As Trump left the courtroom after his testimony, he remarked loudly, “This is not America. Not America. This is not America.” The bad news for the former president is that it is. This is the America where the rule of law still holds and where he too is required to abide by it.
There is no featured post this week.
This week everybody was talking about E. Jean Carroll
Friday, after about three hours of deliberation, a New York jury ordered Donald Trump to pay E. Jean Carroll $83.3 million: $7.3 million for the emotional distress Trump caused her, $11 million for the damage to her reputation, and $65 million in punitive damages. The punitive damages are there because Trump just won't shut up about Carroll; a previous case that cost him $5 million hasn't discouraged him from continuing to attack her in his rallies and on social media. Maybe, the jury figured, $65 million will be more effective.
I can't quite imagine what audience Trump thought he was playing for in this trial: muttering during Carroll's testimony, stomping out during her attorney's summation speech, jousting with the judge, obsessively continuing the defamation over Truth Social during the trial, and so on. Obviously, this behavior didn't impress the jury or endear him to the judge. I've got to think that most female voters are thinking: "He sexually assaults this woman, repeatedly drags her reputation through the mud, inspires his cultists to harass and threaten her for years ... and he thinks he's the victim." I suppose some men might be happy that some other man is finally standing up to all the uppity women in the world, but I doubt they're a winning political coalition.
And of course, the main thing Trump's antics did was draw attention to the case, which (to put it mildly) does not cast his image in the best light. He has reminded us not just of Carroll's accusations (which now, in the State of New York, legally have to be considered facts), but also of all the other women who have told similar stories about him and stuck by them, and of the Access Hollywood tape, where he bragged that he can grab women by the pussy and get away with it.
I mean, if you want to badly enough, I suppose you can believe that all 26 women (who have no apparent connection other than being women) are lying, and that Trump's taped confession was just "locker room talk" to impress Billy Bush. But seriously. After you've tied your brain into a knot like that, can you do anything else with it?
In his first response to the verdict on Truth Social, Trump posted: "THIS IS NOT AMERICA!" Joyce Vance has the right response:
The bad news for the former president is that it is. This is the America where the rule of law still holds and where he too is required to abide by it. I look forward to more of this.
Lots of people are wondering whether Carroll will ever see this money or if Trump will ever pay it. What you may not realize is that those are two different questions. Consider the $5 million a jury awarded Carroll last year. Trump is appealing that verdict, so Carroll hasn't gotten the money yet. But Trump has had to pay it: He posted the money to a court-controlled account that will be distributed to Carroll after Trump runs out of appeals, assuming none of them succeed.
So no matter how long Trump strings out this $83.3 million verdict, he's going to have to put up a big chunk of the money fairly soon.
I often point out when Fox News ignores some story that breaks its preferred narrative, so I have to give it credit here. Shortly after the verdict was announced, I flipped over to Bret Baier's show, where famous torture-memo lawyer John Yoo commented:
The whole point of this unprecedented damages is to tell Donald Trump to shut up. ... It's not just that he should stop insulting Jean Carroll, but he has to stop disrespecting the justice system.
Their take wasn't terribly different from the one I was hearing on MSNBC and CNN.
I can't believe I'm writing this, but we're waiting on judges to rule in two more serious Trump cases. I mean, any other politician in the country would be ruined by the jury verdicts in the Carroll case, but that case is less "serious" because it only concerns Donald Trump's behavior as an individual, and doesn't directly affect the institution of the presidency or the rule of law in the United States.
In the Carroll case, I stand at a distance and reflect on one man's shameless lack of any moral code. But Trump's sweeping claim of presidential immunity could determine whether I continue to live in a democracy. That claim arose in an attempt to delay Trump's federal January 6 trial, previously scheduled to being in March. The case can't proceed until the legal system decides whether Trump can be tried at all.
At first, it looked like the appeals court wanted to get this done quickly. They held a hearing on January 9, and all three judges seemed skeptical of the whole immunity idea. But nearly three weeks have gone by without a ruling. MSNBC legal blogger Jordan Rubin speculates what might be going on: The court would like to present one unanimous opinion, with agreement on the justification and not just the outcome. That would make a clearer statement to the public and stand up better if it's appealed to the Supreme Court. But the judges are having trouble ironing out their differences.
