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The Republican Party, as time goes by, has become less and less a fan of democracy. This is a direct result of both their policies being unpopular and their fealty to Donald Trump driving away voters who used to be in their camp. So they figure if they can't win a fair vote, they'll just change the rules.
You'll have to excuse us for thinking that this week's momentous events were all the direct result of a lost opportunity. For all the people who are grumbling that Donald Trump should have been criminally charged with trying to subvert American democracy and the will of the people a lot earlier than now -- which, by the way, now includes Trump himself complaining that it should have happened earlier -- let's place the real blame where it belongs: on Mitch McConnell and all the other cowardly Republican senators who voted with Trump in his second impeachment trial. If McConnell and nine more GOP senators had stood firm and done the right thing back then -- mere days after the January 6th insurrection attempt -- then we simply would not be where we are now.
Donald Trump, the former president of the United States, was arraigned today in a federal courtroom on some very serious felony charges. The most striking thing about today's events, however, was how routine they have now become. This is (depending on how you count them) either the third such indictment of Trump or the fourth (I would say third, as the previous court filing was merely a superseded indictment that beefed up his second indictment, so the two should really be seen as only one). And Trump could have one more serious indictment and arraignment in his very near future, in Fulton County, Georgia. As with just about everything to do with Trump's presidency, this is all unprecedented. But it's also becoming routine.
While it is certainly now going to be a one-subject week, I thought it'd be worth it to take a little pause between Trump's new federal criminal indictment and his impending arrest and arraignment tomorrow to take a look into an aspect of all of this that is (at least, for the moment) being overshadowed by Trump's new felony charges: what is happening at the state level. I will admit that I am partly doing this because I had at least three-quarters of yesterday's pre-indictment article already written, and it seems a shame to just toss it out. But now I have a larger point to make about six other states as well, which I'll get to at the end.
It has been one of those days as a political commentator where you have to chuck out what you've been working on and start all over again. While I had three-fourths of a column written about new election-interference indictments handed down in Michigan today, late in the day (East Coast time) Special Counsel Jack Smith's federal grand jury indicted Donald Trump on four felony counts, all having to do with Trump's Big Lie that the 2020 election had somehow been stolen from him.
I just finished listening to Smith give his brief statement to the press and then sat down and read all 45 pages of the indictment -- which I urge everyone to take the time to do. I will doubtlessly have much more to say about it all in the coming days, but wanted to write down a few snap reactions and then indulge in a bit of speculation -- on a mystery that will likely be solved by the rest of the political journalistic world by the time the sun goes down (if they're worth their salt at all, that is): who are the six unindicted (as of yet) co-conspirators?
Nothing is ever completely inevitable in politics, because there is always the possibility of some outside event completely turning the political world on its head. But it's getting harder and harder to use any other word to describe Donald Trump's run for the Republican presidential nomination. The only real big chance this has of changing will come during the debates, but even that has to be seen as a real longshot, at this point. After all, Trump may not even show up for the debates, since he has such an enormous and very comfortable lead in the polls and since precisely zero of his challengers has made any sort of splash with the Republican electorate to date. And if he does show up and debate his opponents, Trump will use the same playground-bully style he always does, and the crowd will eat it up with a spoon. Trump is perhaps not completely inevitable, but he is certainly approaching inevitability.
As the ghost of Richard Nixon might have warned Donald Trump: "It's not the crime, it's the cover up." While the political world was all breathlessly awaiting a new Trump indictment over the failed January 6th insurrection attempt, the special counsel surprised everyone by superseding his first indictment instead -- the one dealing with Trump's refusal to return national security documents which were not his. And it was a bombshell.
We do try to resist the urge (we really do!), but this week it was impossible to focus on just about anything else in politics other than the tsunami of bad legal news for Donald Trump. Remember how Trump dominated each and every news cycle for over four years? Those days are back, sadly enough, and will likely continue (at some degree of intensity or another) for the foreseeable future. He is the quintessential car wreck towards which we all must dutifully rubberneck, so here we go....
Donald Trump might need a bigger henhouse soon, as more and more of his legal chickens keep coming home to roost. After a very long two years of a whole lot of nothing happening (at least publicly), all of a sudden there is so much prosecutorial news it's hard to even keep track of it all. So I thought it'd be worth doing a rundown of all Trump's legal woes, as things stand right now (barring any further breaking news today).
The nation celebrated its 247th birthday this year, leaving only three more to go until the second-biggest celebration of our lifetime (as we still personally remember the ushering in the bicentennial in Washington D.C.). But since it was a short week, what with Independence Day falling on a Tuesday, we are hoping this will be a short column (for once). Well, short-ish at any rate. We are cautiously optimistic.
Cautious optimism is a good place to start, actually. We stumbled across an interesting paper from two Democratic strategists (Celinda Lake and Mike Lux) which confidently states: "All the elements are in place for a big Democratic victory in 2024," and predicts that the "trifecta" of winning the House back, holding the Senate and keeping Joe Biden in the White House is well within grasp.