About As Expected

One big thing I noticed from still photos of last night's speech was the continuing problem of his eyes: he's frequently squinting through a slit-eyed but otherwise expressionless mask, or, if his eyes are open, his pupils are unusually dilated. It's not a good look. The clenched fist in the lower photo is plainly rehearsed, but the pouty mouth contradicts it. Give 'em hell, Harry! He basiclly can't put together a public persona, much less a likeable one.

The big episode that stood out, apparently for most commentators, was the exchange with Marjorie Taylor Greene.

Joe Biden just confused Laken Riley, a college student killed by an illegal immigrant, with USC football coach Lincoln Riley. This just happened. The man’s brain is mush. Incredibly disrespectful. pic.twitter.com/SxYP3k174X

— Clay Travis (@ClayTravis) March 8, 2024

He then went off script and veered into incoherence:

“Laken [Lincoln] Riley, an innocent young woman who was killed by an illegal. That’s right,” Biden said. “But how many thousands of people being killed by illegals? To her parents I say, my heart goes out to you having lost children myself.”

“But look, if we change the dynamic at the border, people pay these smugglers,” he added.

Nobody can really figure out what he meant by " how many thousands of people being killed by illegals?" or how, "if we change the dynamic at the border, people pay these smugglers." The takeaway is that he can never be allowed to leave the teleprompter, but he routinely does. This is just the latest example.

And the corollary is that he can't debate. His surprise performance in the 2020 debates with Trump took place four years ago. Then, he was focused enough to recite a canned reply about Hunter's laptop: "These 51 former intelligence officers declared that it was disinformation and phony." I very much doubt he could do that now, much less even get the number right or pronounce "disinformation and phony" without slurring. This will go as it goes, but even his boosters acknowledge that any public appearance carries the risk of gaffes.

The final point for me was his remarks on Ukraine:

If anybody in this room thinks Putin will stop at Ukraine, I assure you, he will not.

But Ukraine can stop Putin if we stand with Ukraine and provide the weapons it needs to defend itself. That is all Ukraine is asking. They are not asking for American soldiers.

He then wanders into NATO, which is off the subject -- Ukraine isn't in NATO and under current conditions, it's unlikely ever to join, since there would need to be a settlement of the current conflict that would require Russian agreement, when Russia has consistently opposed Ukraine joining NATO. But Biden concludes,

I say this to Congress: we must stand up to Putin. Send me the Bipartisan National Security Bill.

History is watching.

If the United States walks away now, it will put Ukraine at risk.

Biden's own record has been delaying decisions over weapons like F16s and Abrams tanks beyond the point where they could have been effective, but as the story has developed, it appears that a big proportion of US aid has been lost through Ukrainian corruption. Reports I've cited here suggest that Secretary Blinken and the CIA have lost confidence in Ukraine's ability to achieve Zelensky's objectives, which continue to be driving Russia back to pre-2014 borders.

In that context, Victoria Nuland, the architect of current Ukraine policy, announced her retirement earlier this week, suggesting the need for serious re-evaluation -- but Biden seems oblivious. As Tucker Carlson commented,

This is crazy talk. There's no explanation of what the goal is here. There's lie after lie. Ukraine can stop Russia. No it can't. This has gone on for over two years.

Even when I supported Ukraine's fight based on optimistic projections from the retired general talking heads, I was always uncomfortable that there was no plan for an end state, just an assertion that we'd support Ukraine for "as long as it takes" to do whatever it was. This has turned out not to be viable, but even if Secretary Blinken and the CIA have lost confidence, so far, there's no attempt to recalibrate.

Apparently Biden's handlers still hope Murphy's Law doesn't apply.

How Will The Big Guy Do Tonight?

This piece notes,

The speech’s March 7 delivery date is the latest one for a State of the Union address in history, Fox News noted.

This is only the second occasion in history that the president has chosen not to speak in person to a joint session of Congress in January or February. On March 1, 2022, Biden made his first speech to Congress.

This must certaintly reflect discomfort among Joe's handlers over his ability to stand up and read coherently from a teleprompter for an hour or more. Whatever ails him -- and I'm still hesitant about any answer that requires a medical diagnosis -- there's a general consensus that it's gotten worse.

