SATURDAY, AUGUST 26, 2023
...in the course of the Georgia trial? Is Donald J. Trump a madman? Here's the way the invaluable Paul Krugman begins his latest column:
KRUGMAN (8/26/23): James J. Jordan was a Mad man—a copywriter who devised advertising catchphrases that were annoying but memorable, including “I’d rather fight than switch” for Tareyton cigarettes and “When you’re having more than one” for Schaefer Beer. In other words, he was very good at his job.
Now he has posthumously become a sloganeer for an actual madman, a former president who tried to overturn an election and may yet destroy U.S. democracy.
Given the existential threat he poses to America as we know it, Donald Trump’s economic ideas aren’t the first thing on most people’s minds. Nonetheless, it was a bit startling to see Trump propose, as he did last week on Fox Business, a 10 percent tariff on all U.S. imports, which he called a “ring around the collar” of the U.S. economy.
Before he gets to the meat of his column, Krugman offers a whimsical aside about a recent turn of phrase by Trump.
He also calls Trump "an actual madman." But what does he mean by that?
For ourselves, it has long been our assumption that Trump is, in fact, in the grip of some severe "mental illness" or "personality disorder."
We assume that Trump could, in fact, be diagnosable as (colloquially) a "sociopath"—as someone in the grip of "antisocial personality disorder."
That said, the major organs of our "mainstream press" all agree that such obvious possibilities must never be allowed to play a role in the national discourse. Today, the reader is left to wonder what Krugman actually thinks about the possibility lurking in his highlighted description of Trump.
We mention this because it takes us right to the heart of our discussion of the comfort food we liberals get served each night on MSNBC.
The happy talk and the comfort food come at us thick and fast. This has even created a world in which we agree with Ann Coulter on a particular point.
In a recent colloquy with Frank Bruni and Stuart Stevens, Coulter describes Trump as author of "the most disappointing presidency ever."
Coulter wants DeSantis to be the GOP nominee. She also offers these remarks, in the New York Rimes no less:
COULTER (8/23/23): [F]amous last words, but: I don’t think Trump will be the nominee, but you’d really do the country a solid if you could get Democrats to stop indicting him.
[...]
The only reason Trump will “stay in the news” is that the media keep him there. The weird obsession liberals have with Trump is driving normal people away from the news. Even I, MSNBC’s most loyal viewer, cannot watch it anymore. The same words, same arguments, same info, same topics for over two years now! “We almost lost our democracy!”
Trump is a bore. Please stop covering him. [Coulter's italics.]
We agree with Coulter's comment about MSNBC. The channel is so devoted to selective discussion—to the endless repetition of happy talk and the endless provision of comfort food—that it become extremely hard to watch.
We do try to watch Lawrence O'Donnell. That said, it seems to us that his recent doses of cheerleading represent the type of adamant true belief that could, very imaginably, pave the way to defeat next year.
In recent days, we've floated a question:
Is it possible that Donad J. Trump could go on trial and escape conviction?
Watching Lawrence or Nicolle, any such notion seems like sheer absurdity. Especially with respect to the Fani Willis indictments in Georgia, Lawrence has cast himself in the role of cheerleader fanboy in a way which surely boosts ratings and sales, but leaves our blue tribe barefoot and clueless, exposed.
[Never] is heard a discouraging word on our blue tribe cable! This strikes us as a very dumb way to approach next year's election.
With respect to the Willis indictments, Lawrence started by praising the document for the sheer brilliance of the writing.
We can't say that we share that assessment. But then, by last Thursday night, Lawrence was cheerleading thusly:
O'DONNELL (8/17/23): Amy Copeland, one struggles to imagine what anyone could seriously say in Donald Trump's defense at [Trump's newly canceled] Monday event, which is why I read just that one page of the [Fani Willis] indictment, which contains thirteen lies told in the famous phone call to Brad Raffensperger, lies that usually get ignored by us in our coverage of the phone call because we're just stuck on the solicitation part of it, which is the "Get me the 11,000 votes."
But if you are defending Donald Trump against this accusation of this being a criminal enterprise, you have to take on each one of those grotesque lies in those thirteen lies in that phone call. I just don't see where the Trump defense begins on material like that.
In Lawrence's world, the Willis indictment lists thirteen "lies"—actually, thirteen grotesque lies—allegedly told by Donald J. Trump "in the famous phone call to Raffensperger."
Lawrence said he couldn't see where the Trump defense could even begin with that. Soon after, to his massive credit, Andrew Weissmann offered this:
WEISSMANN (8/17/23): [W]hat you would say here, if you were a defense counsel, is, "You know, I had lawyers telling me this is what happened. I had people doing this data collection, so I was relying on things. So even though I may have been wrong, I didn't kn— I wasn't knowingly lying."
Because remember, you can't— It's not enough that he was just saying it and he was wrong. It has to be with knowledge, intentionally, at the time.
Uh-oh! Because Weissmann was present on the scene that night, we got to hear some very rare words of caution. A prosecutor will have to show that Trump really was lying that day. A prosecutor will have to show that Trump knew his claims were wrong.
According to Weissmann, a Trump defense would start by saying that Donald J. Trump believed the things he said in that famous phone call. Lawyers had been telling Trump the various things he said in that call—and Trump's attorneys would start by saying that Donald J. Trump believed what those lawyers had said.