The other judge we're waiting on is Arthur Engoron, who is expected to make a ruling on the New York civil fraud trial against the Trump Organization sometime in the coming week. As in the Carroll trial, Trump's guilt has already been established in a summary judgment, and the recent trial was just to assess damages. The NY attorney general is asking for a $370 million payment and restrictions on the Trump family's ability to do business in New York.
As noted above, Trump can still appeal a judgment he doesn't like, but he can't avoid putting up a large sum of money while appeals play out.
Also pending is whether or not Trump is disqualified from holding the presidency again by the 14th Amendment's insurrection clause. The case has made it to the Supreme Court, which will hearing arguments on February 8.
Deborah Pearlstein urges the Court to give the country a clear answer to the hard questions, rather than find an easy way out.
No matter what the Court does next, its popular legitimacy will be sorely tested. Tens of millions of Americans are going to believe that it got the answer wrong, and that the result of the 2024 election is at best unfair because of it. Punting will only make already bad matters for American constitutional democracy worse. For there is no legitimacy, or democratic stability, in governing institutions that do nothing but race to see who can avoid taking responsibility for the hardest issues for the longest time. ... In an era of rising antidemocratic sentiments in the United States and around the world, constitutional democracies have to be able to show that they are capable of fulfilling the most basic functions of governance. In this case, at the very least, that means deciding to decide.
She makes this interesting observation: The legal arguments for the various outcomes run counter to the justices' political leanings. (For example: Conservatives typically favor an "originalist" reading of the Constitution, which would disqualify Trump.) So it would look very bad for the Court if the decision fell along the usual 6-3 partisan lines.
I heard on TV that the initial note from the Carroll jury used the abbreviation M, which they had to explain meant "million". I was reminded of an exchange in the opening episode of The Beverley Hillbillies. Jed is explaining to his skeptical cousin Pearl that some city guy has bought his swamp for between 25 and 100 of "some new kind of dollars". When Pearl protests that "There ain't no new kind of dollars", Jed asks: "What'd he call 'em Granny?"
And Granny says, "Milly-an dollars."
News channels occasionally interview Trump's former lawyers about what's going on with his cases. Sometimes they are still on his side and sometimes not. But the networks never tell us a central piece of information for evaluating the lawyer's opinion: Did Trump pay his legal bill or not? Is the lawyer talking about a paying former client or a deadbeat former client? Seems like that would make a difference.
and the Gaza War
The International Court of Justice made a preliminary ruling in the genocide case that South Africa has brought against Israel. Vox has a good summary.
The ICJ is the body specified by the Convention Against Genocide (a treaty signed by both Israel and South Africa) for adjudicating disputes about whether the parties are fulfilling their treaty commitments. As such, the ICJ ruled that it has jurisdiction to hear this case and that South Africa has standing to file it. Israel had asked the ICJ to dismiss the case without further investigation, which it declined to do. Instead, the ruling finds the South Africa's claims "plausible". Any final judgment will require a more detailed investigation and could be years away.
The ruling describes the dire conditions inside Gaza, and says
[T]he catastrophic humanitarian situation in the Gaza Strip is at serious risk of deteriorating further before the Court renders its final judgment.
South Africa had asked for an injunction requiring an immediate ceasefire, which the court did not provide. It did place a number of limitations on Israel's Gaza campaign, "to enable the provision of urgently needed basic services and humanitarian assistance to address the adverse conditions of life faced by Palestinians in the Gaza Strip", and instructed Israel to preserve all evidence that could be relevant to a genocide investigation.
The immediate practical effect of the ruling is likely to be small, because ICJ rulings are enforced by the UN Security Council, where the US can veto any substantive penalties against Israel. But the ruling further isolates Israel and the US from world opinion.
Israel has charged that staff members of the main UN agency providing relief to Palestinian refugees were involved in the October 7 Hamas attacks. The exact claims have not been made public, but several employees were fired in response. The US and a number of other donor countries have paused their funding of the organization, further complicating the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. The agency, UNRWA, has about 13,000 employees.
The war continues to ooze outward, with a rising risk that the US will get drawn into a larger conflict with Iran. A drone hit a US outpost in Jordan early Sunday morning, killing three US soldiers and wounding more than 30. BBC summarizes the situation:
Since mid-October, US military installations in Iraq and Syria have repeatedly come under attack by Iran-backed militias, injuring a growing number of US soldiers. The US has repeatedly retaliated by striking targets in both countries.