Former aides who worked directly with then-Vice President Joe Biden in the Obama administration have called current fears over his age “a very real issue” — with some alarmed at how he has become more “frail” and “mumbly.”

“If you watch Joe Biden speak, oftentimes he sounds frail and he sounds more frail than he used to, even in 2019 and 2020,” Jon Favreau, the chief speechwriter for Obama when Biden was vice president, said in a recent episode of the “Pod Save America” podcast.

“The voice sounds frail, and he shuffles more because of the arthritis in his back,” Favreau said, adding that the oldest-ever president also appears “mumbly.”

. . . Podcast co-host Jon Lovett, another ex-Obama speechwriter, agreed and argued that the Biden campaign should get the president out in public to demonstrate his mental and physical abilities — even if they are concerned that he will make more gaffes.

“I’m sure that going out there means more missteps … more gaffes that start circulating, but if you don’t view Biden being out there as a net positive, then the argument he shouldn’t be running is right.”

The problem is that he was out in public earlier this week, and there were gaffes.

FULL VIDEO:

REPORTER: "What's your message to Democrats who are concerned about your poll numbers?"

BIDEN: "My poll numbers? The last five polls you guys don't report. I'm winning — five! Five in a row!" pic.twitter.com/Mz5gWQMRSA

— RNC Research (@RNCResearch) March 5, 2024

About ten seconds into the video, he leans over and breathes right in the reporter's face, "I'm winning [huuuuh] Five [huuuuh] Five in a row!" Frankly, if I'd been there, I would have averted my face to avoid the hot, heavy reek of alcohol on his breath, but that's just me. Another reaction to another episode on Tuesday:

Oh my Lord. This man is not well. pic.twitter.com/5UoEW90FD6

— Peter Daou (@peterdaou) March 6, 2024

This post affirms the view I've had ever since the 2020 debates:

Unpopular opinion: Joe typically exceeds expectations at these major speeches and there's no reason to expect anything different this time.

However the only way he does this is by shutting off everything else and getting on a modified sleep (and perhaps medication) cycle.

— Brick Suit (@Brick_Suit) March 5, 2024

They either have to change up his meds or keep him off the sauce for a day or more before a major event, and those chances seem to be less and less frequent. But he was out and about as recently as Tuesday and not looking good. On one hand, Trump has repeatedly said he doesn't think Biden can make it through to the election, although now he's challenging Joe to debates. So far, this isn't a subject the White House likes:

White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre sparred with a reporter on Wednesday over questions about whether President Joe Biden will debate GOP front-runner and former President Donald Trump ahead of November’s election.

“Is President Biden going to commit to a debate with President Donald Trump?” Fox News White House correspondent Peter Doocy asked.

Jean Pierre responded, “That’s something for the campaign to speak to.”

“Well, we know when the debates are going to be. We know where they are going to be. Is he going to go?” Doocy pressed again.

“You should speak to the campaign,” she said.

But leaving debates aside, there doesn't seem to be a whole lot of confidence in Joe's ability to stand up and read coherently for an hour on national TV. Yes, he's done it before, and yes, he's exceeded expectations, but I'm just not sure how much of that he still has in him.

Victoria Nuland Announces Retirement; No Plan B

Yesterday's AP headline completely misses the point:

Victoria Nuland, the third-highest ranking U.S. diplomat and frequent target of criticism for her hawkish views on Russia and its actions in Ukraine, will retire and leave her post this month, the State Department said Tuesday.

Nuland, a career foreign service officer who served as Assistant Secretary of State for Europe during the Obama administration but retired after Donald Trump was elected president, returned to government as Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs in the Biden administration.

She had been a candidate to succeed Wendy Sherman as deputy Secretary of State and had served as acting deputy since Sherman’s retirement seven months ago but lost an internal administration personnel battle when President Joe Biden nominated Kurt Campbell to the no. 2 spot. Campbell took office last month.

Nuland had served at the U.S. embassy in Moscow in the tumultuous 1990s and was in the city during the attempted coup against former Russian President Boris Yeltsin.

