"Are You Staring Me Down?"

Via the Huffington Post:

Chaos enveloped Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan Monday afternoon after a defense witness verbally tangled with Judge Juan Merchan, causing the courtroom to be cleared ― and earning a severe rebuke in return.

The drama began when the witness, an attorney and longtime Rudy Giuliani associate named Robert Costello, appeared to be upset at Judge Merchan for sustaining a series of objections from the prosecution about his answers.

. . . [T]he judge asked the jury to leave the room while instructing Costello to remain seated.

“I want to discuss proper decorum in my courtroom,” Merchan told Costello.

“I’m the only one that can strike testimony in this court,” he said. “You don’t give me side-eye, and you don’t roll your eyes. You understand that?”

Wait a moment. I'm not an attorney, but I'm a big true crime fan, I've watched lots of trials on TV from Perry Mason onward, and I've seen several trials in person as a juror and in the audience. What puzzled me about this exchange right away is that the judge and the witness both face in the same direction, toward the attorneys and the audience beyond them, as shown in the sketch above. The judge wouldn't normally see the witness's face, much less what he's doing with his eyes. But let's go on:

Costello proceeded to glare at the judge.

“Are you staring me down?” Merchan asked. The judge then cleared the courtroom, including members of the press, who were hastily shuffled into an adjoining hallway.

Based on my experience watching court sessions, and as illustrated in the sketch above, it would be physically very difficult for a witness to stare down a judge. The witness would need to turn his head over 90 degrees toward the judge and look up at him, and the judge likewise would need to turn his own head 90 degrees, look down, and hold the witness's gaze. At minimum the witness would be trying to stare the judge up, not down, tacitly acknolwledging the judge's superior position, which wouldn't work in terms of body language. Something's wrong here.

Alan Dershowitx, who was attending the trial, made things much clearer on Hannity last night (via partial transcript at RedState):

I sat in the front row, literally just feet away from where all the action occurred. I rolled my eyes when the judge made some rulings that were absurd. Any first-year evidence student would understand that he was making biased rulings in favor of one side.

I stared him down, but Costello didn't. He acted like a normal witness and the judge went berserk. The judge violated Trump's constitutional right to a public trial by kicking the media out of the courtroom. I don't know why I wasn't kicked out, and I heard him lecture Costello... "What you did was contemptuous. You looked at me contemptuously...”

. . . I'm sure Costello was trying to hide his contempt for the court, but the judge had such a thin skin that he threatened him. He said he would strike the testimony and hold him in contempt if he rolled his eyes again. You have a constitutional right to roll your eyes and to stare at anybody. It was absurd!

So OK, that begins to clear it ip. Nobody was twisting his neck to stare at anybody, Dershowitz, probably the most distinguished living attorney in the country, was sitting in the front row at the trial and rolling his eyes at the judge. The judge blew up -- in Dershowitz's words "went berserk". In the version of another attendee, Paul Ingrassia, Merchan then shouted "GET OUT OF THE COURTROOM, NOW! GET OUT OF THE COURTROOM!"

Merchan grows irate, begins EXCORIATING Robert Costello on the stand for making a few off-handed remarks and rolling his eyes during the testimony.

Merchan: Are you staring me down right now?

Costello: I'm not.

Merchan: GET OUT OF THE COURTROOM, NOW! GET OUT OF THE COURTROOM!…

— Paul Ingrassia (@PaulIngrassia) May 20, 2024

Except that Merchan made it clear that Costello was to remain seated in the witness box to be admonished while everyone else left. But the order to clear the courtroom didn't work, only about half the people left, and Dershowitz stayed. I strongly suspect that the order to get out of the courtroom was in fact directed at Dershowitz, who likely knew better than anyone that he was perfectly entitled to stay, and that's what he did, which only infuriated Merchan more.

