We're Tip-Toeing Through a Minefield of Trump's Creation. It's Time He's Held Accountable For That.
PLUS: A college football preview
Hey hey, long time no see! Yeah, I kind of took August off. Didn’t really intend to do that, but the dog days of summer aren’t conducive to the pressure of deadlines.
And what a month it was! Sure, Democrats managed to get Biden’s Build Back Better Inflation Reduction Act passed (I’ll get around to that soon) but BEYONCE RELEASED A NEW ALBUM!!! (I don’t know what her plans are…do you?…but if Renaissance really is an Act 1, my inclination is to wait and review the project once it’s released in its entirety.)
Speaking of something that hasn’t been released in its entirety, the FBI affidavit that convinced a judge to let federal law enforcement agents search the premises of Don Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home/resort for classified documents he took with him when he left the White House was just made public as I write this, and it is heavily redacted (as in page after page is blacked-out). The earliest takes seem to focus on how Trump had in his possession documents containing classified information gathered by human sources, which apparently is a big deal because if those documents leaked, the sources that generated that information could be compromised. (I also assume the fact that documents containing classified information gathered from potentially identifiable human sources were just stashed in what is for-all-we-know a broom closet adjacent to the caddyshack at Mar-a-Lago might discourage future human sources from passing-on their insider information to American intelligence operatives.)
This remains a developing situation, but what we do know is that Donald Trump has once again managed to suck all the air out of the room and exhale it back onto the inferno we in the biz fondly refer to as our American democracy. I must say I have no idea why Trump is hoarding printed material, since the guy notoriously doesn’t read. My theory: Because no one dared to tell the president “Hey, we need that back,” Trump just kept every scrap of paper that seemed interesting to him. When he moved out of the White House, his people just threw everything he’d collected into moving boxes, including not only classified national security documents but other presumably privileged documents he doesn’t want in the public record because they could implicate him in some sort of wrongdoing. DOJ just wants the top secret stuff back, but Trump is worried they’ll snoop around and take more than that. Of course, there is a fairly easy way to resolve all this—just hand over the classified documents—but Trump is probably worried that, too, like everything else in his life over the past fifty years, will turn into a lawsuit, and even if (I’m guessing) DOJ isn’t inclined to prosecute the once-and-likely-future GOP nominee for president so long as they get the classified documents back, few things involving Trump are ever completed the “easy way.”
The political reaction to the Mar-a-Lago Raid was predictable. Democrats ran the gamut from vindictive glee to a dispassionate wait-and-see attitude. Republicans were so outraged that polls found Trump’s support among GOP voters actually recovered and solidified after a hearing-filled summer that saw his popularity slide. The most surprising reactions to me at least came from conservative pundits who have never been fans of Trump. To a person, these writers seem to believe the FBI operation was a terrible blunder on the government’s part. Here’s George Will in the Washington Post:
[T]here are important unanswered questions about who instigated the search of Mar-a-Lago, and why. One remarkable aspect of this debacle, however, is that vigorous disgust need not wait until we know those answers: Try to imagine a justification for this flamboyant exercise of — what? law enforcement? What was important enough to bring to a rolling boil the already simmering suspicions of tens of millions of Americans about tentacles of the “deep state” engaging in partisan skulduggery?
And David Brooks in the New York Times (in an article titled “Did the F.B.I. Just Re-elect Donald Trump?”):
My impression is that the F.B.I. had legitimate reasons to do what it did. My guess is it will find some damning documents that will do nothing to weaken Trump’s support. I’m also convinced that, at least for now, it has unintentionally improved Trump’s re-election chances. It has unintentionally made life harder for Trump’s potential primary challengers and motivated his base.
It feels as though we’re walking toward some sort of storm and there’s no honorable way to alter our course.
(Um, yeah David, we have been. For some time now, in case you haven’t noticed.)