I posted in some detail on her actual career last August. There, I linked to her Wikipedia entry:

From 2003 to 2005, Nuland served as the principal deputy foreign policy adviser to Vice President Dick Cheney, exercising an influential role during the Iraq War. From 2005 to 2008, during President George W. Bush's second term, Nuland served as U.S. ambassador to the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) in Brussels, where she concentrated on mobilizing European support for the NATO intervention in Afghanistan.

. . . During the Maidan Uprising in Ukraine, Nuland made appearances supporting the Maidan protesters. In December 2013, she said in a speech to the US–Ukraine Foundation that the U.S. had spent about $5 billion on democracy-building programs in Ukraine since 1991. The Russian government seized on this statement, claiming it was evidence the U.S. was orchestrating a color revolution.

. . . Nuland was the lead U.S. point person for Ukraine's Revolution of Dignity, establishing loan guarantees to Ukraine, including a $1 billion loan guarantee in 2014, and the provisions of non-lethal assistance to the Ukrainian military and border guard. Along with Secretary of State John Kerry and Secretary of Defense Ash Carter, she is seen as a leading supporter of defensive weapons delivery to Ukraine. In 2016, Nuland urged Ukraine to start prosecuting corrupt officials: "It's time to start locking up people who have ripped off the Ukrainian population for too long and it is time to eradicate the cancer of corruption". While serving as the Department of State's lead diplomat on the Ukraine crisis, Nuland pushed European allies to take a harder line on Russian expansionism.

Her husband, Robert Kagan, is a prominent neoconservative academic, while her brother-in-law, Frederick Kagan, has been a major contributor at the Institute for the Study of War, a major cheerleader for the US interventionist strategy in Ukraine, which suggests the incestuous nature of neoconservative policymaking overall.

She was a prime mover in the US proxy interventions in Ukraine, which led to the 2014 Donbas annexation followed by the 2022 invasion, and her star in the Biden administration rose until, by reports, Secretary Blinken and the CIA began to become disillusioned with the 2023 counteroffensive that July. At that point, Biden appointed her Acting Deputy Secretary of State following the retirement of Wendy Sherman. According to a story at Gateway Pundit citing reports from Seymour Hersh behind a paywall,

At the same time, “ultra-hawkish” Victoria Nuland was promoted by Biden from Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs to Acting Deputy Secretary of State ”over the heated objections of many in the State Department,” Hersh writes. “She has not been formally nominated as the deputy for fear that her nomination would lead to a hellish fight in the Senate. “

“Tony Blinken, who publicly vowed just a few months ago that there would be no immediate ceasefire in Ukraine, is still in office and, if asked, would certainly dispute any notion of discontent with Zelensky or the administration’s murderous and failing war policy in Ukraine,” Hersh writes. The White House’s “wishful approach to the war, when it comes to realistic talk to the American people, will continue apace,” Hersh said. “But the end is nearing, even if the assessments supplied by Biden to the public are out of a comic strip.”

So with the end nearing, it appears that saner heads among Biden's handlers nominated Kurt Campbell to fill the Acting Deputy spot, which then led to Nuland's decision to retire. But according to the AP story at the top link, she'd already retired once, when Trump was elected in 2016, which suggests she anticipated then that Trump wouldn't favor the Ukraine policies of covert Western intervention with which she'd been identified through much of the Obama administration. Now, with a Trump return in the realm of possibility, it looks like she's made an equivalent decision.

Says something about Trump, doesn't it? This also suggests the Biden administration is quietly backing off its whole Ukraine policy, something that it has been telegraphing since last summer, but without adjusting its legislative priorities. The current "bipartisan" border security bill, now stalled in the House, contains $60 billion in additional Ukraine funding in an apparent attempt to maintain appearances while doing nothing to change the actual military balance.

Nuland's retirement, following a tacit acknowledgement that her appointment as Deputy Secretary would never get Senate confirmation, suggests that the administration has dropped its post-2022 Ukraine policy without annuncing a Plan B. This seems like it's par for the course lately, as there's no plan B for Biden, either.

McConnell's Turnaround

I've been noting here that Trump is moving to take over the Republican apparatus in light of his status as presumptive nominee, which he's achieved much earlier than he did in 2016. Not as much has been said, though it should be, about his role in pushing Mitch McConnell to announce his retirement as Senate Republican leader. A month ago, I noted that McConnell had been forced to reverse his support for the Senate border "compromise", citing a source, "McConnell said the political mood in the country has changed since negotiations began months ago."