Iran has denied involvement, but a group it supports, Islamic Resistance in Iraq, has claimed responsibility. President Biden has pledged to "hold all those responsible to account".
The outpost is called Tower 22, and is in the far north-east corner of Jordan, near the border with both Syria and Iraq. It is part of a deployment of around 30,000 US troops in the region, mapped by CNN.
Trump is saying the kind of stuff he always says: Bad things wouldn't happen if he were president, because he is "strong" while Biden is "weak". But he hasn't specified what he would do differently. He alternately sounds isolationist and like he would strike back harder.
and the border
This week House Republicans have been demonstrating why it's so hard to work out any compromise with them: They don't actually want anything other than power. Their apparent policy positions are just postures they strike for Fox News and for their base voters.
The Biden administration actually does want something: more military aid to Ukraine, which is fending off an invasion by Trump's pal Vladimir Putin. Originally, Biden hoped to get that aid included in budget deal at the beginning of the fiscal year (October 1). Most Senate Republicans and about half of House Republicans claim to back Ukraine aid, but it didn't make the first FY 2024 continuing resolution. Or the second one in November.
Back in October, Biden repackaged Ukraine aid with Israel aid, figuring that strong Republican support for Israel would put it over the goal line. But no deal. He included money for increased enforcement at the Mexican border, because Republicans appeared to care about that. No deal: Republicans said they wanted policy changes, not just more money.
OK, then. Biden and Senate Republicans have negotiated policy changes that cause Democrats some real heartburn:
Components of the deal include a new authority that allows the president to shut down the border between ports of entry when unlawful crossings reach high levels, reforming the asylum system to resolve cases in a shorter timeframe, and expediting work permits.
Under the proposed deal, the Department of Homeland Security would be granted new emergency authority to shut down the border if daily average migrants crossing unlawfully reach 4,000 over a one-week span. Certain migrants would be allowed to stay if they proved to be fleeing torture or persecution in their countries.
It’s impossible to close the border to asylum seekers because of current law, despite multiple attempts by Trump to do so while he was in office.
Republican senators like Lindsey Graham are telling their colleagues in the House that this is a better deal than they are likely to get if Trump takes office in 2025, because Democrats would likely filibuster. (But of course Trump is going to be a dictator in his second term, so why should Republicans worry about what Congress will or won't do?)
But there's still a problem: Republicans don't want to do something about the border, they want to have the worst possible situation so that they can blame Biden for it. Trump wants the border as a campaign issue. If the situation were to improve, that would be bad news for him. (In general, good news for America is bad news for Trump. He is openly rooting for an economic crash, and seems downright cheerful while predicting a "major terrorist attack". The fact that the stock market continues to set records is an unfortunate development for him.)
So Trump instructed Speaker Johnson to torpedo any border deal, no matter what is in it. "It's not going to happen, and I'll fight it all the way." Mitch McConnell said: "When we started this, the border united us and Ukraine divided us. The politics on this have changed.
Mitt Romney, who still has one more year in the Senate, made a moral critique:
The fact that [Trump] would communicate to Republican senators and congresspeople that he doesn’t want us to solve the border problem because he wants to blame Biden for it is really appalling. Someone running for president ought to try and get the problem solved as opposed to saying, "Hey, save that problem, don’t solve it, let me take credit for solving it later."
Democratic Senator Brian Schatz of Hawaii commented:
I think if Democrats were holding up funding for the defense of three allies unless we got an unrelated thing, and then we said no to the very thing we demanded because our nominee told us to kill it, that the media would justifiably go thermonuclear on us.
Speaking of the border, what's going on in Texas is truly outrageous. (And Dan Fromkin wants to know why the major media outlets are ignoring it. ) Texas has recently taken a variety of actions that essentially claim that it -- and not the federal government -- controls its border with Mexico.
Texas erected razor wire barriers along a river in Eagle Pass, Texas, that physically prevented federal Border Patrol agents from entering the area, processing migrants in those areas, or providing assistance to drowning victims. According to the DOJ, the Border Patrol was unable to aid an “unconscious subject floating on top of the water” because of these barriers.