And Andrew Sullivan:
I have no idea why the former president seems to have insisted on keeping boxes of highly classified documents he received in office, and then refused to give them all back. I don’t know why he resisted a subpoena on what seems like a routine request. It looks fishy — but with Trump, it always looks fishy. He acts like a criminal even when he isn’t committing a crime. He has never accepted the legitimacy of any legal authority if it is targeting him, and literally cannot submit willingly to it without some kind of psychic break. He could be guilty, but he could also be innocent; or guilty of something not-so-bad.
Equally, I have no idea why the FBI really had no option but to do this — given its huge political risks. And it seems perfectly possible to me that the US government’s fanatical protection of its own secrets has led to another stupid overreach by clueless prosecutors.
You can also read Rich Lowry and Ross Douthat on the matter. Basically, all these commentators argued that Trump’s appeal—and with it, his threat to the republic—was fading, but the raid only managed to boost and galvanize support for him among Republicans. Furthermore, they questioned the utility of the search, believing it unlikely to produce evidence of a crime that would convince his supporters to abandon him once-and-for-all. Even if the raid did uncover evidence of a serious crime that led to charges, it very well could lead to the spectacle of a major party presidential candidate running for president while on trial, which would turn into a campaign waged not only against his political enemies but the validity of the legal system itself. It would have been better, they argued, if the notoriously unpolitical Attorney General Merrick Garland had actually made a political calculation and squashed the raid so Trump couldn’t play the role of besieged party leader and rally his followers.
At first, my eyes rolled so hard reading these columns that by the time I finished it felt as though I’d been riding a tilt-a-whirl. But I have to admit they have a point. I want Trump to get his comeuppance as much as anyone, but the more I think about it, the more I’m convinced the agent of his political demise won’t be a prosecutor in a courtroom but someone like Liz Cheney, who has a sense for how to make him bleed politically. Liberals think putting this guy behind bars will finally rid the country of his presence. It wouldn’t. If Trump was put on trial, he’d either end up running for president after a jury exonerated him, after prosecutors dropped charges, or from a jail cell, where he would undoubtedly campaign as the most unfairly treated political prisoner since the days of Pontius Pilate. Trump has already famously said he could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and his supporters would still stand with him. He’s right. A guilty verdict wouldn’t change that. So, to extend the metaphor, the task before us isn’t convicting the man of murder. It’s convincing those that can still be reached by appeals to reason and patriotism that Trump has homicidal tendencies.
So maybe it would have been better for Garland, the DOJ, and the FBI to have just left Trump and Mar-a-Lago alone. No use stoking the flames, right? Exercise some prudence by keeping agents of the state from rifling through the home of a toxic and politically embattled ex-president as part of a search that will probably have little legal but tremendous symbolic import. Maybe. But I think that argument needs to be taken back around the block a bit.
Let’s turn to some reporting first. To begin with, we’ve learned from NBC News that some of the documents in Trump’s possession weren’t just mundane government papers but materials of the highest classification. As background, the US government has a tendency to stamp “confidential” or “top secret” on way too many documents that don’t need to be classified, meaning it’s possible the papers Trump had are really of little consequence. But that doesn’t seem to be the case.
After Trump's lawyers turned over 15 boxes in January, officials at the National Archives identified items inside the boxes ‘marked as classified national security information, up to the level of top secret and including sensitive compartmented information and special access program materials,’ the letter said. That suggests Trump took home the most highly protected material in the U.S. government — material that, if disclosed, could betray sources and methods.
The New York Times reported Friday night that the likely presence of documents marked “HCS,” for Human Intelligence Control System, triggered the search.
We’ve also learned from the Washington Post that the FBI has been working with Trump’s lawyers for months to get him to return the classified documents. In other words, the raid only occurred after the FBI had repeatedly asked Trump to comply with the law:
In a legal filing on Monday, Trump’s lawyers insisted that he had been cooperating with Justice Department requests. In fact, however, the narrative they laid out, as well as other documents and interviews, show that Trump ignored multiple opportunities to quietly resolve the FBI concerns by handing over all classified material in his possession — including a grand jury subpoena that Trump’s team accepted May 11. Again and again, he reacted with a familiar mix of obstinance and outrage, causing some in his orbit to fear he was essentially daring the FBI to come after him.