The change was Mike Johnson's election as Speaker and Trump's surge in the polls.

Two weeks ago, having made it plain to RNC chair Ronna McDaniel that her resignation was expected, he sent the same message to McConnell:

. . . I don’t know that I can work with him,” Trump said during a town hall on Fox News' "The Ingraham Angle" on Tuesday. “He gave away trillions of dollars that he didn’t have to, trillions of dollars. He made it very easy for the Democrats.”

This wasn't the language of Trump's first term -- he had no real choice but to work with McConnell at the time. All of a sudden, he's sending McConnell an unambiguous message that his time's about up. Something's happened.

[A]ny serious attempt to understand history’s longest-serving Senate leader needs to focus on the age in which he rose to power: those eight years of Republican rule in the early 2000s. . . . More than anything, Mitch McConnell was a Bush Republican.

. . . Few Americans of either party hold much nostalgia about the George W. Bush presidency, and former Rep. Liz Cheney’s headlong charge into obscurity doesn’t quite inspire imitators. Better to draw your authority from a deeper well.

. . . Mitch McConnell won leadership of the Senate GOP in 2006 — just off three years of controlling the White House, Senate, and House of Representatives, which they used to tinker on business-friendly reforms, while failing to achieve a lasting effect.

The defining issues of the day were bailouts for Wall Street, the president’s promised amnesty for illegal immigrants, and the increasingly unpopular Iraq War. McConnell supported all three.

. . . His legacy epitomizes the Republican Party of the 2000s: corporate tax cuts, unfettered spending on defense and liberal programs, and the abandonment of any serious legislative efforts on cultural issues, from abortion to marriage to immigration.

It’s fitting that after four decades in the Senate, he hopes funding the war in Ukraine will cement his legacy. It’s priorities like these — and men like him and other Bush Republicans — who opened the door for the new right’s rebellion within the ranks.

Nevertheless, McConnell appears willing to acknowledge circumstances:

Senate leader Mitch McConnell is the highest-ranking Republican in Congress who has yet to endorse Donald Trump's bid to return to the White House — having once called the defeated president "morally responsible" for the Jan. 6, 2021 Capitol attack.

. . . McConnell's political team and Trump's campaign have been in talks over not only a possible endorsement of the former president but a strategy to unite Republicans up and down the party's ticket ahead of the November election, according to a person familiar with the situation and granted anonymity to discuss it.

. . . In the aftermath of the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, key Republicans, including McConnell, signaled unequivocally they were done with Trump.

In a scathing speech during the Senate impeachment trial on charges Trump incited the insurrection at the Capitol, McConnell decried Trump's intemperate language and the "entire manufactured atmosphere of looming catastrophe" and "wild myths" about a stolen election.

What's increasingly clear is that Trump now appears to be in a stronger political position, certainly within his own party, than he's ever been, especially during his first term. Exactly why this is needs to be examined, but the failure of consensus Bush-era policies, including neoconservative foreign policy and softness on illegal immigration, is certainly one factor. The controlling metaphor of the "stolen" election is another, which I'll take up again soon.

Chutzpah

As the presumptive Republican nominee in the November election and leading Biden in the polls, Trump has increasingly been taking over the party machinery, but he's also beginning to send serious foreign policy signals over the direction his next administration is likely to take. In the most recent example,

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban will meet former President Donald Trump on Friday, March 8 in Florida, Orban's press chief told Hungarian state news agency MTI late Sunday.

Last month nationalist Orban endorsed Trump's bid to return to the presidency this year.

"We hope the current president will go, and President Trump will return and he will have free hands to make peace [in Ukraine]," Orban said Feb. 23.

Elsewhere,

At the invitation of former President Donald Trump, Hungary’s Prime Minister Viktor Orbán will be traveling to the USA next week. However, it seems unlikely that he will meet with President Joe Biden, reports eXXpress.

