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Things I think that I think you should think too

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

It isn’t any wonder that people are confused, thanks to the ongoing gratuitous lying of TFG, and the lazy characterizations of and headlines about the news of the day. There are so many examples from which to choose, here’s a recent one that’s got me annoyed.

Five years ago amid the protests over the murder of George Floyd there came a movement to end the tributes being paid to those who committed treason by taking up arms against the United States of America during the Civil War. This started with opposition to statues and other monuments to the memory of Confederate war “heroes” across the country — mainly in the states of the former Confederacy, of course — and grew to reconsidering the naming of a number of U.S. military installations, vessels and related facilities which honored the likes of Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson, the Battle of Chancellorsville and many more. (I wrote about my experience in this matter ten years ago.) Over the veto of President TFG, Congress created what was known as the Naming Commission — known in that way because its full name, I swear to God, was The Commission on the Naming of Items of the Department of Defense that Commemorate the Confederate States of America or Any Person Who Served Voluntarily with the Confederate States of America — with the mandate “to create a list of military assets with names associated with the Confederate States of America and recommendations for their removal.” In January 2023 the Department of Defense leadership ordered the Pentagon bureaucracy to execute the commission’s recommended name changes.

The changes themselves generated protests. Some, like a retired Army lieutenant colonel of my acquaintance, objected to the mothballing of the familiar names of places that they felt had created their own important history, despite the character of the men for whom they were named; I get that. But the real disheartening response was from the very many people who disagreed with ending the veneration of heroes of the Lost Cause, or who dishonestly argued that the change was meant to “change history.” No, the change was meant to stop honoring people who were never worthy of the honor, people who in fact were enemies of America.

Now, along comes a president who has clearly demonstrated, over and over again in the first five months of his second term in office, that he doesn’t believe any laws or other actions of the United States Congress apply to him — a position the Supreme Court has given him some reason to believe. He also (mistakenly) believes himself the cleverest little boy in class, and of course he lies as easily and as routinely as he breathes. In a speech this week, which prompted a renewal of concerns about his improper politicization of the U.S. military, he said “he would restore the names of all Army bases that were named for Confederate generals but were ordered changed by Congress in the waning days of his first administration.” Except, of course, he isn’t doing that at all.

In a statement, the Army said it would “take immediate action” to restore the old names of the bases originally honoring Confederates, but the base names would instead honor other American soldiers with similar names and initials.

For example, Fort Eisenhower in Georgia, honoring President Dwight D. Eisenhower — who led the D-Day landings during World War II — would revert to the name Fort Gordon, once honoring John Brown Gordon, the Confederate slave owner and suspected Ku Klux Klan member. This time around, however, the Army said the base would instead honor Master Sgt. Gary Gordon, who fought in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia.

The Army is acknowledging reality here, stating that the “new” names just so happen to match the previous names but actually honor other people and not the Confederates who are no relation to the new honorees.

Mr. Trump, however, contradicted that explanation in his announcement, at one point saying that the Army would be “restoring” the name of one Army base in Virginia — Fort Gregg-Adams — to “Fort Robert E. Lee,” previously named for the commander of the Confederate army. The Army said in its statement that the base would be renamed to honor Pvt. Fitz Lee, a member of the all-Black Buffalo Soldiers who was awarded a Medal of Honor after serving in the Spanish-American War.

The president lied, contradicting his own Pentagon. He did it, I believe, to curry favor with those people who didn’t want the names of the traitors removed from the bases in the first place, by telling them he was undoing what Congress and the Biden Administration had done. This is just a late example of something I’ve said about him for years: he will say anything, whatever he wants to be true in that moment, with no regard for its actual truth or even if it contradicts something he himself said previously. None of that matters to him. When it comes to anything he says, I find it helpful to remember, as was suggested some years ago (sorry, can’t remember by who), that he’s behaving as he always has: he’s a real estate developer hyping his latest project, and all that matters is closing the deal.

