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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: A stress test for democracy [1]
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Date: 2023-03-23
Charles Blow of The New York Times notes that Trump will continue to be a one-trick pony until the trick no longer works.
We know Trump and how he operates. He tries — and often succeeds — to spin his negatives into positives, to deny his misdeeds while charging that those trying to hold him accountable are the real culprits. Trump’s strategy from the very beginning of his political foray has been to discredit or destroy the gatekeepers, in politics and the media, who might one day be called upon to expose him. (“Low-energy” Jeb Bush, anyone?) He continues to brand them as weak, dishonest and out to get anyone who supports him. And every time an attempt to hold him accountable falls short of delivering the most fitting consequences, he counts that as a victory, and the effort’s “failure” as proof of its illegitimacy. Then he rolls all this together in his rhetoric to bolster his contention that all investigations of him and members of his inner circle amount to a campaign of political harassment.
Adam Gabbett of The Guardian details the Trump campaign’s fundraising after his announcement of impending indictments.
The emails paint Trump as the victim of a political agenda of a varying cast of “globalist power brokers”, the “deep state” and “witch hunt-crazed radicals”. Each ends with a plea for donations, the language used changing slightly each time. [...] New York Times reported that the total paled in comparison to the amounts raised by previous presidential frontrunners like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. Trump’s pleas for money could make sense given his relatively poor fundraising so far. Between 15 November 2022, when Trump announced his run for president, and 31 December 2022 Trump’s campaign said he had raised $9.5m, or $201,600 a day. TheTimes reported that the total paled in comparison to the amounts raised by previous presidential frontrunners like Jeb Bush and Hillary Clinton. In his 2016 campaign Bush, who entered the race as the favorite, raised an average of $762,000 a day after announcing his candidacy, the New York Times reported. Clinton averaged $594,400 a day following her 2016 announcement. On Tuesday, as barriers were placed around the Manhattan criminal courthouse in New York City, an email from Trump’s re-election campaign shared a photo of the scene in another fundraising email, asking supporters to: “Please make a contribution to stand with President Trump at this critical moment.” The email again contained links to donate to the Trump Save America Joint Fundraising Committee, Trump’s principal campaign arm. The committee had just $3.8m cash on hand at the end of 2022, according to its filings with the Federal Election Commission, despite having raised more than $151m over the previous two years.
Jennifer Rubin of The Washington Post writes that it is unknown whether an indictment will actually help Trump politically.
What is known: His core base of support has shrunk, and it’s logical to assume that GOP primary voters nervous about reelecting Trump would hardly be assuaged if he were indicted in this case or perhaps other, more serious ones. The opposite is at least as likely. And if he were convicted in a criminal case and — though charges brought now might not be resolved by November 2024 — I’ll go out on a limb to say there is simply no way Americans would elect someone with a criminal record as president. (I also doubt that Republicans, already straining to find an alternative to the baggage-laden 2020 loser, would risk nominating someone with a criminal record.) Moreover, the best evidence that an indictment is unlikely to be a boon to Trump comes straight from the horse’s mouth (or keyboard). Trump has issued one unhinged Truth Social post after another, threatening Bragg, inveighing against his enemies and expressing disbelief that New York police would shut down protests. It certainly does not seem as though he thinks this is a political winner for him. And as he emotionally decompensates, his ability to conduct a rational campaign that revolves around anything other than his own victimhood diminishes. He might not be turning into a more formidable candidate, but he’s already a more hysterical one. Taking a step back, the “this will only help him” view is a bizarre way of converting a story about serious matters such as the rule of law and the lies Trump is accused of making to get elected into a morally neutral, albeit baseless, election prediction exercise. In the host of issues to be explored — including whether a hush-money payoff to Stormy Daniels affected the 2016 election, and the role of local prosecutors in holding Trump accountable — it’s strange that media coverage would devote so much attention to one most likely to infuriate Trump opponents and energize Trump defenders.
Juan Gabriel Vásquez pens an essay for El País in English about the invention of an alternate reality by Fox News.
In the 2019 miniseries The Loudest Voice, Roger Ailes – the former chairman of Fox News, portrayed by Russell Crowe – shares a pearl of wisdom to a disciple: “If you tell them what to think, you lose them. If you tell them what to feel, they’re yours.” [...] I haven’t taken it upon myself to find out if he ever said those exact words … but it’s not hard to imagine. This was Roger Ailes, after all: a man of humble beginnings who sensed the power of television during the Nixon administration, understood it under Reagan, tamed it with the Bushes and, later, during the Obama administration, turned Fox News into the most powerful ultra-conservative propaganda organ our century has ever seen. The channel is capable of turning clowns into presidents, the truth into a lie… and a lie into the truth. “If you tell them what to think, you lose them. If you tell them what to feel, they’re yours.” In less than 20 words, this is an instruction manual for any of the various populist movements that have surged over the past decade. The replacement of reason with emotions – that trick, performed by a conjurer or street swindler – is as old as Mark Antony’s speech in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. Yet, the citizens of today’s democracies have seen it wreak havoc in some of the most stable countries in what we call the West.
Jared Gans of The Hill summarizes new polling that shows confidence in the banking system has noticeably declined since the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, Signature Bank, and other banking entities.