Orbán will meet with Trump in Florida on Friday, March 8, as confirmed by his spokesperson Bertalan Havasi on Sunday. The announcement did not mention any plans for a meeting with President Biden. Additionally, Orbán’s Foreign Minister Péter Szijjártó is scheduled to visit Russia again at the end of March.

Note the oh-by-the-way about the foreign minister's upcoming visit to Moscow. It's likely that this will transmit some sort of message from Trump to Putin, and this will inevitably involve some sort of argument from circumstance over Ukraine -- the West generally has invested well over $100 billion in the proxy war, only to have become bogged down with no hope of even returning to pre-2022 boundaries.

From the AP:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán confirmed Friday that he will visit Donald Trump in Florida next week, and described a possible comeback by the former U.S. president as the “only serious chance” for an end to the war in Ukraine.

Addressing a diplomacy forum in Turkey, Orbán also suggested that Trump’s possible return to the White House could help end the conflict in Gaza.

. . . “The only serious chance for peace is if he’s able to come back and to make peace,” Orbán told the forum. “Otherwise, the war between Ukraine and Russia will be long.”

Trump’s return “is a precondition for a strong and quick peace in the European continent,” he continued.

Orbán said he was convinced that if Trump had been in office when the war in Ukraine started “there would have been no war now.”

Let's go back to the 2017 kerfuffle over Trump's national security adviser Michael Flynn and the Logan Act:

The controversy over former National Security Adviser Michael Flynn’s communications with the Russian ambassador to the United States has revived interest in an obscure 18th-century federal law known as the Logan Act.

On Monday evening, Flynn resigned after reports that he had discussed U.S. sanctions against Russia with the Russian official before Trump took office. At the end of December, the Obama administration imposed sanctions following the determination of U.S. intelligence officials that Russia intervened in the 2016 presidential election to undermine then-candidate Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning.

The Russian-interference angle, of course, was never anything but the purest moonshine, but it's an indication of the extreme Democrat sensitivity to Trump making foreign policy initiatives when he isn't formally and legally in office. If in 2016 he was telegraphing negotiations with Russia while he was merely president-elect, what are they going to do now that he's just the presumptive nominee and current front-runner, nearly a year before he could be sworn in? Here's more on the 2017 Flynn controversy:

Michael Flynn, President Trump's former national security adviser, pleaded guilty Friday to providing false statements to the FBI. Those are less serious charges than he could have faced, because he is cooperating with special prosecutor Robert Mueller's investigators.

Flynn likely has something to trade, as NPR's Carrie Johnson noted on All Things Considered Friday. Flynn was not acting alone, according to charging documents against him. In fact, there were multiple members of the presidential transition team who spoke with Flynn about his communications with the Russian ambassador.

That included a "very senior member," who "directed Flynn to contact officials from foreign governments, including Russia ..." Several news organizations have identified that individual as Jared Kushner, President Trump's son-in-law.

Ah, the Mueller investigation. This lasted from May 2017 to March 2019 as an ongoing effort to undermine the Trump presidency, abetted by never Trumpers within the administration like William Barr. The results were inconclusive -- namely, they didn't lead to impeachment and removal for Trump -- and Mueller took the blame:

People across the political spectrum, even those who have worked with Mueller, were airing concerns that the 74-year-old longtime lawman, at a minimum, appeared out of practice.

“This is delicate to say, but Mueller, whom I deeply respect, has not publicly testified before Congress in at least six years. And he does not appear as sharp as he was then,” David Axelrod, the former top Obama White House strategist while Mueller was FBI director, wrote on Twitter about 45 minutes into the nationally televised hearing.

“Bob Mueller is struggling,” added Glenn Kirschner, a former federal prosecutor who worked under Mueller in the U.S. attorney’s office in Washington, D.C. “It strikes me as a health issue. We need only look at footage of his earlier congressional appearances to see the dramatic difference in his demeanor and communicative abilities.”

But if Michael Flynn's putative violation of the Logan Act -- he was never indicted or tried for that, he was forced to plead guilty to lying to the FBI -- was enough to force a two-year fishing expedition by the deep state, what are they going to do about Trump's meeting with Orbán? It seems all but announced that this meeting will lead to some sort of back-channel message from Trump to Putin via Orbán's foreign secretary, with Trump a private citizen fully out of office and without even the justification that he's president-elect. What's Joe Biden gonna do about this, if Obama had James Comey perp walk Michael Flynn in early 2017 for far less?