What I also find so very annoying in this case is how The New York Times presented the story I quoted from just now: the headline is “Trump Says Army Bases Will Revert to Confederate Names” and the subhead is “The move would reverse a yearslong effort to remove names and symbols honoring the Confederacy from the military.” Not “President Pulls a Fast One, Tricks Gullible Followers Into Thinking He Stood Up To The Woke Mob And Returned Glory To White Supremacists” followed by “Bait-and-switch inserts new honorees with same names as dishonored Confederates to make MAGA mob think they beat the libs again.”

I know that everyone gets it, intellectually, that our president is full of it. We all knew that last November, but he won anyway. Still, how come we seem to have to relearn the lesson day after day after day? I believe most people, including me, still start by hearing “the president” say something and think, hmm, that’s interesting, or terrific, or stupid or illegal, but our default reaction to Trump anytime his lips are moving should be, no, that’s not right. Honest reporters of the news do a pretty good job pointing out his “errors” but they must respond to such a tsunami of crap that the constant corrections can blend into the background noise.

On a related issue, I think it’s just wrong that anyone credit Trump himself for coming up with the ideas for the many rotten things being done by our government in his name. He’s not stupid, but he’s not educated enough about how the government works to have figured out how to short-circuit it, to sabotage it, to subvert our national ethos. Those ideas are coming from the smart, educated, devious and subversive supplicants in MAGA nation and the Christian nationalist world who are and have been using Trump as a figurehead to undermine our democracy and turn (or return) America into the nation of white Christians they believe it was and should be again. Maybe we can talk more about that another day.

Reality checkers

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

obfuscate: to throw into shadow; to make obscure; confuse; to be evasive, unclear, or confusing (Merriam-Webster)

We — all of us, I think — we need more people in our world with clear vision about things that are happening plus both the ability and the commitment to speak plainly and honestly about those things. Today I come to praise the deobfuscators.

Have you heard, there were people in the White House during the last term who tried to cover up the president’s physical and mental decline? I know, such a shock, right? Or, as the great Charles P. Pierce puts it in Esquire, the hysteria over Jake Tapper and Alex Thompson’s revelation “that a White House will withhold adverse health information from the public…is, of course, news to those people who remember Grover Cleveland’s secret cancer operation, the unspoken agreement not to photograph FDR in his wheelchair, the relative severity of Eisenhower’s heart problems, the staggering medical record of John F. Kennedy, Nixon’s manic boozing during the height of the Watergate crisis, and, in the closest parallel we have, Reagan’s staff’s successful concealment of the fact that he was a symptomatic Alzheimer’s patient for most of his second term.”

It’s not to say that what is reported in this book is not true; it is to say, rather, “duh.” The diminishment of public dialogue in our time, to a focus on what is shiny and new to the exclusion of all else, makes it easy for us to lose sight of the things that should really matter to our country, to our children’s future. Of course, there are those who prefer it this way:

Life will go back to normal for the elite political media and their useful idiots in the Democratic party. They won’t have to think much about assaults on habeas corpus, deportation of tiny cancer patients, destruction of the regulatory safeguards of the federal government, or clear-cutting of American democracy. Game on!

Earlier this month we all learned that Rob Manfred, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, decided to lift the “permanent” ban from baseball issued in 1989 to Pete Rose, which makes Rose eligible for election to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Columnist Mike Finger at the San Antonio Express-News elegantly gives voice to the clear reading of events which corporate Baseball would prefer you ignore: MLB dishonestly re-defined “permanent” to mean “lifetime” and cravenly capitulated to a president who can’t keep his tiny tiny hands off of other people’s business.

In one view of America, apparently shared by Manfred, character counts, but it doesn’t count that much. Some sins are unforgivable, but only for a while. History should be honored, but the parts that make us uncomfortable can be omitted.

And above all, principles are what matter, right up until the day someone in power asks you to abandon them.

Within three years, baseball’s all-time leader in hits might be enshrined at last in the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York. Thanks to Manfred’s decision, Rose is eligible to be considered by the veteran’s committee, even though he repeatedly broke the game’s most hallowed rule, even though he denied it for more than a decade, even though he never apologized, and even though the ban he accepted in 1989 was supposed to be “permanent.”

