Trump’s in Trouble: Don’t Get Your Hopes Up Just Yet
It seems likely that the coming month will be the one where some chickens come home to roost for the Former President’s entourage. Be prepared to be disappointed.
A series of indictments coming out of New York will target the corporate structure built to sustain Trump’s cash flow while protecting him from personal liability. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance Jr. and New York Attorney General Letitia James are now working together, after each has spent more than two years investigating Trump’s business.
They’ve given the former president’s attorneys a deadline of Monday afternoon to make any final arguments as to why the Trump Organization should not face criminal charges over its financial dealings.
At the heart of this investigation are businesses using a web of hundreds of individual limited liability companies, most of which are ultimately controlled by a trust whose beneficiary is Trump himself. The only individual likely to be charged will be Trump Organization chief financial officer Allen Weisselberg, who has refused to cooperate with investigators with respect to whether Trump had personal knowledge of financial transactions not reported to tax authorities.
While these charges will hamper execution of business transactions and --to a degree-- cash flow, they won’t have any direct impact on the former president. He isn’t going to be arrested. He isn’t going on trial. And he isn’t going to jail.
I’m willing to bet that, despite years of digging into his affairs, investigators haven’t been able to come up with the kind of evidence needed to gain a conviction. This isn’t to say that crimes haven’t been committed, it’s just that the mafia template for business --where real estate transactions are used to hide a multitude of sins-- and Trump’s own flakiness make prosecution difficult without an eyewitness.
Understanding how things work in Trumpworld is easier to understand if you delve into how the White House operated with respect to the 2020 elections.
Landslide, Michael Wolff’s new book on the administration’s final days, will dominate the news over the next few days, thanks to his insider access yielding a cornucopia of gossip and vignettes told by people looking to absolve themselves from blame. This is the first of a roughly dozen books where the former president granted interviews to the writers.
There are tons of titillating tales, some of which are revealed in an extract published by New York magazine, but the most revealing parts have to do with the chaos surrounding the January 6th insurrection. There is no evidence presented in the book that Trump had a direct hand in anything other than creating the pre-conditions leading up to assault on the Capitol.
But…
There was the world within shouting distance of the Oval Office — privy to the president’s monologues, his catalogue of resentments, agitation, desires, long-held notions, stray information, and sudden inspirations with little practical relationship to the workings of government — and then there was the more normal world beyond that.
Early in Trump’s presidency, aides noted that a second-floor office, where the likes of Stephen Miller and Kellyanne Conway worked, meant a degree of exclusion but also protection: Trump would never climb the stairs (and, by the end of his term, he never had).
To the degree that Trump had, for four years, been running the government with scant idea of the rules and practices of running the government, he was now doing it virtually without anybody who did have some idea and desire to protect both him and themselves from embarrassment or legal peril.
Jared Kushner was, to his own great relief, in the Middle East, wrapping up what he saw as his historic mission: his peace deals. The president had all but banished the White House counsel, Pat Cipollone (who was grateful to be banished), and was speaking instead to Herschmann. Herschmann, believing he understood how to move the president, tended to offer objections that sounded awfully like the plaudits of a yes-man. Kayleigh McEnany had been strategically missing in action for several weeks.
The remaining campaign officials (Jason Miller, Clark, Cannon) tended to be merely on the receiving end of Trump’s calls and opinions. And everybody else was, effectively, cleared out. White House wags noted that Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin had fled as far as Sudan — where he was negotiating a good-behavior economic pact with the former terrorism-sponsor nation — to get distance from this last election gasp.
The one person Trump did have at his side, Rudy Giuliani, was drinking heavily and in a constant state of excitation, often almost incoherent in his agitation and mania.
***
The Trumpanistas gathered in Ohio this past weekend for what was billed as the first of many rallies. What the crowd (roughly 5K) heard was a 90+ minute litany of grievances and conspiracy, much of which was lifted from earlier speeches. While the faithful were grateful, it was impossible to miss the hundreds of people leaving early.
https://twitter.com/DearGoodPeople/status/1409187702495354882?s=20
From the New York Times:
He repeated familiar falsehoods about fraudulent 2020 votes. He attacked Republican officials for refusing to back his effort to overturn the election results — including Representative Anthony E. Gonzalez of Ohio, who voted to impeach Mr. Trump, and whose primary challenger, Max Miller, was the reason for Mr. Trump’s visit. The former president praised Mr. Miller as they appeared onstage together.
Mr. Trump remains the most powerful figure in the Republican Party, with large numbers of G.O.P. lawmakers parroting his lies about a stolen 2020 election and fearful of crossing him, and many in the party waiting to see whether he will run again for the White House in 2024.