I don't think Biden will do anything. Looking back, the Mueller investigation was an early draft of the lawfare strategy, which has proven feckless, and in fact, the 2024 election is turning out to be a referendum on the Democrat opposition to Trump throughout his first term. The whole Biden administration has simply been a real-world refutation of the Democrat strategies since 2016; whatever they may argue, on whatever flimsy grounds, people are looking back and deciding things were better under Trump.

Any attempt to reboot the Logan Act strategy against Trump or whichever fall guy they may try to designate a la Flynn will simply drive Trump higher in the polls. Trump knows this. Somewhere among Biden and his handlers, they know this too.

Whatever's Become Of Hunter?

In recent weeks, both Joe Biden's son Hunter and his brother James have given closed-door depositions to the Comer Committee, and the transcripts have been released. On Thursday, the New York Post ran the headline, After years of denials, Hunter Biden FINALLY acknowledged Joe was ‘the big guy’ in $5M China deal. The next day, it had the story Joe Biden got $40K from China funds, brother James admits in bombshell impeachment interview.

Nobody noticed. Last fall, this would have been much bigger news. I think there are several reasons. One is that by this point, the whole Biden family boodle has been factored in; the part of the public that follows the news has inferred everything there is to infer, and it's moved on. Second, while there's a there there, it's never turned into anything big. Joe got $40K from China? Heck, Nathan Wade go $600K from Fani, and that was for piddling stuff like wine tasting tours.

Third, the Hunter-Joe-James story had nothing to do with Trump, and that may be the secret. Trump's steady rise in the polls began with the federal and Fulton County indictments and the New York joke civil cases in the middle of last year, and those all had to do with Trump. Trump is an interesting guy, Joe Biden is a nebbish. Former Clinton intimate Dick Morris says at 2:00:

[T]he charges against Trump are so noisy and so all-encompassing that they eat up all the room in the election and suck all the oxygen out of the room. After you finish debating whether Trump led a revolution or not, and after you finish debating whether Trump intimidated a woman who he raped or not, what are you gonna do, talk about his stand on Social Security, talk about his stand on dealing with China? There's no place for the other issues in the dialogue.

In other words, it's all about Trump, plus the comic-book villains who're made to order to serve as his foils: Judge Engoron, Fani Willis, Nathan Wade -- and the problem is that more are lined up like Alvin Bragg, Letitia James, and Jack Smith. Trump may as well be campaigning against the Joker.

As the famous statement attributed to Clausewitz and others goes, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. Republican strategists came up with a perfectly reasonable idea that dated back to 2020 and the first reports of the Hunter laptop: hit Joe with all the Biden family scandals. The good part of that plan was that it could attach to any generic Republican candidate, and it's actually been a rationale for the Haley campaign: Biden and Trump are equally awful, and Haley is the one remaining alternative.

The problem the get-Hunter strategy has had to confront, though, is that Joe is a nebbish, so is Hunter, so is James, and so is Hunter's BFF Kevin Morris. These guys aren't worth Trump's time; he's got more interesting things to do, and that's what the YouTubers and others, up to and including Alan Dershowitz, are gleefully following. Hunter has been overtaken by events; the generic Republican strategy of going after Hunter was never more than so-so, and as Trump moves steadily closer to the nomination, he isn't going to need it. That's for Nikki to try to salvage.

The Hunter strategy may in fact, though, have had some secondary effect. From the little we hear, Joe has been at least in part preoccupied with Hunter's legal problems, and the baggie-near-the-Sit-Room scandal appears to have forced Joe to move Hunter out of the White House -- for whatever he was worth, Joe seems to have needed Hunter as an important adviser/enabler. If that had even a minimal effect in distracting Joe from better uses for his time, it served its purpose, but the focus now is on Joe himself. The Hunter strategy for generic Republcans was never going to be a winner, and now it's beside the point.