None of those facts changed after Rose died last September at age 83. The only big development since then was that Rose received a public show of support from the president of the United States.

If your consideration is limited to Rose’s career as a player, there’s no doubt he deserves the honor of being in the Hall, starting with the fact the had more hits than any other player, ever. But he was banned because he broke the rule that no player is allowed to bet on baseball, ever. Period.

Rose had his chances to atone for his misdeeds while he was alive, and he never did. He applied for reinstatement in 2015, initially claimed he didn’t bet on sports anymore, then admitted he still did. He kept making appearances in casinos, even after then-commissioner Bud Selig suggested that staying away could provide a path to removing the ban.

(snip)

And now is the time that Manfred chooses to ease off the most notorious betting rule-breaker of his generation?

Apparently, now is indeed the time. Now is the time, even though betting wasn’t the worst of Rose’s alleged transgressions. In 2017, Rose was accused in federal court documents by a woman who claimed to have had a sexual relationship with him when she was 14 or 15 years old in 1973, when Rose was in his 30s. According to the Philadelphia Inquirer, Rose issued a response acknowledging he had sex with the accuser, but “said he believed she was 16 at the time, old enough to legally consent in Ohio.”

In 2022, when an Inquirer reporter asked him about the incident, Rose responded, “It was 55 years ago, babe.”

That, of course, is not an admission of guilt. It’s also probably not a line likely to be included on Rose’s Cooperstown plaque, if he gets one.

It is, however, a reflection of one version of America. As long as the right man is vouching for you, any source of shame can be overlooked, if not outright ignored.

We need people who are on the lookout for attempts to warp the facts of the reality we share, and I’m pleased to have found two more.

No reservations on the crazy train

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

In the Unofficial Pat Ryan Register of All Things Known and Unknown, there is recent high concern that Donald Trump has dementia.  Or is just batshit crazy.  One or the other is used to explain some of demented and/or hallucinatory things he says at his rallies.  But such concerns aren’t new: in the 2016 campaign it even led to the development of an explanation of a candidate’s speech that you’d never expect to be considered positive: that one should take him seriously but not literally.

At a rally in Ohio earlierGJcwK0kaMAEBJeW this month, in a speech in which he referred to China and automaking, Trump said (amid a typical word salad) there would be a “bloodbath” if he doesn’t win this November; sounds pretty ominous, and the Biden campaign claimed he was threatening actual violence.  But maybe he meant to convey that one result of him losing would be the continuation of Biden policies that would be devastating for the American auto industry.  In February, he told the Black Conservative Federation Gala that Black Americans like him better lately due to the many criminal and civil court cases against him: “I think that’s why the Black people are so much on my side now because they see what’s happening to me happens to them. Does that make sense?”  (No, not really)

One way or another, the listener has to do a lot of work to try to figure out what the speaker really means.  It’s the speaker’s fault if he doesn’t make his message clear enough for the audience to understand it.  (I mean the audience of the general population; his MAGA followers seem to process the dog whistle messages just fine.)

Susan Glasser in The New Yorker: I Listened to Trump’s Rambling, Unhinged, Vituperative Georgia Rally—and So Should You

But there is at least one constant message in Trump speeches lately that doesn’t need much interpretation: his promise to free those convicted of crimes in the January 6 attack on the U.S. Capitol.  Jonathan Chait sets the eerie scene in a great piece in New York Magazine:

At a recent rally in Ohio, Donald Trump stood at formal attention while an announcer instructed the crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, please rise for the horribly and unfairly treated January 6 hostages.” As Trump saluted, the speakers played a version of the national anthem sung by imprisoned insurrectionists. “They’ve been treated terribly and very unfairly, and you know that, and everybody knows that,” Trump said at the outset of his speech. “And we’re going to be working on that as soon as the first day we get into office. We’re going to save our country, and we’re going to work with the people to treat those unbelievable patriots.”

