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Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Time's up [1]

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Date: 2023-07-20

We begin with Patrick Marley, Josh Dawsey, Yvonne Wingett Sanchez, and Carol D. Leonnig of The Washington Post and their report of the imminent charges that will be filed against Number 45 for his role in the Jan. 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.

The proliferation of charges and expected charges marks the most extensive effort yet to hold accountable those who attempted to help Trump remain in office after he lost the election. And because they come as the former president makes vindication a central pillar of his 2024 campaign, experts say they will mark an extraordinary test of the nation’s criminal justice system and political institutions. [...] Smith’s sprawling Jan. 6 investigation has involved dozens of Trump advisers, Republican officials, lawyers and other allies appearing in front of a grand jury that meets on Tuesdays and Thursdays in Washington. The sessions have often served as a way to get Trump’s own people to dispute his claims about the 2020 vote. The grand jury has been presented with unsupported conspiracy theories that were promoted by Trump, as well as reports commissioned by his team that dispute those claims. One person with direct knowledge of the grand jury’s activities, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss an ongoing investigation, said some of the sessions seem intended to disprove Trump’s election falsehoods once and for all.

Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo says that Jan. 6 indictments and news is the last thing the GOP wanted to hear.

It now appears all but certain that Trump will A) receive the Republican presidential nomination with little real opposition and B) face four separate batches of felony indictments in four separate jurisdictions for crimes ranging from comparatively minor fraud to the greatest crime of all, attempting to overthrow the state and the constitution itself. Those two almost certain probabilities — seemingly facts in utter contradiction — are in fact mutually reinforcing. A normal candidate would be driven from the race. For Trump they become just more evidence of a larger battle that validates his status as not simply the head but the inevitable leader of the Republican Party. His role as victim effectively boxes out any serious challenger for the nomination.[...] One effect of Trump’s probable January 6th indictment is removing a good bit of the centrality and leverage held by Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida. She can effectively slow roll Trump’s case through 2024 in time for Trump to shut down the case and promote her if he is reelected. But with another federal case in DC and two other state cases underway, her moonlighting on Trump’s legal team just matters a lot less. Such as I’ve noted above is Trump’s version of reality. But for all his bravado and “multiple indictments, I’m Loving This!” protestations, the reality is that this amounts to an unmitigated disaster for the GOP.

Charles Blow of The New York Times sees the impending Trump indictments as “anticlimactic.”

It should feel like the fulfillment of America’s commitment to justice that Trump is finally facing some accountability for his recklessness and ruthlessness, for his disavowal of constitutional concerns and apparent contempt for the law. So why does it feel so anticlimactic? Why does the feeling of foreboding remain? Why is there no sense of finality in the air? It feels that way because there’s no guarantee that we’re reaching the end of Trump’s era of menace. On the contrary, there’s every indication that he has no intention of bending or breaking — that he’d rather destroy our democracy than be accountable to it. America is undergoing an extreme stress test, and no one truly knows how it will emerge.

John Cassidy of The New Yorker says that there may be more good economic news for the Biden administration.

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