Plan A Continues To Collapse

Conventional wisdom is very slowly coming to accept that Plan A, securing a conviction in a Trump trial before the election, has effectively disappeared: whatever the outcome of Judge McAfee's decision in the Fulton County RICO case against Trump and his co-defendants, the losing side will appeal. The most conservative prognostications are that the judge will disqualify Wade, the special prosecutor, but not Willis, who would keep her position as DA, but she'd need to find someone new to serve as special prosecutor.

That could be a problem, since Wade had been baked into the process from the start. A second contract prosecutor on the case, Anna Cross, disappeared from the proceedings for unkown reasons after attacking Terrence Bradley on February 16, when it had been assumed she would continue in a lead role. Instead, Adam Abbate, an assistant DA on the regular payroll, was called up from the secnd team to represent the DA's office in Ms Cross's absence; his performance was abysmal:

Closing arguments from prosecutor Adam Abbate have been marked by long pauses and halting answers as he at times struggled to answer questions from Judge Scott McAfee.

In one particularly awkward exchange, McAfee asked Abbate why District Attorney Fani Willis would at first fight her subpoena to testify at last month’s evidentiary hearing, only for her to change her mind and answer questions voluntarily. Abbate cited the very public nature of the hearing and how intrusive many questions were.

So in what looks to be the best case for Willis, if she stays on the case, finding capable prosecutorial talent and bringing them up to speed before the election could be a problem, as the defendants will continue to find reasons for further delay. But if Willis herself is disqualified, the whole case is likely out the window.

Meanwhile, the US Supreme Court's decision to hear Trump's immunity claim will significantly delay the January 6 trial under Judge Chutkan, originally seheduled to start on Monday:

“The surprise is that it took the court the better part of two weeks to reach this result, from which no justice has publicly dissented,” [CNN Supremne Court analyst Steve] Vladeck said. “The justices couldn’t reach consensus on a way to resolve the matter without giving it full briefing and argument.”

“It’s hard to read any tea leaves into whether that makes the court more likely to side with former President Trump when it finally resolves his immunity claim, but it certainly means that, even in the worst-case scenario for Trump, the January 6 prosecution will be delayed for at least another 3-5 months. That’s a pretty big win for Trump even if he ends up losing this case,” Vladeck added.

This drives Politico to wishful thinking:

Almost immediately after the court’s order, a consensus seemed to form among the pundit class: that it will now be impossible for Trump’s trial in Washington to take place before the election. Here is the reality — tentative and messy, perhaps, but true nonetheless: Trump’s trial in Washington can still start before November given the time available on the calendar. Trump’s trial also should start before November given the intense public interest.

. . . Let’s assume, however, that the justices issue a ruling in June that rejects Trump’s bid for immunity, which is what should happen on the merits. The situation at that point will get much more fraught, and it will fall to Chutkan to make some difficult choices with no real precedent.

. . . [I]f Chutkan can manage it, she should hold the line. It should not have fallen to her to make this happen, but if Trump’s criminal case comes back to her this summer from the Supreme Court, she should do her best to put the case on the quickest and most reasonable trial schedule that she can devise, even if some on the Supreme Court are working overtime to help Trump to prevent this from happening.

This set of assumptions has the same flaw as the White House's original lawfare strategy: it assumed that with indictments in mid-2023, one or more cases could come to trial and result in a conviction, if not during the primary season, at least by November. This ignored Murphy's Law on one hand, anything that can go wrong will go wrong, but also the simple nature of the legal system, in which defendants will always try to delay trials, and they often succeed in doing this for years.

Another victim of Plan A's failure is Nikki Haley. A good part of her continued campaigh has been based on a perceived contingency that Trump could in fact still at least come to trial in one or another case before the election, and she could become the fallback candidate, but that contingency seems less likely with each passing day:

When Haley exits the race, which could come as soon as next week, after Super Tuesday, the former U.N. ambassador will have outlasted every other one of Trump’s serious rivals. But her incentives to remain in the race are vanishing, and Haley has only pledged to continue campaigning through Tuesday. Even if Trump were to be sidelined for some non-electoral reason — an unforeseen health event or a conviction in his first criminal trial, which is scheduled to start this month — few Republicans think Haley would be the choice of a majority of delegates at a contested convention.

So far, there doesn't even seem to be a good set of possible alternatives for either the Democrats or never-Trumpers on how to proceed given the current developing circumstances.