Over the last year, the insurrection has gradually assumed a more central place in Trump’s campaign. The J6 version of the national anthem has been playing at rallies since March 2023, and Trump has been referring to jailed insurrectionists as “hostages” since November. But the prospect of pardoning them, which he has floated for two years, has in recent days been made his highest priority. Trump’s promise to “save the country,” which before encompassed his array of domestic and international policies, now refers principally to vindicating the militia that tried to illegally install him in power and that more and more has come to resemble a classic paramilitary group in the Trump imaginarium, licensed to carry out extrajudicial violence on his authority alone.

Bad enough that Trump is promising he will ignore/overturn court cases that sent hundreds of domestic terrorists to jail; Chait finds a scarier reason for Trump’s using this new message, one that potentially drives away independents who might vote for him: his desire for a second term in the White House that is unrestrained by conventional politics or judgement.

But there is a perfectly cogent reason why Trump continues to press his most extreme demands, even at the cost of repulsing potential voters. He is no longer willing to accept the alliance of convenience with reluctant partners that held traditional Republicans like Mitch McConnell, Paul Ryan, and Reince Priebus by his side during his first term. Trump has long demanded fealty from his party, which has made it harder to discern the acceleration and intensification of his work in the days since he effectively clinched the Republican nomination on Super Tuesday. Trump’s primary focus is not outward but inward, tightening his control over the GOP to almost unimaginable levels of personal loyalty.

Trump’s elevation of the insurrection to a matter of holy writ within the party is a matter of both conviction and strategy, consistent with his intention to stifle even the quietest forms of dissent. This is why Trump deposed Ronna McDaniel as head of the Republican National Committee in favor of election deniers Michael Whatley and Lara Trump. McDaniel had dutifully jettisoned her maiden name (Romney). She had strongly suggested the 2020 election was stolen, saying the vote tabulations had “problems” that were “concerning” and not “fair,” without quite stating as fact that Trump absolutely won. All her genuflections were not enough.

This is also why Trump is reportedly bringing back Paul Manafort, who served a prison sentence for bank and tax fraud, and witness tampering and obstruction of justice, and whose business partner, Konstantin Kilimnik, was assessed by the FBI to have ties to Russian intelligence. Manafort’s skills are hardly irreplaceable. The point of bringing him back, other than the familiar mob logic of rewarding an underling who took his pinch like a man and refused to rat out the boss, is to signal that loyalty to Trump matters more than any other possible consideration. Normal politicians would distance themselves from staffers who committed crimes, especially crimes on their behalf. Trump regards this as the highest qualification.

(snip)

While Trump touts his first term as a historic success, he and his closest allies view it as largely a failure. Trump, in this view, was manipulated by staffers loyal to the traditional party into letting figures like Robert Mueller and Anthony Fauci undermine him. Mike Pence’s refusal to cooperate in Trump’s plot to steal the election was the ultimate betrayal. Trump’s project is to ensure that a second term faces no sabotage.

An effective Trumpist government has difficulty functioning under the rule of law. If Trump’s staffers and allies believe that carrying out his orders, some of them plainly illegal, will lead to prison or other punishment, they will again hesitate to follow them. That belief is one he has to stamp out, especially as he faces multiple criminal charges for his attempts to steal the election in 2020.

Chait’s conclusion is that Trump’s new focus is meant to shed his movement of all but the true believers; he doesn’t want to build a coalition of various interests and beliefs, he wants only those loyal to the boss, who will support and assist any grift the boss wants.

Among the true-believing Trumpists, there’s no confusion about what Trump’s relentless demands of cultlike submission are trying to accomplish. “The Judas Iscariots of the American Right need to understand that their betrayal comes at a cost,” rails a recent column in American Greatness, one of the new pseudointellectual organs that have sprung up in the Trump era to meet conservative audience demand for sycophantic content. “Excommunication is not enough. Their treachery deserves relentless psychic pain.” It adds that Mike Pence, the New York Times columnist David French, and others “should never be allowed back into respectable conservative company under any circumstances.”