Federal law, moreover, provides that Border Patrol agents may “have access to private lands, but not dwellings, for the purpose of patrolling the border to prevent the illegal entry of aliens into the United States.” So Texas claimed the power to use razor wire to prevent federal officers from performing their duties, in direct violation of a federal statute.
Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in the federal government's favor, but only 5-4. The order was very terse, so we have no idea why Justices Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh weren't on board. Do they really want to reinterpret the supremacy clause of the Constitution?
Even so, you might think a 5-4 Supreme Court decision would end the matter, but apparently not.
On Monday the Supreme Court said the federal government has the authority to remove razor wire that Texas installed at the southern border. Homeland Security said Texas had until Friday to give federal authorities access to Eagle Pass. But Governor Abbott is doubling down saying he'll increase state patrol of the border, adding more barriers and more razor wire.
Texas has two related disputes with the federal government: The feds want to remove a floating barrier Texas has put in the Rio Grande, and a Texas law (set to take effect in March) would give state judges the power to issue deportation orders.
On his excellent blog Popular Information, Judd Legum goes into more detail, explaining how Governor Abbott is recreating the nullification crisis from the Jackson administration.
I forget where I first heard this suggestion, but if we simultaneously let Texas secede and admit Puerto Rico, we don't have to change the flag.
and the 2024 campaign
The Democratic side of the New Hampshire primary was muddled, because the DNC wants South Carolina to be the first primary. So NH was unofficial, Joe Biden was not on the ballot, Biden did not campaign in NH, and a bunch of Democratic-leaning independents probably voted on the Republican side for Haley. Nonetheless, Biden's write-in campaign got 64% of the vote, easily beating back challenges from Rep. Dean Phillips and Marianne Williamson, whose campaigns never caught fire.
Biden also got good economic news of two types: The economy continues to perform quite well, and the media is finally starting to take note of it. Both trends are captured in the WaPo's "Falling inflation, rising growth give U.S. the world’s best recovery".
I forgot to mention last week that the general public is also starting to catch on: consumer sentiment has jumped in recent months.
After losing in New Hampshire, Nikki Haley has just one possible winning strategy (other than hoping that some court takes Trump out of the race; see above): Her continued presence in the race annoys Trump, and if she needles him enough he might act out in ways that even his supporters will have to see as crazy.
This week she characterized Trump's notably ungracious victory speech in New Hampshire as a "temper tantrum" and called him "unhinged". She's also alluded to his apparent cognitive decline: "We've seen him get confused."
For some time I've been pointing to the media magnifying symptoms of Biden's age while minimizing Trump's far more serious mental glitches. Apparently they needed some Republican's permission before they could raise Trump's cognitive issues.
If I were running Haley's campaign, I would want her to hammer on the point that he won't debate because he's not up to the challenge. Make it a real playground put-up-or-shut-up thing. I double-dog dare you to debate me.
Since Trump's New Hampshire victory made his nomination seem inevitable, news-network talking heads have been speculating about his VP choice. What's weird to me is that hardly anybody is saying the obvious: Trump thinks he made a mistake picking Mike Pence, because Pence eventually realized he had a moral code and a responsibility to America. So he didn't help Trump stay in office after losing the 2020 election. Like Meat Loaf, Pence would do anything for Trump, but he wouldn't do that.
Trump doesn't want to make that same mistake again. So what he is mainly looking for is someone with no moral code, no loyalty to America, and no will of his or her own that might conflict with Trump's will.
In All the King's Men, the Boss explained his choice of the comically unctuous Tiny Duffy as lieutenant governor: "You get somebody somebody can trust maybe, and you got to sit up nights worrying whether you are the somebody. You get Tiny, and you can get a good night's sleep."
So: Elise Stefanik, then.
and you also might be interested in ...
If you've ever wondered where those media takes on "real Americans" come from, Tom the Dancing Bug explains:
It looks like Taylor Swift is headed to the Super Bowl. Apparently some fans are annoyed with how often the cameras show us Swift in a luxury box at Kansas City Chief games, but I'm amused. From what little I know of Swift's biography, she missed a lot of typical schoolgirl stuff while she was working to make it in the music business. Now, in her 30s, she finally gets the quintessential high school experience of rooting for her boyfriend's football team and wearing his team jacket. I'm happy for her.
and let's close with something eponymous
What happens when an actual penguin interns at Penguin Books?