As I've been saying since last October with Judge Engoron, Trump's strategy, at least in all the New York cases, is based on the Chicago Seven defense, something Alan Dershowitz recognizes, and Dershowitz worked for the defense on that case. Both Trump and Dershowitz recognize Trump can't get a fair verdict in any of the New York trials, so his strategy is to provoke the judges into losing their tempers and making reversible errors -- or, from a media standpoint instead of a legal one, to make monkeys of themselves in front of a national audience.

Clearly this has worked with Judge Merchan. Consider the pressure that's been building on Merchan. I don't think he envisioned that the trial would get the national attention it's received -- but as a direct result of his threat to send Trump to jail for contempt, which itself was an outcome of Trump's Chicago Seven strategy, US senators, the Speaker of the US House, and now the most distinguished living US attorney, Dershowitz, have been attending the trial in clear support of Trump. And the most distinguished living US attorney, Dershowitz himself, rolled his eyes at the judge and stared him down.

The trial for Merchan is actually going worse for him than the Chicago Seven trial went for Judge Julius Hoffman, who continued his career after the Chicago Seven case, although he was eventually sidelined by being given no new cases to preside over. Judge Merchan, now the subject of ethics complaints and potential misconduct allegations, likely won't fare as well. He's got to be recognizing that the people involved in the highly political cases against Trump are coming under scrutiny, and like Fani Willis, not only are their particular cases collapsing, but other corruption and misconduct are coming to light.

I don't think any of this is what Merchan had in mind. By threatening to put Trump in jail for contempt, he played into Trump's hands, and he's gotten in way over his head.

Not In The Polls

The RealClearPolitics headlines are usually tepid, cautiously juxtaposing a slightly right-of-center piece with a rabid left winger under the pretense that they're somehow bipartisan, reflecting someone's wish dream of conventional wisdom. But for some reason, this morning's titles are oddly unanimous: 7 Theories for Why Biden Is Losing (And What He Should Do) by Ezra Klein at the New York Times, Alarmed Dems Run From Biden in Battleground States by Alexander Bolton at The Hill, Biden Can Save America From Trump by Dropping Out by Jeremy Mayer at USA Today, and How Lawfare Turned Trump Into a Superhero Frank Miele at RealClearPolitics.

None of them mentions the national popular-vote poll aggregate, which always tops RCP's list. Some of them mention the battleground-state aggregates, but even then with some skepticism. As Ezra Klein puts it in the lead piece,

Biden is losing to Trump. His path is narrowing. In 2020, Biden didn’t just win Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin. He also won Arizona, Georgia and Nevada. Now he’s behind in those states by six points, nine points and 13 points in the latest Times/Siena/Philadelphia Inquirer poll.

. . . [T]o the extent polls have been wrong in recent presidential elections, they’ve been wrong because they’ve been biased toward Democrats. Trump ran stronger in 2016 and 2020 than polls predicted.

Sure, the polls could be wrong. But that could mean Trump is stronger, not weaker, than he looks.

In February, Klein had argued that Joe should drop out to save the election. He seems still to hold out for this as a last-ditch alternative if the first debate goes south:

The June debate will be his best opportunity. Doubts about age are really doubts about capability, and all Biden needs to do is persuade enough voters that he is more capable than the erratic criminal defendant across the stage, who turns 78 next month. But if the debate goes poorly, or if Biden’s numbers deteriorate further, Democrats will need to decide between a Biden-Harris ticket that is very likely to lose or an open convention.

Jeremy Mayer at USA Today is also ignoring the national aggregate and focusing on the battleground state polls:

Recent polling of Biden against Trump looks ugly.

Really? This morning's RCP national popular-vote aggregate has Trump up by a mere 0.9 point. Doesn't this feed the recent wisdom that the November election will be razor-thin? It doesn't sound like Mayer believes it.

Biden's poll numbers are awful. America, brace for a Trump victory in November.

But then he looks at the bright side. What if Joe drops out and there's an open convention, as Ezra Klein has been advocating?

If Democrats were to nominate Pennsylvania Gov. Josh Shapiro, he'd beat Trump like LeBron James posting up Kevin Hart.