Measured in traditional political terms, January 6 martyrdom may be a disadvantageous message for Trump. The stolen-election lie polls terribly with persuadable voters, and his fixation with it is one reason why Biden’s catastrophic approval ratings have resulted in only a small Trump lead. But by Trumpian logic, it is the perfect campaign theme. It forces his internal critics to swallow their last objection against him. It sends a message to his allies that they can act with impunity. By November, the J6 national anthem will be burned into our brains as deeply as any campaign jingle.

It doesn’t require high-levelGJiBgcnXcAAa-K4 interpretive skills to see the threat posed by a future President Trump in an administration without the likes of John Kelly or Mark Esper around.  They are among 40 of Trump’s 44 one-time Cabinet members who do not support him.  Think about that: of all the people Trump put in positions to lead the government – “the best people” – 10 out of every 11 of them now say no way do they want him in power again.  They haven’t all told us exactly what they saw on the inside of the Trump White House, but it’s enough for them to warn us not to repeat the mistake that was made in 2016.

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Courting trouble for the former guy

Pat Ryan Leave a comment

Former President I Will Not Be Ignored got a little more of what he’s been begging for yesterday: attention from our nation’s judicial system.  In response to his ridiculous-on-its-face insistence that former presidents enjoy lifelong complete criminal immunity from prosecution for actions taken while in office, lest they be indicted by forces of the opposing party the instant they leave office, a federal appeals court panel ruled – unanimously – that he is off his rocker.  Essentially.  In a legal sense.

At public arguments in January, the three judges expressed concern over the most extreme implications of Trump’s view, with one suggesting it would allow a future president to order the assassination of a political rival. But in their opinion Tuesday, they said it is Trump’s own alleged crimes — “an unprecedented assault on the structure of our government” — that threaten democracy if left beyond the reach of criminal prosecution.

“We cannot accept former President Trump’s claim that a President has unbounded authority to commit crimes that would neutralize the most fundamental check on executive power — the recognition and implementation of election results,” the judges wrote. “Nor can we sanction his apparent contention that the Executive has carte blanche to violate the rights of individual citizens to vote and to have their votes count.”

When he “warns” that all political parties would legally attack former leaders from other parties if those leaders did not enjoy legal protection, it’s a textbook example of the projection associated with his narcissism: in fact, such a thing has never happened in the past, but it is something that he himself has already promised he will do if he becomes president again next year.  This case could still go to the Supreme Court; we will know within weeks.  But we do know that the Supremes will be hearing a Trump case tomorrow, a case over his Constitutional eligibility to ever become president again.

The Supreme Court will hear oral arguments on Thursday in what is shaping up to be the biggest election case since its ruling nearly 25 years ago in Bush v. Gore. At issue is whether former President Donald Trump, who is once again the front runner for the Republican nomination for president, can be excluded from the ballot because of his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attacks on the U.S. Capitol. 

Although the question comes to the court in a case from Colorado, the impact of the court’s ruling could be much more far-reaching. Maine’s secretary of state ruled in December that Trump should be taken off the primary ballot there, and challenges to Trump’s eligibility are currently pending in 11 other states. Trump warns that the efforts to keep him off the ballot “threaten to disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans” and “promise to unleash chaos and bedlam if other state courts and state officials follow Colorado’s lead.” But the voters challenging Trump’s eligibility counter that “we already saw the ‘bedlam’ Trump unleashed when he was on the ballot and lost.”

At issue is a section of the 14th Amendment to the Constitution, approved in the years following the Civil War to prevent former rebels from entering government and continuing their rebellion.  Paraphrasing here, it prohibits anyone who’d previously been a U.S. government official, and then later “engaged in insurrection or rebellion” against the Constitution, from later serving in government again.  Pretty sensible, right?  In other words, among the requirements to be president, one must be at least 35 years old and not have previously been a traitor.

Trump’s arguments that the 14th Amendment doesn’t apply to him are from the same book as his “presidents need to be able to commit crimes with impunity” arguments in the immunity case he’s currently losing.