Weissmann went on to say that it wouldn't be easy to sustain that line of defense. Our reaction was this:
Long ago and in real time, we listened to the entire audiotape of that entire "famous phone call." We didn't just listen to the one cherry-picked line about "finding" the needed number of votes.
After we'd listened to Trump for an hour, he had us believing that he really did believe his crazy claims. There's no way to be sure, of course—but that's how it sounded to us.
Apparently, we aren't alone in this reaction to this "actual madman." Headline included, Devlin and Dawsey offered this at the start of the month in the Washington Post:
Heart of the Trump Jan. 6 indictment: What’s in Trump’s head
Donald Trump’s trial for allegedly conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election may hinge on a long-debated aspect of the former president’s mind-set: How much, or if, he believes his own false claims.
The 45-page indictment filed Tuesday lays out the myriad ways Trump allegedly lied about mass voter fraud and tried to use those claims to get state, local and federal officials to change results to declare him the winner.
Central to special counsel Jack Smith’s case is the accusation that Trump knew his claims were lies. Evidence of a defendant’s intent is often critical to criminal prosecutions, and it may be the most crucial element of Smith’s case against Trump.
“These claims were false, and the Defendant knew they were false,” the indictment’s first page declares, staking out the boundaries of what will probably be a high-stakes legal battlefield inside Trump’s brain.
“I think the entire indictment really turns on the question of Trump’s intent,” said Robert Kelner, a veteran D.C. lawyer. “Arguably, there isn’t any smoking-gun evidence in the indictment regarding intent, though there is certainly circumstantial evidence. At the heart of the case is really a metaphysical question of whether it’s even possible for Donald Trump to believe that he lost the election, or lost anything else, for that matter.”
[...]
Within hours of the indictment’s unsealing, Trump’s legal team signaled that his defense will be based in part on the argument that he genuinely believed the election was stolen and rejected arguments made by those who tried to convince him otherwise.
“I would like them to try to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that Donald Trump believed that these allegations were false,” Trump lawyer John Lauro told Fox News.
Multiple witnesses have said they were asked by prosecutors in front of the grand jury if they heard Trump say he lost—and what evidence he was shown about the election, said people familiar with the questioning, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss closed proceedings.
Some of the witnesses were asked about particular pieces of evidence—including reports from state officials and reports commissioned by the campaign—and whether those reports were shown to Trump or his advisers, including Rudy Giuliani, a key figure in that time period who is identified only as “Co-Conspirator 1” in the indictment.
At least one witness testified that Trump was provided extensive evidence showing the election was not stolen, but Trump never conceded the point, the people said.
“Even in private, he’d argue and say that it was,” one Trump adviser said Wednesday. “You could give him 100 reasons why it wasn’t stolen, and he’d come up with something else. It was like playing whack-a-mole.”
[...]
People close to Trump insist that, to this day, he believes the voter fraud claims.
In conversations with eight current and former advisers on Wednesday, including some who have soured on Trump, none said they heard him privately contradict his claims that the election was stolen in the months after the election. All eight of them, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations, said they believed at the time, and still do, that Trump had convinced himself that he won.
“He is going to keep saying the election was rigged and stolen because he believes it,” one adviser said. “They are never going to get him to say he was lying, because he still believes it.”
Is Donald J. Trump crazy enough—is he enough of an "actual madman"—to believe his unsupported claims about the 2020 elections? We have no idea.
Our cable stars repeat a tiny set of unconvincing claims in which it's said that Trump admitted defeat at various points. In the ancient jargon of the press corps, we'd say that these flimsy examples are "close enough for tribal cable news work."
That said, many observers have suggested that he actually is crazy enough to believe his own twaddle. On August 6, Michael Wolff offered this in the New York Times:
WOLFF (8/6/23): His yearslong denial of the 2020 election may be an elaborate fraud, a grifter’s denial of the obvious truth, as prosecutors maintain, but if so, he really hasn’t broken character the entire time. I’ve had my share of exposure to his fantastic math over the years—so did almost everyone around him at Mar-a-Lago after the election—and I don’t know anyone who didn’t walk away from those conversations at least a little shaken by his absolute certainty that the election really was stolen from him.
Declaring that Trump is "an actual madman" may not be the way to a pro-Trump juror's heart. But there are a million problems with the childish ways our "cable news" servants serve us our nightly comfort food, and there are a million ways that a pro-Trump juror might differ from Lawrence's fanboy reactions to the endlessly complicated Willis indictments.
Our blue tribe culture has become so childish and dumb that we've even created a world in which Ann Coulter gets to be right.
The children go on TV each night and serve us our happy talk and our comfort food. Except for the childishness of our own tribe, the news product they are offering has become almost wholly unwatchable.
Meanwhile, Biden and Trump are tied in the polls. We're rarely asked to wonder about what that could possibly mean.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep, but our tribe is locked in a silo. [Never] is heard a discouraging word as ratings and profits and salaries go up while we wander about in a haze.
There are a million ways a pro-Trump juror may not buy the Willis indictments. It only takes one dissenter, in a twelve-member jury, to deny conviction.
Jack Smith faces a similar task. One lone dissenting juror could mean that Trump escapes conviction.
Cheerleader O'Donnell can't seem to imagine this possible problem. That said, a trial could end without a conviction.
Where would things go from there?