If you want to read more about that, here’s a timeline from the New York Times detailing the twenty-month-long effort to get Trump to return these documents.
The New York Times further reports that the Department of Justice grew concerned over the security of those documents after it subpoenaed surveillance footage from Mar-a-Lago showing individuals moving boxes in and out of the room where the materials were being stored:
While much of the footage showed hours of club employees walking through the busy corridor, some of it raised concerns for investigators, according to people familiar with the matter. It revealed people moving boxes in and out, and in some cases, appearing to change the containers some documents were held in.
Finally, as The Guardian points out, Trump’s own legal argument—that the documents in his possession are protected by executive privilege—is an admission he is breaking the law:
The motion submitted on Monday by the former president’s lawyers argued that a court should appoint a so-called special master to separate out and determine what materials the justice department can review as evidence due to [executive] privilege issues….
But the argument from Trump that the documents are subject to executive privilege protections suggests those documents are official records – which he is not authorized to keep and should have turned over to the National Archives at the end of the administration.
What does all this add up to? That the former President of the United States has refused for the past twenty months to turn over to the US government classified, highly sensitive documents that he is not keeping in a secure location and that are illegal for him to keep in his possession. How about we just start there: For nearly two years, the government has been trying to get Don Trump to comply with a pretty basic and straightforward law and his refusal to do so has once again thrown the nation into what very easily could spiral into a major political crisis. Rather than wring one’s hands over the propriety of the DOJ’s actions, why not declare enough is finally enough and demand Trump get his act together. Last I checked, Merrick Garland isn’t the only character in this political drama expected to act like an adult. It’s long past time for Trump to put on his man pants.
I understand the FBI does not have a spotless investigative record and that there are good reasons for DOJ to keep this case at arm’s length so as not to politicize the nation’s law enforcement system. If Trump is indicted, it will fall on the government to prove its case. Politically, however, Trump long ago lost the benefit of the doubt. Trump is not a good faith actor and we are long past the point where we should assume his intentions are pure. This republic does not need to play the sucker for him, not after everything he’s put us through over the past ten years.
All this talk about prudence is certainly worth taking into consideration. It’s a way of saying one needs to be strategic in the way one handles Trump and weigh various values, costs, and benefits against one another before doing something that might do more harm than good. And yes, politics is not a dispassionate, rational undertaking. It’s easily commandeered by emotion and delusion. Political actors need to account for those factors.
But they also don’t need to be held captive to them. Prudence is a political virtue; Trump spent his presidency undermining its exercise by insisting people either sell their souls to him or become his mortal enemy. People like George Will, David Brooks, and Andrew Sullivan can have a debate about prudence with someone like Merrick Garland because all four men are reasonable, prudential people. You can’t have that sort of argument with Donald Trump, which is the essence of the problem. What Will, Brooks, and Sullivan could acknowledge is that Garland is in an impossible situation: He can allow Trump to continue to flaunt the law and put the nation’s security at risk, as Trump has been doing for the past twenty months, or he can enforce the law (one any human being with a basic sense of self-control could easily comply with) and stand by as Trump proclaims to his millions of followers that he is being targeted for prosecution.
This country has bent over backwards to accommodate Donald Trump and it has torn us apart. Rather than fret over how to manage America’s enfant terrible, why not tell Trump we expect him to comport himself in a manner that dignifies an office held in the past by men with names like Washington, Lincoln, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. It shouldn’t take a search warrant to retrieve unsecured classified documents from an ex-president, and we shouldn’t have to debate whether executing that search warrant will push us closer to civil war. No one expects the President of the United States to be a perfect angel but we can do a whole lot better than a serial arsonist. It’s beyond time to assert that.
