Has Donald J Trump’s Candidacy Peaked?

Looking weak isn't something he does well

It wasn’t a good weekend for the presumptive GOP presidential candidate. The Libertarian Party national convention at the Washington Hilton booed him, despite the MAGA campaign team trying to orchestrate his appearance on Saturday.

Young Trump supporters lined up outside hours before the event, hoping to snag seats in the front rows of the audience. Convention organizers had other ideas, and an attempt to restrict those seats to actual delegates led to pushing and shoving.

The Secret Service confiscated yellow rubber chickens at the door that were handed out by the RFKJr campaign in hopes of raising awareness of their candidate’s exclusion from upcoming televised debates.

Despite chants of USA! USA! coming from a portion of the crowd, the booing is what garnered national media coverage, along with Trump’s see-sawing between pandering and threatening the crowd. You could see his clenched jaw by the end of what was likely one of his shortest speeches ever.

RFKJr’s hopes of attracting Libertarian involvement thanks to his anti-vaxx stances didn’t play well with that crowd. Chase Oliver from Georgia emerged as the nominee after a final run-off ballot where the alternative was “none of the above.” I

From Politico:

• The upshot appears to be that the Libertarian nominee could be even less of a factor than usual, between the party’s schism and the emergence of Kennedy as an alternative for disaffected voters. Still, in what could be an extraordinarily close election, a few thousand votes here or there can matter. And keep an eye on Oliver, who is explicitly going after young voters who are angry about immigration, the cost of living and the war in Gaza.

Trump wasn’t on the Libertarian ballot (he got 8 write-in votes) , but his campaign believed an appearance was necessary for countering any Kennedy (19 votes) sentiment. There was some talk prior to the convention of winning the nomination by acclamation. 

Post convention, damage control in MAGAland was the order of the day, with Trump going silent on social media for many hours and then posting that he could have received the nomination if he wanted it.”

• Follow up speaker to Trump’s address at Libertarian convention: “there is no one in this room that is at risk of falling for Trumps bullshit” and goes on to say the idea that they would nominate him as their candidate is “ludicrous” and “laughable” — next speaker adds “at least Bobby Kennedy had the decency to lie to us” @underthedesknews 

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There’s a reckoning on the horizon for Donald Trump. Tomorrow lawyers for both sides in the criminal trial for fraud in New York will present their closing arguments. My armchair pundit prediction is that there is a 50/50 chance of one hold-out juror causing a mistrial.

The GOP candidate has taken the occasion of Memorial Day to once again tempt judge Mechan to impose further penalties for violating a gag order. 

Team Trump, according to the New York Times, is preparing a one-size-fits-all response to the verdict, namely promises of revenge. 

• The retribution may be more serious this time, especially if Mr. Trump retakes the White House next year. He has already said, without providing evidence, that he holds Mr. Biden personally responsible for every one of his 88 criminal charges in four jurisdictions. And he has promised that if he wins back the presidency he will appoint “a real special prosecutor to go after the most corrupt president in the history of the United States of America, Joe Biden, and the entire Biden crime family.”

• The verdict of this trial will land in the middle of a presidential campaign, which gives the aftermath a new dynamic, especially if Mr. Trump is acquitted, said John R. Bolton, Mr. Trump’s former national security adviser, who has been deeply critical of his former boss.

• “He will display the sense of injury that he had to put up with it at all because if they couldn’t follow through with it then there was nothing there,” Mr. Bolton said. He predicted Mr. Trump would blame Mr. Biden for the verdict, whatever it might be.

Living through the time period between when a judge sends off the jury to begin deliberation and when they return to render their verdict is one of those “you had to be there" experiences. 

Former federal prosecutor Joyce Vance shared her insight:

• The most difficult part of my job as a prosecutor wasn’t preparing for trial or even handling appellate arguments. It was “The Wait”—the hours or days between when a jury got the case and when they delivered their verdict. The wait is excruciating in a case where you’re almost certain the jury will convict and even more so in a case that’s a closer call for whatever reason.

• That’s where we’ll find ourselves in the week ahead. Waiting for a verdict in the Manhattan case.