Trump’s first, and main, argument is that Section 3 does not apply to him because the president is not an “officer of the United States.” In other provisions of the Constitution where the phrase “officer of the United States” appears, Trump notes, it does not apply to the president – for example, the clause that requires the president to “Commission all the Officers of the United States” and the impeachment clause, which lists the president and vice president separately from “civil Officers of the United States.” Moreover, Trump adds, the Supreme Court in 2010 indicated that the phrase applies only to federal officials who are appointed; it does not extend to elected officials like the president.

The voters dismiss this argument, countering that the president has been called the “chief executive officer of the United States” since long before the 14th Amendment was drafted. As with the phrase “office under the United States,” they say, Section 3 simply uses the phrase “of the United States” to distinguish between federal offices, such as the presidency, and state officers.

The voters also discount Trump’s reliance on other provisions of the Constitution. They note that although the appointments clause requires the president to appoint some “officers of the United States,” it also indicates that the Constitution provides for the appointment of other “officers of the United States” – including the president and vice president – by the electoral college. And the impeachment clause, they reason, provides for the impeachment of the president and vice president separately from “all civil Officers of the United States” because (unlike other officials) the president and vice president play both civil and military roles.

Section 3 also does not apply to him, Trump continues, because when he is sworn in the president pledges to “preserve, protect and defend the Constitution” – rather than “support” it, as Section 3 requires.

The voters contend, however, that “Section 3 is about violation of a sworn duty, not about pedantic wordplay.” The oath that the president takes to “preserve, protect and defend” the Constitution is an oath to support the Constitution, they insist.

The voters add that an interpretation of Section 3 that excludes the president, while still applying to all other officials – including “postmaster or county sheriff” – who took an oath to support the Constitution and then engaged in insurrection would be at odds with the purpose of the provision. Moreover, they suggest, it would be an exception that would apply only to Trump, because “every other President (except, of course, George Washington) had previously sworn a constitutional oath in some other federal or state capacity.”

Trump pushes back against any suggestion that it would be inconsistent with the purpose of Section 3 to hold that the president falls outside its scope. When the 14th Amendment was ratified, he contends, there weren’t any former presidents who had supported the Confederacy, so the drafters would not have had any reason to exclude the president from serving again.

There are a couple of schools of thought among Never Trumpers and other reasonable people: is it better to invoke the Constitution to keep the former guy from being on the ballot for president this year and not take a chance that he wins, or just let the election runs its course and have him suffer electoral defeat?  Of course, we’ve seen what happens when he loses an election fair and square, and we’ve seen what happens when he wins.  I found E.J. Dionne’s argument of how his mind has changed on this question to be persuasive.

Though I agreed that Trump had, indeed, engaged in insurrection, I thought it would be best for the country to have him go down to defeat again in a free and fair election. Keeping him on the ballot so voters could decide was the path to long-term institutional stability and might finally force a reckoning in the Republican Party.

Many people I respect continue to hold versions of this view. But the more I read and listened, the clearer it became that Section 3 was directed against precisely the conduct Trump engaged in. [Emphasis added] Its purpose is to protect the republic from those who would shred the Constitution and destroy our system of self-government. What Trump did in advance of the attack on the Capitol and on Jan. 6, 2021, legally disqualifies him from the presidency.

The record is clear that the legislators who wrote and enacted the amendment in the wake of the Civil War were not just thinking of the Confederacy’s leaders but also of “the leaders of any rebellion hereafter to come.”

Those are the words of John B. Henderson, a Republican senator from Missouri, when he cast his vote for the amendment in 1866. They are recorded in a powerful amicus brief filed with the Supreme Court by a distinguished group of historians of the era: Jill Lepore, David Blight, Drew Gilpin Faust and John Fabian Witt.

The amendment’s authors, they argue, “hoped not only to prevent a resurgence of secessionism but also to protect future generations against insurrectionism.” It was intended “to bar anyone who has betrayed an oath to uphold the Constitution from becoming President of the United States.”