Will anything I’ve written persuade Trump’s followers to abandon him? No, I wouldn’t expect it to, just as I wouldn’t expect their zeal for Trump to cool if DOJ turned a blind eye to Trump’s infractions. So long as their dear leader is crying bloody murder, they’ll cry along, no matter if their grievances are real or imaginary. (As I mentioned earlier, Trump could shoot someone in the middle of 5th Avenue and they’d excuse his behavior; he could also say he’s got a bridge in Brooklyn for sale and they’d crawl over one another to buy it. This is a reality not lost on many of them, either.) And would I expect anything I’ve written or the facts on the ground to convince GOP leaders to finally throw Trump under the bus? Absolutely not. They can do the electoral math, and besides, they’ve been handed multiple opportunities on a silver platter to dump this guy in the past and they just haven’t had the guts to do so. Mar-a-Lago is a hill they’re willing to die on.
I believe, however, there is a majority of Americans for whom enough is enough, and it’s time to speak for them. They’re tired of all the drama and absurdity surrounding Trump, as well as the strain he is constantly putting on the system. For them, Trump is no longer a disruptor nor an alternate point of view. He is the source of a political problem and should be treated accordingly. That doesn’t mean they’ll tolerate sending Trump up the river on trumped-up charges. What it means is Trump’s lost the benefit of their doubt, and if he’s crossed a line, it’s fair game to hold him to account.
Trump’s turned this country into a minefield. It’s going to take years to defuse it. Yes, we need to find ways to maneuver through it safely, and there are bound to be explosions. Yet rather than focusing so much on how to tiptoe around these mines, right now, we ought to be united in our outrage over the fact that we’re all standing in the middle of a minefield to begin with. Enough is enough.
Signals and Noise
From a Friday night post on Donald Trump Jr.’s Instagram page, captioned “Redact this!!!”
Jonathan Last at The Bulwark lists Joe Biden’s presidential resume and it ain’t bad.
Worth considering, though: By Catherine Rampell for the Washington Post: “Biden’s Student-Debt Plan is the Democratic Version of ‘Trickle-Down’ Economics”
Recent special elections suggest Democrats may do better than expected in November’s midterms.
As Ivan Penn of the New York Times reports, one of the most critical components of the recently passed Inflation Reduction Act is a $350 billion expansion of a federal loan program aimed at providing money to clean energy projects and converting energy plants that use fossil fuels to renewable and nuclear sources. That money can be used to push a lot of projects that are struggling to get financing over the finish line; for example, Tesla used a similar federal loan during the Obama administration to expand beyond the production of sports cars. While some of these projects will inevitably fail, the interest paid by successful loan recipients help the government recoup its money.
Yet as Matthew Brown and Michael Phillis at AP report, one of the drawbacks of the Inflation Reduction Act is the way it could potentially expand oil and gas production. The Inflation Reduction Act opens up federal land and offshore sites for drilling; furthermore, it ties the development of green energy to fossil fuel energy development. While it’s expected the initiative will eventually wean the United States off its reliance on fossil fuels, it may also mean the U.S. will begin exporting huge amounts of fossil fuels to the economically developing world. The obvious next step for environmentalists will be exporting green technology to Africa, Asia, and Latin America.
But the law also specifically categorizes carbon dioxide as a pollutant. Earlier this year, the Supreme Court ruled the EPA had no authority to regulate carbon dioxide emissions as a pollutant because Congress had never defined it as a pollutant.
After the pandemic revealed how reliant the American economy is on imports, Dion Rabouin of the Wall Street Journal reports American companies plan to relocate a record number of overseas jobs (350,000) to the United States this year.
Harry Stevens of the Washington Post has an interesting story about how the technological revolution that has powered the latest wave of gerrymandering may also be its undoing. Today, map makers can microtarget voters and either pack or crack them into heavily partisan districts. Judges often don’t like to weigh-in on the dark art of gerrymandering, but plaintiffs have found a way to get judges’ attention: By running thousands of redistricting simulations to show judges how out-of-proportion some state maps are. The article has excellent graphics to demonstrate how this works.