• Just to give you some idea of how rough of a time this is for prosecutors, I turned to some friends, former Obama U.S. Attorneys, for their thoughts. Barb McQuade said she would pretend to clean her office. Jenny Durkan, who was the U.S. Attorney in Seattle, described it as a time when you are too nervous to eat chocolate and your heart races every time the phone rings. Another friend, Laura Davis-Duffy, in San Diego, shared that she used that time to go eat with the trial team because they were too busy and in the throws to eat much during the trial. But my favorite was my friend Wendy Olson in Idaho, who said she would read old issues of People Magazine that they kept at the courthouse while she was waiting for a jury to come back.

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Finally, you shouldn’t be shocked to learn that, despite Trump’s trevails, the grifting never stops with one of his enterprises:

• Forbes reported on Sunday there are now questions about airfare charges for his government-supplied security detail with over $800,000 paid by taxpayers this election cycle and another $361,000 still owed.

• According to Zach Everson of Forbes, "New filings raise the question of whether Trump is also using his campaign to convert Secret Service funds into business revenue."

• The biggest recipient of air travel reimbursements is Tag Air which is solely owned by Trump.

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Monday News You Should Read

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Daily marijuana use outpaces daily drinking in the US, a new study says via the Associated Press

• For the first time, the number of Americans who use marijuana just about every day has surpassed the number who drink that often, a shift some 40 years in the making as recreational pot use became more mainstream and legal in nearly half of U.S. states.

• In 2022, an estimated 17.7 million people reported using marijuana daily or near-daily compared to 14.7 million daily or near-daily drinkers, according an analysis of national survey data. In 1992, when daily pot use hit a low point, less than 1 million people said they used marijuana nearly every day.

• Alcohol is still more widely used, but 2022 was the first time this intensive level of marijuana use overtook daily and near-daily drinking, said the study’s author, Jonathan Caulkins, a cannabis policy researcher at Carnegie Mellon University.

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Using religion to sell homemaking as the only career for women is the real sin via Leslie Gray Streeter at The Baltimore Banner

• You may have heard of the rising so-called “tradwife” movement — which reclaims traditional gender roles in marriage — made shiny and TikTok-friendly for a new generation with good-looking folks like Butker, influencer Estee Williams and model Nara Smith. It’s the shiny Instagram images of thin, gorgeous moms, chubby baby on their hip, basking in the glow of gleaming wheat, or the memes warning single women they’ll “hit the wall” of attractiveness and eligibility at 35 and be stuck with their degrees and cats. (That honestly doesn’t sound that bad.)

• As Ms. magazine wrote recently, the gist of the movement is that “men are the breadwinners; women are the breadmakers. It’s the natural order.” But I worry for women who put all their bread into a basket that might run out, leaving them in many cases without resources, job history or even access to their own funds. When I got married at 38, I had a successful career, owned a home and had my own credit. When I was widowed five years later, that foundation guaranteed the financial survival of my son and I, and now we’re thriving.

• Yes, Butker is a conservative Catholic speaking to other Catholics, as his defenders on the internet have pointed out, framing his speech as presenting just one of many choices women can make. But no one who truly respects the choice to prioritize career or never marry frames those decisions as “diabolical lies.”

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How California and the EU work together to regulate artificial intelligence via CalMatters

• This week, EU leaders ended a years-long process with the passage of the AI Act, which regulates use of artificial intelligence in 27 nations. It bans emotion recognition at school and in the workplace, prohibits social credit scores such as the kind used in China to reward or punish certain kinds of behavior and some instances of predictive policing. The AI Act applies high risk labels for AI in health care, hiring, and issuing government benefits.

• There are some notable differences between the EU law and what California lawmakers are considering. The AI Act addresses how law enforcement agencies can use AI, while Bauer-Kahan’s bill does not, and Wicks’ watermarking bill could end up stronger than AI Act requirements. But the California bills and the AI Act both take a risk-based approach to regulation, both advise continued testing and assessment of forms of AI deemed high risk, and both call for watermarking generative AI outputs.

• “If you take these three bills together, you’re probably at 70-80% of what we cover in the AI Act,” de Graaf said. “It’s a very solid relationship that we both benefit from.”