The obtuseness here is astonishing. According to Wikipedia, "At a young age, Shapiro started a worldwide letter-writing program, known as Children for Avi, on behalf of Russian Jewish refuseniks. He attended high school at Akiba Hebrew Academy[.]" The far-left faction of Democrats will veto even the thought of a Jewish nominee, and that goes for J B Pritzker as well. If the issue were even raised at the convention, it would be disastrous.

In fact, there would be serious problems with any move to nominate anyone but Kamala Harris -- even Cory Booker would be anti-woman -- who would fare worse in the general election than even Biden, although she might be able to avoid debating Trump if the timing of Joe's withdrawal would allow it.

But another problem is the assumption that Trump himself is a problem candidate. Mayer says,

Republicans are stuck with former President Donald Trump. Unless he dies or is incapacitated medically, he’s their nominee. He may have to win to stay out of jail.

But Frank Miele's piece has a more realistic take on Trump's current standing:

In fact, the persecution of Trump for his role as the leader of a populist political movement has so angered Republican and independent voters that instead of destroying him, his opponents have elevated him into a superhero – someone virtually impervious to the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

If you don’t believe me – or the polls – then watch the video of Trump’s campaign rally in Wildwood, N.J., where he drew a huge crowd three weeks into his so-called “hush money” trial.

. . . Moreover, the seeming injustice of Trump being turned into a political martyr by his opponents has resonated with the black community. Minority voters and young voters are turning to Trump in part because they see him as the victim of a rigged system, just as many of them have been. If blacks and Hispanics propel Trump to victory, that will be further proof of his superpowers.

We seem to be moving farther along stages of grief over the potential November election results, maybe at the moment someplace between denial and anger, buit certainly major pundits and major outlets are starting to say out loud that Biden is going to lose. Again, as I've been pointing out for a while, it's unprecedented for this discussion to be taking place so early in the cycle.

Jacked-Up Joe?

At RedState:

Trump spoke at the Minnesota GOP’s annual Lincoln Reagan fundraising dinner on Friday.

. . . “Although he has agreed to debate, so I don’t know, maybe they know something. He’s going to be so jacked up for those debates, you watch.

"I'm going to demand a drug test," he declared.

"I don’t want him coming in like the State of the Union,” Trump said. “He was high as a kite.” By the end of the evening, Trump said, Biden was “exhausted.” “We’re going to demand a drug test.”

Even on the right, there's been a certain amout of pearl-clutching about this, from pretty much the same people who worried that he thought Hannibal Lecter is a real person. For instance, Jazz Shaw at Hot Air seems to think this was a serious proposal:

If Biden refuses to do this, there isn't much that Trump could do about it. Nobody, including elected officials or candidates, can be forced to release their private medical records, although they are free to do so voluntarily.

Gee, Captain Obvious, d'ya think? Incredibly, he goes on:

Donald Trump has not yet said that he would submit to a drug test ahead of the debate, though he hasn't refused to do it either. Further, the results of the tests likely wouldn't have any impact on whether or not the debate moved forward. A typical pre-employment drug test using a urine sample typically takes one to five days for the results to come back. If either Biden or Trump were being given any sort of "enhancers" in advance, the test would probably have to be done within a couple of hours of the event to be effective.

And the man thinks Hannibal Lecter is a real person on top of it! This idea is completely impractical, but worse, it's probably illegal! The level of obtuseness at nearly all the alt sites is exasperating, although Hot Air has historically been Never Trump.

Clearly what Trump is actually trying to do here is address a problem that commentators have brought up since Biden responded to Trump's debate challenge: in 2020, expectations for Joe's debate performance were so low that when he exceeded them, even minimally, and didn't self-destruct with some absurd gaffe, he was thought to have "won" the debate and proved his fitness for office. His performance at this year's State of the Union achieved a similar minimalist goal, although it's significant that it didn't have the intended extra result of improving Joe's standing in the polls.

