagan’s Iran-Contra contribution. Welcome to the rest of the world.

Greg Sargent and Paul Waldman/The Washington Post:

The unhinged GOP defense of Trump is the real ‘test’ for our democracy Voters often take their cues from elites. The degree to which senior Republicans acknowledge that the law should be applied to Trump, just as it is to everyone else, will help shape how accepting voters, especially Republican ones, are of the outcome. Are you hearing any such acknowledgment? Even worse, some elite right-wing media figures are hinting at violence. “People better be careful, and that’s all I’ll say about that,” snarled Fox News host Jesse Watters. His colleague Tucker Carlson warned that this is “probably not the best time to give up your AR-15s.” The position implied here is that the price of social peace is absolute impunity for Trump. The insistence that Trump must be kept above the law — no matter his wrongdoing — courses through all these GOP responses. Media accounts should centralize this fact. This appalling civic conduct is itself a major story. Yes, a prosecution of a president is unprecedented in the United States. But as a new Post piece demonstrates, many other advanced democracies — including Israel, Italy, France and South Korea — have seen prosecutions of former presidents and prime ministers, usually for various kinds of corruption.

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