Yet in the audience and on the stage, the scene in Ohio on Saturday was reflective of how diminished Mr. Trump has become in his post-presidency, and how reliant he is on a smaller group of allies and supporters who have adopted his alternate reality as their own. One of the event’s headliners was Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, the far-right Republican who has promoted the QAnon conspiracy theory.
Clues as to the former president’s diminished status abound. The major networks, including Fox, didn’t broadcast the rally. Some of his former supporters are now willing to suffer his wrath by attempting to rehabilitate their image.
Former Attorney General Bill Barr offered up a version of his personal involvement in the effort to subvert the election to journalist Jonathan Karl in The Atlantic.
Barr wasn’t willing to go along with the Big Lie and was willing to say so publicly.
“My attitude was: It was put-up or shut-up time,” Barr told me. “If there was evidence of fraud, I had no motive to suppress it. But my suspicion all the way along was that there was nothing there. It was all bullshit.” …
“We realized from the beginning it was just bullshit,” Barr told me, noting that even if the machines somehow changed the count, it would show up when they were recounted by hand. “It’s a counting machine, and they save everything that was counted. So you just reconcile the two. There had been no discrepancy reported anywhere, and I’m still not aware of any discrepancy.”
That was good and necessary, but not sufficient to launder Barr’s reputation.
Recognizing that the Jenna Ellis/Rudy Giuliani/My Pillow Guy conspiracy theories were a shit show in a clown car was the bare minimum level of responsibility we should expect from an attorney general.
And then there is all the rest.
As Elie Honig notes, “Barr tells tales of denying the big lie *after* the election, but he omits that he aggressively promoted that lie in the crucial months *before* the election.”
As Charlie Sykes said in The Bulwark:
Shed no tears for Barr. As Trump himself might say, “You knew damn well I was a snake before you took me in.”
https://twitter.com/petestrzok/status/1409215524605726726?s=20
***
So the good news is that Donald John Trump is fading. The bad news, however, is twofold.
As long as the worst thing that happened to the former president are exposés of his behavior, he retains an impressive fundraising machine. The man may be down, but he isn’t out. After all, he bankrupted a casino and still got taken seriously as a businessman.
The big danger, however, isn’t so much the man as it is the legion of the dispossessed he’s inspired.
Adam Serwer, author of the forthcoming “The Cruelty Is the Point: The Past, Present, and Future of Trump’s America” contributed an op ed to the New York Times, elucidating his thesis by delving into the history of what is now the GOP’s reigning ideology:
“...a politics of cruelty and exclusion that strategically exploits vulnerable Americans by portraying them as an existential threat, against whom acts of barbarism and disenfranchisement become not only justified but worthy of celebration.
At the risk of being labeled a Critical Race Theorist (lol), I’d say our current flavor of ‘otherism’ is deeply rooted in this country’s racism. Serwer goes back to the aftermath of the Civil War, where Southern Democrats sought to undo the reconstruction, and takes us through the era where Republicans took over the mantle as the party of exclusionism.
Contemporary Republicans are far less violent and racist than the Democrats of the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age. But they have nevertheless adopted the same political logic, that the victories of the rival party are illegitimate, wrought by fraud, coercion or the support of ignorant voters who are not truly American. It is no coincidence that Mr. Obama’s rise to power began with a lyrical tribute to all that red and blue states had in common and that Mr. Trump’s began with him saying Mr. Obama was born in Kenya.
In this environment, cruelty — in the form of demonizing religious and ethnic minorities as terrorists, criminals and invaders — is an effective political tool for crushing one’s enemies as well as for cultivating a community that conceives of fellow citizens as a threat, resident foreigners attempting to supplant “real” Americans. For those who believe this, it is no violation of American or democratic principles to disenfranchise, marginalize and dispossess those who never should have had such rights to begin with, people you are convinced want to destroy you.
This isn’t the kind of thing that can be argued against using facts. We’re talking about a belief system based on who’s less than a person. The reward for hanging with the Trupanistas is a sense of righteousness and community based on the illusion of having some sort of power, even if it is limited to “owning the libs.”
The antidote is, Serwer argues, creating a political coalition that can change the landscape enough to make extremism less rewarding. Crucial to all this is blocking attempts to undermine participation in the electoral process; stripping voting rights for freed slaves in the reconstruction era enabled the return to power of those who’d supposedly lost the Civil War.
Today’s version of reconstruction reactionaryism requires constant reminders of who or what might “replace” a fantasized version of the nation. The constant regeneration of scare stories accompanied by fresh acts of cruelty serve to keep the shock troops of the right energized and their politicians fearful of having the mob turn on them.
***
Why we can’t have nice things, part 3,400,871
https://twitter.com/realTuckFrumper/status/1409151708941389826?s=20
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