The problem for Joe all along has been the incongruity between his day-to-day performance of stumbling, slurring, and malapropisms and his occasional ability to avoid these on the most critical occasions like debates and State of the Union addresses. All Trump is doing is raising this unspoken issue to the level of public discourse, which in some circles is considered to be impertinent or impolite, but to others is simply necessary. It goes directly to the question of Joe's fitness -- if he consistently performed at his day-to-day level, he wouldn't be taken seriously as a leader, but if he occasionally does slightly better, that makes it all right.

It's a phenomenon that's actually recognized by everyone, and it must have a cause. One explanation, which I think is at least reasonable, is the one Trump is putting forward with calculated hyperbole, that Joe's getting some kind of a shot, vitamins, stimulants, whatever, that puts him just over the goal line. Another view, which I think is at least simpler, is that Joe is normally drunk (one of the biggest lies alcoholics tell is that they aren't drunks), but he lets his handlers keep him sober for long enough before his most important events that he doesn't show it with stammering, hypercorrection, slurring, and random pauses.

For now, one explanation is as good as the other. The most important thing is that Trump has been the truth-teller who raises the question of why this happens. This circumvents yet another attempt to set the bar for Joe's performance so low that when he does just a little bit better, he's somehow won. On the other hand, I still think the debates will be irrelevant, the issues will be settled sooner.

What Does This Say About Joe?

Fr Mike Schmitz's Bible in a Year podcast in recent weeks has been moving through First and Second Samuel, with its dysfunctional story arc of King Saul and King David. It's hard not to see Biblical reverberations in King Saul, a failed ruler intensely jealous of his eventual successor, David, but there's now the additional parallel that US Catholic bishops, beginning with Cardinal Gregory. are criticizing Joe for being a "cafeteria Catholic", which faintly echoes Samuel's mesaage that God has rejected Saul as king.

But an even closer parallel is the story of David and his strange, almost codependent, relatonship with his entitled son Absalom.

He was a great favorite of his father and of the people. His charming manners, personal beauty, insinuating ways, love of pomp, and royal pretensions captivated the hearts of the people from the beginning. He lived in great style, drove in a magnificent chariot, and had fifty men run before him.

Absalom had his half-brother Amnon, David's eldest son, murdered in revenge for Amnon's rape of their sister Tamar. Fr Schmitz stresses David's apparent hesitation to do much of anything about this whole situation, and although David sends Absalom into quasi-exile, Absalom is able to manipulate things to get David more or less to rehabilitate him, upon which, once Absalom returns to Jerusalem, he attempts a coup d'etat.

This starts a civil war, which ends when Absalom's hair is caught in a tree during the climactic Battle of Ephraim's Wood. David's general Joab finds him, and against David's explicit instructions not to harm Absalom, has him killed. Fr Schmitz stresses the inapprpriateness of David's public grief at Absalom's death:

2 Samuel 18:33 Then the king trembled and went up to the chamber over the gate and wept. And this is what he said as he walked: “My son Absalom, my son, my son Absalom! If only I had died instead of you, Absalom, my son, my son!”

At this, Joab slaps David upside the head:

2 Samuel 19:5-7 Then Joab came into the house to the king and said, “Today you have shamed all your servants, who have saved your life today and the lives of your sons and daughters, the lives of your wives, and the lives of your concubines, 6 by loving those who hate you, and by hating those who love you. For you have revealed today that commanders and servants are nothing to you; for I know today that if Absalom were alive and all of us were dead today, then it would be right as far as you are concerned. 7 Now therefore arise, go out and speak kindly to your servants, for I swear by the Lord, if you do not go out, no man will stay the night with you, and this will be worse for you than all the misfortune that has happened to you from your youth until now!”

This is the puzzle for me in the relationship between Joe and Hunter. According to Politico, as Hunter heads for trial on his gun and tax charges,

While aides insist that the White House will have no involvement in the case, brought by special counsel David Weiss, some fear it could dramatically impact the president himself, more psychologically than politically.