(snip)

And to argue that barring Trump from the ballot is “antidemocratic,” wrote professors Carol Anderson and Ian Farrell in another brief, is “ironic … as he bears by far the most responsibility for attempting to subvert democracy on Jan. 6.” An effort to overthrow constitutional procedures, wrote [Sherrilyn] Ifill, should be distinguished from political protests, even those “accompanied by sporadic acts of violence.” Demonstrators are not the same as a mob trying to hijack the government.

(snip)

Throwing Trump off the ballot would seem, on its face, the opposite of democracy. Yet the whole point of Section 3 is to protect constitutional democracy from anyone who has already tried to destroy it. If its provisions don’t apply to Trump, they don’t apply to anyone. The court would not be disqualifying him. He disqualified himself.

The court convenes at 10 a.m. ET tomorrow; you can listen live to the arguments here or download the clip later.

ALSO: The Washington Post’s Aaron Blake with insight into the damage done to Trump by the loss in his immunity claim case.

83 millions reasons to be happy

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

If it is true that we like to see good things happen to good people, I suppose it’s also true that we like to see bad things happen to bad people.  I know I do.  So today is a very happy day indeed, to see that a New York jury has awarded $83.3 million in damages to the writer suing Donald Trump for “defaming her in social media posts, news conferences and even on the campaign trail ever since she first accused him in 2019 of raping her in a department store dressing room decades earlier.”  Most of that, $65 million, is punitive damages – punishment for the defendant’s conduct.  Well done, sir!

I’d be stunned (shocked, like Claude Rains was) if Trump ever paid the money – he has a long history of delaying and deferring and settling lawsuits for pennies on the dollar with adversaries who’d rather take something than nothing at all – but it is heartening any time he doesn’t get his way with his bullying and bloviating and insistent lying.  Lying, like just last night, when he repeated his worn-out self-defense of the original rape/sexual assault allegation, insisting “I don’t even know who this woman is.  I have no idea who she is, where she came from.”  In present tense.  Really?  Even if that were true years ago when the accusation was first made, how can you honestly claim today that you do not now know who she is?  Is telling the truth just that hard for you?  (“I know you lie, your lips are moving…”)

This has also been an opportunity for the former guy to give us another demonstration – as if we needed one – of his wide-ranging ignorance.  He used his own social media service this afternoon to say he disagrees with all the verdicts in this case, that he will appeal today’s decision on damages, that he blames Democrats for the suit in the first place (huh?), and that some unspecified “they” have “taken away all First Amendment rights,” presumably by limiting his testimony in court and restricting some of the witnesses his lawyers wanted to call.  Of course, “they” have not and did not do that.  At all.  But you knew that.

You knew that the First Amendment right to free speech does not mean that we are all endowed with the right to say any thing we want, at any time we want, any where we want, to any body we want, and that no one can do any thing about it.  The First Amendment prohibits the government from censoring your speech or other expressions of opinion, unless the speech in question falls into one of the categories which the courts have determined are NOT protected: child pornography, or a solicitation to commit a crime, for instance…or in this case, speech that is defamatory.

Judges have a right to run their courts; a higher court can punish this one if he is found to have violated the law.  Don’t hold your breath waiting for that to happen in this case.

Meanwhile, there are more courts hearing cases against you know who: the judge in the New York civil fraud trial against Trump and his business promised a ruling before the end of the month, and then there are the rest of the now-famous 91 indictments, including the it-seems-really-clear-he-did-it classified documents case in Florida.  AND some Republicans are starting to admit, publicly, that Trump’s acknowledged efforts to get the GOP to refuse to compromise with Democrats to pass an immigration bill…

…Trump has been lobbying Republicans both in private conversations and in public statements on social media to oppose the border compromise being delicately hashed out in the Senate, according to GOP sources familiar with the conversations – in part because he wants to campaign on the issue this November and doesn’t want President Joe Biden to score a victory in an area where he is politically vulnerable.

…are bad for the party and bad for the country.  Of course, what is good for the party and good for the country have never been priorities for the former guy.