William Barr Is The Energizer Bunny

William Barr is still holding to the theory that some sort of Establishment -- into which he has special insight -- is pushing the various cases against Trump in order to stampede Republicans into nominating him as a sure loser for 2024. I've said here that at minimum, this violates the law of parsimony, since it's too complicated a theory. Alan Dershowitz, a smarter guy, has been putting forward a simpler theory all along, which agrees with public statements by Trump's current prosecutor Alvin Bragg, that his indictment is meant simply to prevent Trump's 2024 candidacy in the first place.

Barr made his case on Trump most recently last night:

“I said he’s frequently his own worst enemy and he digs himself holes,” Barr said on CNN Primetime on Thursday night. “And he does some things that are reckless that are clearly gonna give rise to investigations and look into them. And that included both the documents in Mar-a-Lago and the Jan. 6 episode.”

. . . Barr has been openly critical of Trump since leaving his administration, even saying last week that Trump is the “most likely” GOP candidate to lose to President Biden in a hypothetical 2024 presidential election. Barr stepped down as attorney general, apparently at Trump’s request, in his final month as president and just before the Jan. 6 insurrection.

The problem for Barr is that other legal analysts have been saying that all the potential cases against Trump are varying levels of flimsy, including the Mar-a-Lago documents case that Barr mentions. On that matter:

Attorney Alan Dershowitz, who serves as a professor emeritus at Harvard Law School, said President Joe Biden’s document haul and those found during the FBI raid at former President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort last August will “neutralize” each other.

This will make it difficult for the Justice Department to make anything stick, he said.

“The end result here, by the way, will be a tie. Each of these allegations neutralizes the other,” Dershowitz said Friday evening in an interview with The National Desk.

“It means that it’s impossible that Donald Trump will ever be prosecuted for his mishandling of classified information at Mar-a-Lago, and obviously, the special prosecutor will not prosecute President Biden,” he added.

Now, it's certainly possible that even if Prof Dershowitz says these cases are weak, prosecutors will bring them anyhow, as indeed Alvin Bragg has done in the face of prior decisions not to go ahead with the New York indictment. The difficulty is the practical effect of bringing them. Up to now, Mr Barr has scoffed at Trump's rise in the Republican polls as an indication that they will simply nominate him as a loser in the general election. But this isn't such a sure thing now:

[N]ot once during the 2020 election did the average of [Real Clear Politics] national polls show Trump with a lead. Throughout the campaign, the closest Trump came to Biden was a four-point deficit.

Today, the RealClearPolitics poll of national polls shows Trump with an outright lead of 1.7 points. It bears repeating that this never happened once in 2020. Even left-wing pollsters show Trump doing well. The Marquette poll shows a tie. Quinnipiac only has Biden up two points. Rasmussen, one of the only pollsters that show Biden with a respectable approval rating, has Trump up by seven.

As I've been saying here, none of this is predictive so far in advance of the 2024 election. On the other hand, it does begin to refute any attempt by Mr Barr and others to discount Trump's potential candidacy on the basis that he's popular only with the Republican base and will surely lose in a general election -- at least, "if present trends continue", which is never a sound assumption.

But what this data does support is that the Bragg indictment is playing to Trump's strategy, which is to use the media itself to keep him in the media, and we might well begin to assume that the second wave of Republicans who are currently announcing or exploring 2024 candicacies, like Gov Haley and Sen Scott, are actually angling for the vice presidential spot. Even Vivek Ramaswamy, with no political experience, likely wants to raise his profile in anticipation of a cabinet appointment.

And what nobody's mentioned so far is that the Trump surge is also feeding off the Bud Light controversy, which industry observers say has gained surprising traction:

Backlash to Bud Light’s celebration of transgender activist Dylan Mulvaney’s "365 Days of Girlhood" doesn’t appear to be dwindling.

"This boycott seems to have more legs than most," Justin Kendall, editor of beer industry trade publication Brewbound, told the New York Post.

"It started out as a conversation on social media and has breached into mainstream media," Kendall said. "Bud Light is the best-selling beer in the country."

If it's in mainstream media, it's there right next to The Donald. The stories play against each other. I simply don't know if prosecutors in Florida, Georgia, and Washington will ever recognize that additional indictments on flimsy cases will do precisely what they don't want -- keep Trump in the nightly news month after month, portraying him as the one figure the establishment can't tolerate in the political process. They'll make Trump's case for him -- and Prof Dershowitz even makes the point that not only can he run for office from a prison cell, he can serve as president from there, too.

If there's a monolithic establishment behind the scenes making the decision to indict Trump -- which Mr Barr seems to think, and he even seems to think he's part of it -- they've in fact got to be wondering if maybe it's going backfire on them if they keep it up.