"The truth lays like dead leaves. I am sentenced, you'll forget."
Donald Trump is leading in all kinds of polls and his people are making noise about rewiring government in terrible ways.
This week’s soundtrack: Slain Thought - “SACRED SEASON”
The 45th president of the United States was in court again last week. This is, seemingly, a constant thing for Donald Trump. These appearances were different for a few reasons, but mostly they were indicative of the lack of (immediate, at least) consequences for Trump. Bellicose as he is and however much that’s not supposed to play in the austere setting like a courtroom… that was not how it worked. He still acted like Donald John Trump, including his favorite move of saying big numbers for the sake of big numbers. Were he anyone else, he would almost certainly be held in contempt of court, but he’s not. He’s the former president.
He’s been fined for violating a judge’s order, so the rules are not something with which he is concerned. Why would we assume otherwise? Trump’s ability to do business in New York is at stake during this trial and there have been plenty of grandiose notions in the commentariat about it; Trump’s constant cries of the “biggest” and “best” whatever have been struck down by the judge already. But, nothing resembling a consequence has changed him yet. Why would this trial?
The coverage of his testimony has mostly been overshadowed by the war in Gaza, the GOP debates he missed and various other things. But, it’s a big deal, though I don’t know that having cameras in the courtroom would bring anything other than Trump speeches to the public.
Hovering in the background of this and his other court cases is the circus that follows the big man is the slow leaking of his plans for a second term. Said plans are decidedly authoritarian in nature and certainly troubling.
The immigration plans have mostly gotten center stage, as Trump and his acolytes – Stephen Miller, mostly, because he’s more than happy to play the villain – plan “midnight raids” and other dystopian notions of immigration “enforcement.” The New York Times reported a story a few days ago that reads like a horror novel.
He plans to scour the country for unauthorized immigrants and deport people by the millions per year. To help speed mass deportations, Mr. Trump is preparing an enormous expansion of a form of removal that does not require due process hearings.
To help Immigration and Customs Enforcement carry out sweeping raids, he plans to reassign other federal agents and deputize local police officers and National Guard soldiers voluntarily contributed by Republican-run states.…
In a second Trump presidency, the visas of foreign students who participated in anti-Israel or pro-Palestinian protests would be canceled. U.S. consular officials abroad will be directed to expand ideological screening of visa applicants to block people the Trump administration considers to have undesirable attitudes. People who were granted temporary protected status because they are from certain countries deemed unsafe, allowing them to lawfully live and work in the United States, would have that status revoked.
…
And Mr. Trump would try to end birthright citizenship for babies born in the United States to undocumented parents — by proclaiming that policy to be the new position of the government and by ordering agencies to cease issuing citizenship-affirming documents like Social Security cards and passports to them. That policy’s legal legitimacy, like nearly all of Mr. Trump’s plans, would be virtually certain to end up before the Supreme Court.
The hell that this would bring is fairly easy to see. In each of the above three cases I excerpted from the story, the red meat of nativism is lousy; the violence-as-strategy is baked into the proverbial bread. But, more than anything, the scope of the story suggests a second Trump administration would make the first one look like child’s play on a constitutional level.
While the Times downplays the Supreme Court aspect of the birthright citizenship question, it is backgrounded by two things: The court’s current makeup and the far-reaching plans for the Trump Vol. II White House’s legal strategies. The Trump circle has been telling anyone who will listen that they want to make Trump’s wildest fantasies into something real. To do that, they need to find the lawyers who will move out of the ways that Trump tries to bully or mess with them. People like Bill Barr have turned into pariahs in Trump’s world, so he and his acolytes are searching for anyone with a law degree who will find the pretzel logic to approve anything bizarre like invalidating election results or allowing his wildest desires about military parades.
The Times version of this story is worth a read, if only for bits like the following.
By the end of his term, lawyers he appointed early in his administration had angered the White House by raising legal concerns about various policy proposals. But Mr. Trump reserved his deepest rage for the White House and Justice Department legal officials who largely rejected his attempts to overturn the 2020 election, according to people who spoke with him. Casting about for alternative lawyers who would tell him what he wanted to hear, Mr. Trump turned for that effort to a group of outside lawyers, many of whom have since been indicted in Georgia.
The emphasis is mine and cannot be understated. Like Trump himself, the abject disdain for the proverbial rule of law is evident in his favored inner circle. That he’s casting about for anyone resembling Saul Goodman is pretty funny.
I take the above analogy from Don Moynihan’s piece that posted last week. Like Walter White and Jesse Pinkman, Trump wants a criminal lawyer to get him to where he wants to be and, if he gets elected, we might actually see someone like James Morgan McGill at the head of the Justice Department.
The old adage goes “believe people when they tell you who they are” and I think it’s fair for us to not just believe the Trump people when they say they want to do these things, but also to remember what happened during the final weeks of 2020 and the early weeks of 2021.
It’s hard to see how this ends well for anyone. As with Trump’s election in 2016 and even his loss in 2020, that he was even a major-party candidate meant the war was already lost, even if a single battle is won. Biden’s 2020 election may have been a winning battle, but the war was lost when Trump won the GOP nomination in 2016.
Molly Jong-Fast was on with Le Batard last week and was much more optimistic than anyone should be allowed to be regarding the big guy. Yes, she’s a Democratic commentator, but her dismissal of polls and her overall feeling that Trump would be hurt with more spotlight strikes me as fairly rose-colored.
Donald Trump hasn’t gotten a lot of media scrutiny over the last year… and if [you listen to his rallies] you’re pretty horrified… I think when he's more in the spotlight, people will remember more of the craziness.
Le Batard did a good job of pushing on Jong-Fast to compare and contrast Trump and Joe Biden, but the angle by which both (and me, I guess) are coming is such that Trump is already on the bad side of things. The polling, however difficult it is to trust, suggests otherwise. It’s fairly unimportant if Trump has lot as step, as Trump’s voters remain committed to him.
Really, though, it’s important to keep in mind everything above the Jong-Fast video. The first Trump presidency was a very big deal for government, for the administrative state and for American life. It was lousy with constitutional crises. If Trump does even a third of what he wants to do, a second will be even worse.
Lulu Update
Fall is our time, so I took Lulu to the National Arboretum to enjoy the leaves and the trees.
A Recommendation: Joining a Book Club
I’m in two book clubs right now (one at work, one with a synagogue) and it’s kick-started y reading. I can be fairly languid in my reading for pleasure — as an editor, I read for my job — and this has helped get me on a schedule.