Three advisers granted anonymity to speak about private deliberations said they, and members of the First Family, are worried about the weight Hunter Biden’s trial will place on the president at an already difficult time for him politically. Biden has expressed fears to them about the possibility that his son will serve time in prison.

“He worries about Hunter every single day, from the moment he wakes up to the moment he goes to sleep,” said one of the three advisers. “That will only pick up during a trial.”

But it's probably an even bigger issue that Hunter seems to have been banned from the White House since last July and the baggie-in-the-cubby episode. As I posted then,

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.

In fact, the strategy for Joe's handlers was to get Hunter out of the public eye, and this has been remarkably effective -- Hunter has since been out of the tabloids, and there've been no new kerfuffles over special treatment. It looks like he's headed for trial, his uber-fixer lawyer Abbe Lowell has ben remarkably unsuccessful at pulling strings ever since the diversion agreement was scuttled, and now it looks like Kevin Morris can't even pay Lowell to keep representing Hunter.

But all this has done has been to put the focus on Joe. One issue was this: whatever Hunter was, he wasn't Joe, and the antics over Lunden Roberts, their daughter, Hallie, her sister, the Russian escorts, and the whole laptop fiasco did in fact serve the purpose of distracting attention from Joe himself. Joe's handlers got Hunter offstage last summer, but that just left the spotlight to Joe -- and that's precisely when Trump began his long march in the polls.

But the whole Hunter story and its shadowy impact on Joe's psyche still leaves one question -- what does all this say about Joe and his personal qualities that he should have allowed Hunter to have the position he had? Commentators are beginning to point out that Joe will now be forced to pardon Hunter if he wants to keep him out of prison, which is a real dilemma that will affect his place in history. It all seems even to go back to David and Absalom.

Kevin Morris Is Out of Money

Things haven't been going well for Team Biden in recent days, not least because Hunter's "sugar bro", Kevin Morris, has told associates he is tapped out. According to Politico,

Kevin Morris, a Hollywood entertainment lawyer who has long supported the president’s son, has told associates that he has run out of resources to help fund Biden’s legal defense, according to a person close to Morris who was granted anonymity to discuss private conversations.

Whoa, let's parse this one out. First, I live in Hollywood, and I know something about the place. Tinsel Town is built on hype, and Kevin Morris is nothing if not a creature of hype. Here's the standard line as printed in the New York Post as of 2022:

Morris is a successful lawyer and big-money Democratic Party supporter who has become Hunter Biden’s newest fixer and “sugar brother,” allegedly loaning the president’s son $2 million to help pay off his overdue federal taxes. . . . The lawyer, who counts Chris Rock and Matthew McConaughey among his celebrity clients, is also a prolific fiction writer of two novels and a collection of short stories.

But a year later, the Post itself reported he was under an ethics investigation by the California State Bar and in 2020 had left the law firm he founded. He now describes himself as a "retired" attorney and no longer appears to represent former clients like Matthew McConaughey, Chris Rock, Courteney Cox or Minnie Driver.

His career as a novelist was brief as well. I looked at this in detail last June.

In 2009, Morris decided to become a writer or something, and he did what every aspiring writer does, he "found a writing space in Santa Monica", one of the most expensive places to rent a space you can imagine. And as a struggling young writer (born in 1963, he was 46 at the time), he tried and failed to get his first novel published.

In fact, it looks as though after 2009 at the latest, he lost interest in his law practice, and I've got to think his former partners were working to push him out of his own firm at least by that time. But although he became a full-time writer in 2009, it took him until 2014 to get anything published, a collection of short stories, White Man's Problems, and then two novels, All Joe Knight (2016) and Gettysburg (2019). After Gettysburg, he seems to have dropped any literary aspirations, and I can't imagine he ever made any money as a writer. As I said last year,

Novelists can't make money off their writing alone. Even if one of their books makes it to the best-seller list, that just gives a spike in income that lasts only a short time, and then they have to write another novel to pay the bills. As a result, in the modern age, they have to get gigs as creative writing professors, which is how they make any sort of steady income.