I normally avoid stories about fundraising trends and ad spending, but this one raises a good question: The National Republican Senatorial Committee (NRSC)—a PAC led by Senate Republicans aimed at supporting Republican candidates for Senate—has raised a record $173 million this year but had only $28.7 million on hand in June and is cancelling ad buys in the (presumably) competitive states of Arizona, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. (GOP losses in the last two would be Democratic pick-ups.) Said one national Republican consultant: “If [the NRSC] were a corporation, the CEO would be fired and investigated. The way this money has been burned, there needs to be an audit or investigation because we’re not gonna take the Senate now and this money has been squandered. It’s a rip-off.” This won’t keep those candidates off the air—they have their own campaign funds and Super PACS supporting them—but I think donors would want to know how NRSC chairman Sen. Rick Scott (FL) blew through their money.
Another thing to note about GOP fundraising this cycle: Some reports indicate GOP candidates are having a hard time raising money from small donors because Don Trump has that market cornered, and he isn’t using his cash to help his fellow party-members in their races.
Deepa Shivaram of NPR looks at the money raised by Don Trump’s PAC, how he has a history of spending money from that PAC in ways that don’t follow FEC guidelines, and how alleged violations of that spending have gone unenforced.
Friendly reminder: One of the people who talked the Trump White House into pushing hydroxychloroquine as a COVID treatment was none other GOP Pennsylvania senate nominee and known snake-oil salesman Mehmet Oz.
From a Republican primary in Florida last week:
“I’M NOT CONCEDING!” Laura Loomer attacks the Republican Party and alleges voter fraud after losing GOP primary to incumbent Florida congressman Daniel Webster. #news6Makes me wonder if “I’m not conceding because the election was rigged” will become like crying “Wolf.”
A judge in Wisconsin has found that the taxpayer-funded investigation into unsubstantiated voter fraud led by the state’s former Chief Justice has “produced nothing”: No weekly reports, no witness interviews, no measurable data. It did give some employees code names, though.
Kim Crockett, the Republican nominee for Secretary of State in Minnesota, has said the “rigged” 2020 election is a wake-up call for Republicans on par with 9/11.
By Matt Lewis for The Daily Beast: “Trump’s Legacy is Convincing Idiots That They Should Run for Office”
(Not much of a) Surprise, from FOX Business: “Former President Donald Trump’s social media outfit, Truth Social, is locked in a bitter battle with one of its vendors claiming that the platform is stiffing the company out of more than $1 million in contractually obligated payments.”
California plans on banning the sale of new gas-powered cars by 2035.
Yet…by Conor Friedersdorf for The Atlantic: “Gavin Newsom is the Ron DeSantis of the Left” (“Newsom’s behavior is the product of perverse incentives. Excelling in leadership at the state level means waging and winning risky, politically inconvenient fights that do little to raise a governor’s national profile. A far easier way to attract attention and ingratiate yourself to Democratic power brokers is by picking culture-war fights with enemies of convenience—that is to say, people whom most of your fellow partisans loathe—no matter how tenuously connected those fights might be to politics or policy in the place you’re supposed to govern. Many Democrats rightly scoff at Trump-era conservatives who care more about owning the libs than serving their constituents. But Newsom likewise seems to think that, in today’s political environment, the best way to improve his national prospects is to mock and irritate the other side. And for better or worse, he may be correct.”)
By Fabiola Cineas for Vox: “Are Teachers Leaving the Classroom En Masse?”
Garbage Time: A College Football Preview
(Garbage Time theme song here)
You want to know what’s going to happen this season? That’s simple. Four teams will make the college football playoffs: Alabama, Ohio State, and then two of the following four options: Oklahoma, Clemson, Notre Dame if it doesn’t lose a game, or some other team from the SEC (probably Georgia, but if you want to go out on a limb, pick Texas A&M.) ESPN will devote hundreds of hours over the next three months to squeezing some suspense out of all this but there’s really no point since there isn’t much by way of competitive balance in college football and it will all be pretty obvious in the end. If you’re a fan of some other team that wasn’t listed, sorry to break it to you, but your team is just a speed bump on those other teams’ schedules.
