Merrick Garland

[Mike]

Fascinating article in The Atlantic in which investigative reporter Franklin Foer explains why he is sure that Merrick Garland will indict Trump. Mostly though, it is a portrait of Garland as a meticulous and thorough prosecutor who is building an unassailable case against the former president. It is well worth reading.

My favorite quote from it which I think sums up the author's take on who Garland is:

"When he was on the bench, Garland would occasionally orient new clerks to his idiosyncrasies by playing a song by the band Vampire Weekend which contains the refrain, “Who gives a fuck about an Oxford comma?” It was amusing because the band was so distant from his range of expected cultural references, and because the strait-laced attorney general would never utter that sentence himself. It was also funny because Garland does care about punctuation, deeply."

[Kyle]

I read that if Trump announces, they're going to appoint independent special counsel to continue to reduce the perception that they're political investigations.

[Phoebe]

I like the fact that whatever is happening is happening mostly in silence without big media splashes and discussions. I hope it could be like that through the entirety of the investigation and any resulting prosecutions. At least one reason that Trump won the first time is that the media just would not shut up about him. Every time he told a lie or did something shocking, it was 24/7 coverage. We got to see all of his rallies, hear all his insults, have endless media dissection of his every tweet. Meanwhile nobody even knew what the heck Clinton wanted to do. It was largely true of Biden, even. Just Trump sucking up all the oxygen and some type of alternative to Trump that people either disliked or didn't dislike that much. I do think Biden is wildly underrated and I don't think Americans are going to elect Trump again, but hey, it happened once. Never say never. I feel like any prosecution of him in the public eye will just be an occasion for him to communicate with the public again on a constant basis while running for office. I know they can't do it in secret but it's a sad situation.

[Mike]

Combine the multiple prosecutions with the fact that Fox News is now fully blaming Trump for the "disastrous failure" of the midterms. They may, of course, reverse direction again after Trump's next rally, but I think it's getting too close to 2024, and they very actively are switching narrative to Trump bad! DeSantis is savior!

I guess I'm just shocked and pleased that this narrative doesn't have as much of the fix the crooked elections vibe that I feared it would.

[Kyle]

Trump's going to announce and be the nominee. He has hundreds of thousands of voters (if not millions) who will refuse to vote if he runs and doesn't get the nomination. That's the cult of personality the party bought into. And the last six years have shown us that the GOP is more than happy to grumble off the record, but when it comes to speaking out- they are too cowardly to speak against him. He'll announce. He'll run. He'll get the nomination.

[Mike]

Oh I'm certain you're right. But I'm encouraged that the midterms show he doesn't have the pull he once did. And I'm encouraged that Fox News is so eager to badmouth him, showing that even if they do a 180 later, they've already revealed how much the shine is off and if that leads to disillusioned and disaffected Republican voters who sit out next time... well, every little bit helps. I'm certainly not counting any chickens, because they still have a lot of leeway to tilt the election landscape in their favor, but it's also not hopeless.

[Phoebe]

This is what they're fighting about on right wing talk radio here. Inconclusive result. The topic is often "did we err by looking back to 2020?" which is shorthand for Trump because we know he won't stop can't stop saying he won and making everything all about him. But his true believers don't care and genuinely think Trump has this unique insight that caused us to be "run like a business" and sticking up for ourselves in the wider world. It may be delusional but they are certain the country was absolutely thriving and energy independent and solving all foreign policy goals while Trump was in there, and then it all fell apart due to Democrats. They truly think this.

[zen]

It seems that the Republican leadership might have gotten wise to certain facts:

1. Trump has never won a popular vote.
2. The Republicans haven't "won" on the national level since Trump took office.
3. The two largest voter turnouts in mid-term elections in modern history were in 2018 and 2022. The first can be directly attributed to dislike for Trump, especially since the increased turnout was largely due to an unprecedented increase in younger voters. The second can also be attributed to Trump, because there was a similar, though smaller, increase in younger voters, and the predicted backlash against the sitting President's party was muted considerably. In fact, there are Republican lawmakers that are talking about repealing the 26th Amendment, though that's not the age group that was responsible for the difference in the election. It would be a way to make sure that anyone who turned 21 between now and the next Presidential Election knows which party to vote for, though!

[Phoebe]

From my vantage point I would certainly report the kids are Angry. I'm not even sure it's specifically about Trump so much as general hostility toward whoever is responsible for hating on the LGBT kids and making them fear for their lives and learn to throw textbooks and chairs at a hypothetical maniac armed with a rapidly firing gun. WTF really. A couple decades of teaching that fear has had some consequences. As a pro capitalist it disturbs me how anti-capitalist many of them are. They learn that s*** on the tiktok or whatever because it's not happening in school.

[Kyle]

So this happens after every major election, right? The party that is perceived as underperforming has a "come to jesus" soul searching moment and the media speculates on whether this is truly the demise of that party. Seriously. This happens every two to four years.

And while everyone is handwringing over Trump and saying, "This is the last straw"-- they said that before. They said that after January 6. Then Trump made them all eat his ass and apologize and tow the line. And that's what they'll do here. Because they're gutless. They have no will. They're all spineless Ted Cruz's who have no integrity or principle. Donald Trump will be the next Republican nominee.