. . . The only way a writer can get rich off writing is to have a novel made into a Hollywood blockbuster, which is how Steinbeck and Hemingway got rich, more or less, although much of that money went to their ex-wives. But Kevin Morris, despite his wife being one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood, has yet to see any of his stuff made into a movie.

What's interesting here is that in 20l9, the year it must have become clear to him he wasn't going to make it as a writer, he discovered his next big project, Hunter Biden. Exactly how much Morris spent paying Hunter's living expenses and legal bills since then isn't completely clear. According to the Washington Examiner,

Bills of Biden’s paid by Morris have ranged from the desperate — divorce dues owed for Biden’s ex-wife, child support long overdue to Biden’s illegitimate daughter — to the decadent. In an arrangement that reportedly infuriates White House counsel, Morris has paid nearly a million dollars for the amateur Biden’s artwork.

. . . Per the admission of both Morris and Biden, Morris has spent some $6.5 million in direct payments on Biden’s behalf. It is only because of Morris’s payment of Biden’s back taxes that the latter was even considered in good enough standing with the IRS to negotiate the Justice Department’s attempted sweetheart plea deal to keep him out of prison.

. . . It’s clear enough that $6.5 million is the floor, not the ceiling, of what Morris has paid in his pursuit to keep Joe Biden in the White House and his friend Hunter Biden out of prison.

But, in light of Morris's faded legal career and his failure as a novelist, where did he get six million dollars-plus? Well, he's married to one of the most powerful agents in Hollywood, but even powerful agents have credit limits. In January, I concluded,

I think Morris is starting to look like one of Hunter's marks, and I'm just not sure he's all there. I've got to assume Abbe Lowell has got liens on Morris's properties to be sure he gets paid.

When I said "Morris's properties", I of course meant Morris's properties which are probably community property in his marriage, and as I noted in another post from January:

I can't imagine that Mrs Kevin, AKA Gaby Morgerman of the William Morris agency, is thrilled with this, and I suspect that marriage is on borrowed time due to Kevin's involvement with Hunter.

. . . I wouldn't hire Kevin Morris to get me out of a speeding ticket, much less solve my tax, drug, or gun problems.

I can't avoid thinking I was on the right track about this earlier this year. As Stein's Law puts it, "If something cannot go on forever, it will stop." Which brings us to yesterday's news and the Politico link above:

The person close to Morris said that the Hollywood lawyer faces financial constraints that present “a huge problem” and that there are concerns about how Biden will pay for expert witnesses to testify for him at his Delaware trial. It is unclear precisely how much Morris has spent thus far to support Biden, but in a January letter to the House oversight committee, Morris’ lawyer said Morris had loaned Biden more than $6.5 million.

. . . It’s not clear how much Lowell, or the other lawyers working on Biden’s cases, are charging for their services. In other recent cases, Lowell has sought fees of $855 per hour and over $1,500 per hour.

It looks like Mrs Kevin has staged an intervention, and she's cut Kevin off. I doubt if Abbe Lowell will be representing Hunter much longer.

Even The Debates Will Be Irrelevant

I think the single most cogent and succinct take on Biden's announcement that there will be debates is from New York WOR radio host Mark Simone in the clip from the Kudlow show above. At 1:55, he says,

Whenever somebody suddenly demands debates, it means they're way behind. If he's behind in the rigged public polls, he must really be behind in the private polls. I think Saturday is what made this happen. I think that panicked them that Trump got 100,000 people. We've never seen 100,000, I think that really scared them.

Now, why so early? We've never had a debate before the convention. I think the Biden people know he could be a disaster, and they'll need time to fix it if he is. And also, the people running Bidenworld, they gotta decide if they're gonna keep him. If they switch, it will be at the convention. They wanted to test him out.