So let’s move on. The real story in college football has nothing to do with what will actually happen on the field this year. Instead, it’s that USC and UCLA plan to leave the PAC-12 to join the Big 10 in 2024. That means the Big 10, a conference historically rooted in the Midwestern Great Lakes region, will now span the continent. (About a decade ago, it brought Rutgers and Maryland—a.k.a., the NYC and Washington DC media markets—into its fold.) It also leaves the PAC-12—now losing its most storied football and basketball programs—a shell of itself.
The Big 10’s expansion to California follows the SEC’s move last year to add Texas and Oklahoma to its ranks in 2025, which in turn hollowed-out the Big 12. All of this has set-off speculation about what comes next for big time college athletics. Will the Big 12 and PAC-12 merge into a giant western conference, or will the Big 10 eventually absorb the PAC-12’s juiciest remnants? (Washington, Stanford, and Oregon loom largest, followed by Arizona State, Utah, California, and Colorado.) Will Notre Dame finally be compelled to pick a conference? What will become of the ACC, and might the Big 10 and SEC end up picking it apart? And what will happen to the schools that these reconfigured conferences don’t want, like Kansas, a national powerhouse in basketball that boasts the worst football program in the country? Saturday afternoon is where the money’s at, and no conference will want to dance with the Jayhawks and their floundering football team.
When Texas and Oklahoma ditched the Big 12 for the SEC, the move was at least plausible geographically. There was already a Texas school in the conference, and Oklahoma bordered states with schools in the SEC. But with the Big 10 expanding to within a 15-minute drive of the Pacific Ocean, we can drop the whole pretense that these conferences still have some sort of regional identity. What matters is how the addition of a new media market will increase the value of a conference’s television contract, which in turn will increase the value of the shares member schools have in those television contracts. If the Big 10 had wanted to expand and remain regional, it could have simply added a school like Iowa State, but since the University of Iowa is already in the Big 10, adding Iowa State (whose fanbase overlaps with Iowa’s) would have merely diluted the value of the conference’s television deal. Bringing the Los Angeles television market into the Big 10 most definitely does not.
It isn’t hard to see where this is headed. Think beyond the idea of two national super-conferences, an SEC consisting of all the football powerhouses in the American South (including Clemson, Florida State, and Miami) and a continental Big 10 encircling it (I wouldn’t be surprised to see the Big 10 eventually gobble up Virginia, North Carolina, and Georgia Tech.) Universities like Oklahoma, Ohio State, Alabama, Georgia, and Michigan are already probably wondering why they’re sharing television revenue with lightweights like Rutgers, Vanderbilt, Illinois, and Missouri. Big boys like the Sooners, Buckeyes, and Crimson Tide are big enough to drive viewership on their own. Why wouldn’t the nation’s elite college football programs form their own national conference, host their own conference playoff, and crown their own national champion? These schools already get all the nation’s best recruits, drive the news cycle on ESPN, draw the most eyeballs on Saturdays, and own a nearly airtight lock on the playoff system. Just amplify that appeal. Instead of watching Alabama blow out fodder like South Carolina, Mississippi State, Kentucky, and Arkansas every fall, make them fend off the likes of Oklahoma, Ohio State, Notre Dame, Georgia, Michigan, Texas, Clemson, USC, Penn State, LSU, Auburn, Florida, Florida State, Miami, and Texas A&M on a weekly basis.
All the other schools that didn’t make the cut can just sort themselves into their own little conferences after the dust settles. They’ll spend the fall playing schools that are more their own stature. Their fans can still have great seasons, go to bowl games, tailgate, carry-on their local traditions, and root for their local team. If they’re some middle-of-the-road Big 10 school, the bad news is they won’t be playing Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State anymore. The good news is they won’t be playing (and getting routed by) Ohio State, Michigan, and Penn State anymore.
So I don’t see movement in college football toward super-conferences. That will likely happen, but it will only be temporary. What’s going to inevitably happen is the creation of a tiered college football league system. While people will still be able to root for their local teams, most of the national media’s attention—as it already is—will be focused on the elite programs, which will band together to form their own elite league. You could almost think of it as the college equivalent of the NFL, just without salaries. People are gonna get rich, but it won’t be the players.
And that concludes my preview of what we can expect to see in college football.