A poll released Wednesday from The Associated Press and NORC Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Chicago found only 10 percent of respondents said they have a “great deal” of confidence in banking and financial institutions. That’s down from the 22 percent who said they did in a 2020 poll. Almost 60 percent of respondents said in the recent poll that they had “only some” confidence in banking, while 30 percent said they had “hardly any.” In a breakdown of responses from various industries included in the survey, only Congress had a lower percentage say they have a great deal of confidence in the institution. The lack of trust in banking was bipartisan, as only 10 percent of Democrats and 8 percent of Republicans said they have a great deal of confidence. [...] Pollsters also found bipartisan agreement that government regulation of financial institutions is inadequate. Just more than half of Republicans said so, and 63 percent of Democrats agreed.
Historian Eric Foner writes for The New York Review of Books (paywall) about By Hands Now Known: Jim Crow’s Legal Executioners—a new book authored by noted civil rights attorney and law professor Margaret Burnham, depicting the lesser known indignities of Jim Crow.
While statistics can reveal the scope of racist terror, it is the individual stories uncovered by Burnham and her students that make for the most powerful reading. Some truly boggle the mind. In 1941 John Jackson, a Birmingham steelworker, was waiting with other African Americans to gain access to a movie theater through the “Negro entrance.” Police ordered them to clear a path for passersby. Evidently Jackson did not hear the directive and laughed at something said by his female companion. “What are you laughing at, boy?” a policeman yelled. Jackson replied, “Can’t I laugh?” With that, he was thrown into a patrol car, shot, and beaten by an officer. He died on the way to the station house. (In this case, unusually for Birmingham, the culprit was dismissed from the police force, though not otherwise charged.) Being in the wrong place at the wrong time could be dangerous. In 1950, much like Trayvon Martin six decades later, Robert Sands, a fifteen-year-old Black youth, was shot and fatally wounded as he walked through a segregated Birmingham neighborhood, where he was employed by a white family. Sands’s presence had led a white woman to express alarm to her husband. Within minutes he shot the teenager in the back. The local prosecutor refused to assemble a grand jury to consider criminal charges. [...] Burnham reports that at least twenty-eight active duty Black soldiers were murdered between 1941 and 1946 for refusing to submit silently to Jim Crow. Hundreds more suffered gunshot wounds or imprisonment. As Thurgood Marshall complained in 1944 to the Department of Justice, “There have been numerous killings of Negro soldiers by civilians and police,” but he was “not aware of a single instance of prosecution.” These experiences, Burnham writes, “never made it into the sagas about the ‘Greatest Generation.’”
One of those active duty Black soldiers who was almost killed and then was court-martialed for the incident that almost got him killed was Tuskegee Airman George Oliver.
Kim Willsher of The Guardian reports that French President Emmanuel Macron is staying the course on his wildly unpopular pension reforms.
The president ruled out dissolution of parliament, reshuffle of his centrist government and the resignation of his prime minister, Élisabeth Borne, as the opposition has demanded. He said he had full confidence in Borne and only one personal regret: “That I have not succeeded in convincing people of the necessity of this reform.” , as well as the government’s use of a constitutional clause to push the measure through without a vote, has played out on the streets over the past few days as protesters clashed with police in cities across France. This failure and widespread opposition to the raising of the official retirement age from 62 to 64 , as well as the government’s use of a constitutional clause to push the measure through without a vote, has played out on the streets over the past few days as protesters clashed with police in cities across France. [...] Many public commentators had expected Macron to seek to calm the highly charged situation that has seen five nights of protests against the government, without rowing back on the deeply unpopular legislation. Instead, he recommitted himself to his course.
Finally today: While I do not agree with the politics of brunch at all, I do agree with Maggie Hennessy of Salon that brunch is simply overrated.
I don't get asked to go to brunch very often. I prefer it this way. If someone were to ask me, I'd probably respond with some buzzkill comment anyway, like, "No, I'd rather meet you for a sensible breakfast, say around 8:30 am? We'll have a sturdy meal of eggs, toast and bacon then each go about our days." I realize this is not a popular take, especially on the weekends, which were invented for laziness and self-indulgence. The thing is, I really like eating breakfast — and, more gobsmackingly, three square meals a day. But brunch doesn't stop at screwing up the poor, Type A person's eating schedule; it is really only satisfied when it has hijacked the entire day. [...] While we're on the subject of sustenance, I must also take issue with brunch food, which I find as unnecessarily over-adorned as a Real Housewife attending a parent-teacher conference. Occasionally, spots will offer something blessedly simple, like vegetable hash with a runny egg. But on the whole brunch menus teem with garish brutes like loaded French toast with candied bacon, nuts, fruit, whipped cream and syrup; breakfast pizzas and burgers; pig's head terrines; and egg sandwiches smeared with fancy paste and piled high with chichi toppings on a chewy bagel or baguette, meaning the fillings all squish out of the sides on first bite. [...] Give me a no-frills, diner-style breakfast at a reasonable hour to set me right: A sturdy mug of coffee with cream alongside a well-contained breakfast burrito, eggs with toast and bacon, oatmeal with berries, or a simple, impeccably ratioed egg sandwich on soft bread.
Have the best possible day, everyone!
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