Pollster Richrd Baris said on his People's Pundit Daily podcast on Rumble at 37:15:

Biden's team, the Biden White Hoiuse, would not agree to these debates at all if they didn't believe they were behind. They would hide Joe, we know this. And not only is it conventional political wisdom to not expose your leading candidate to potential damage, but it's also part of the Biden campaign's history of thinking. So we know for a fact that if they believed they were in a stronger position than the polls were showing, they would not have done what they just did.

At 1:58:13:

He was already signaling during the primaries that there was no reason to debate. He was already signaling that, so give me a break.

Nate Silver, whose February advice to the Biden campaign I've quoted here frequently (and which the campaign hasn't followed, because it can't) generally agrees with these assessments in his latest Substack essay:

[T]he Trump campaign, after agreeing today to the two debates proposed by Biden, asked for two additional debates in July and August for a total of four. The White House refused[.]

. . . So the White House unambiguously wants fewer debates rather than more. And that’s a bad sign for Biden — part of a pattern where the White House has continually tried to minimize his exposure to unscripted moments.

. . . By moving the first debate to before the Democratic convention in August, Democrats increase their option value. Here’s what I mean by that. If Biden totally and irrecoverably screws up in the June debate — he’s just obviously no longer ready for prime time — then he can step down and Democrats can pull the Ezra Klein break-glass-in-case-of-emergency plan and hold a contested convention. It’s not ideal — that’s an understatement — but it’s much less bad than going into the final months of the campaign certain to lose.

The consensus here is intriguing -- the early first debate gives the Democrats an option, but let's keep in mind that that option consists of Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, J B Pritzker (well, he's Jewish, so that's no longer open), or Gretchen Whitmer. Those are even worse than Joe.

But here's the problem that won't go away for me. If the current polling aggregates are any indication, the campaign season began last fall, incredibly early. The debate scheduled for June is the first ever before either party's nominating conventions in the summer. Nate Silver more or less alludes to this issue when he says,

I can tell you with confidence that polling bounces created by things like debates, conventions and primary wins have a shelf-life. See for instance, Mitt Romney and the first presidential debate in 2012. He was widely regarded as the winner of the debate and then pulled into a near Electoral College tie with Barack Obama. But within a few weeks, the polls reverted back to where they had been before.

By pushing one debate into June, therefore, Biden has made it much less impactful. Whatever effects it has will probably be drowned out by the conventions and then the stretch run of the campaign and umpteen other shifts in the narrative.

What he's implying is that given the unprecedented early extension we're seeing of the campaign season, the debates are irrelevant, and if they're early, it just makes them even less relevant. The biggest problem I see is that the price of the bargain burger at my local fast food joint has gone up twice in the past three months, and this is what people see every day. Frankly, this is why 100,000 people showed up last Saturday for a Trump rally in South Jersey. If anything, the real view of the public is that the election can't come soon enough.

This is why even the rigged public polls have been the same for the past six months, but the other auguries, like the 100,000 in South Jersey, are beginning to be even more troubling. The New York trial has been a circus, but even though the Biden handlers had expected it to be dispositive, its outcome will also be irrelevant -- except that if Trump is convicted and jailed, the 100,000 in South Jersey will be nothing in comparison.

The Biden campaign is in a panic over their position six months before the election, but nobody's looking at how things will shape up just in coming weeks and months, especially if prices keep rising, the border stays open, and there's a major defeat in Ukraine. My take is that the debates will have been overtaken by events even before they can happen.

Things Aren't Fitting The Narrative Here

Fox reported Peter Doocy's question to Karine Jean-Pierre yesterday:

"Why do you think Americans are so down on President Biden?" Doocy asked. "I know you don't like to talk about polls like the five of six swing states that he is losing right now to somebody who is a criminal defendant, but more broadly, it doesn't seem like anything you guys are doing is making [Biden] more popular. Why do you think that is?"

Doocy is putting this in the context of the latest New York Times/Siena poll, but Byron York made the situation plainer in the Washington Examiner:

On Nov. 5, 2023, the New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Critical States as Voters Blast Biden, Times/Siena Poll Finds.” Focusing on the states most likely to decide the 2024 election, the New York Times reported, “The results show Mr. Biden is losing to Mr. Trump, his likeliest Republican rival, by margins of four to 10 percentage points among registered voters in Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden is ahead only in Wisconsin, by two percentage points, the poll found.”

. . . Fast-forward six months to May 13, 2024 — yesterday. The New York Times published a story headlined, “Trump Leads in 5 Key States, as Young and Nonwhite Voters Express Discontent With Biden.” A new poll showed Biden trailing in the same states by nearly the same margin as the old poll. Compare this sentence with the one from six months ago: “The surveys … found that Mr. Trump was ahead of Mr. Biden in five of six key states: Michigan, Arizona, Nevada, Georgia, and Pennsylvania. Mr. Biden led among registered voters in only one battleground state, Wisconsin.”

York goes on to quote, of all people, Sean Trende. I've singled both of them out as purveyors of mainstream conventional wisdom -- here's what Trende had to say:

As RealClearPolitics analyst Sean Trende wrote recently, “The political science literature is pretty consistent that this is the time when the electorate’s views about the election start to harden, particularly with respect to the economy.”

In other words, nothing has changed, and we've reached the point where nothing's gonna change. If York (MA, Chicago) and Trende (BA, Yale) agree, this is almost certainly wrong. As I said yesterday, I think at least part of the problem is that the press across the spectrum is basically lazy (we're getting ready for Memorial Day, after all), and all they want to cover is the battleground states and the national popular vote matchup, which is meaningless.

But let's look at another factor, part of the New York trial that almost nobody has noticed:

On Tuesday, Trump was flanked by former 2024 primary rivals Vivek Ramaswamy and North Dakota Gov. Doug Burgum, as well as House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-La.) and a pair of Florida GOP congressmen, Byron Donalds and Cory Mills.

Other boldface political names to swing by Manhattan Criminal Court include Sens. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio), Tommy Tuberville (R-Ala.), and Rick Scott (R-Fla.) as well as Staten Island Rep. Nicole Malliotakis.

“It is about paying homage to Trump and positioning themselves for something should he win in November,” one person close to the Republican National Committee said Tuesday.

Wait a moment. The big focus of recent testimony at the trial from both Stormy Daniels and Michael Cohen has been the Access Hollywood tape, the one where Trump joked to Billy Bush about grabbing ladies by their body parts. When that came out in 2016, House Speaker Paul Ryan announced that he would no longer defend or support Trump's campaign[.] But in 2024, the Republicasn House Speaker wants to sit in the trial audience supporting Trump as the prosecution adduces that same tape as part of its case against Trump? Something has changed. and it's got to be big indeed.

The second is the polling in more reliably blue states, which media across the spectrum is covering only sporadically. Yesterday I mentioned Washington State and Minnesota, where a McLaughlin poll last week showed Trump and Biden essentially tied. Now a new poll from Interactive Polls shows Biden ahead of Trump there by only two points, within the margin of error.

Byron York does make another important point in his Washington Examiner piece:

Last month, CNN reported that from March 6, the day after Super Tuesday, through April 21, “Biden’s campaign and other Democratic advertisers spent $27.2 million on advertising for the presidential race, while the Trump campaign and GOP advertisers spent about $9.3 million, according to AdImpact data. The Biden campaign’s ad spending has included millions in key battleground states such as Michigan ($4.1 million), Pennsylvania ($3.9 million), Arizona ($2.5 million), Wisconsin ($2.2 million), and Georgia ($2.2 million).

. . . And yet, Trump leads Biden in the states that will determine who wins the presidency.

This again suggests that the commentators are focusing (1) on polling, which has proven historically inaccurate, and (2) polling almost exclusively from half a dozen states, when important things seem to be happening elsewhere. I think the chief mistake of the commentators in this cycle will be to underestimate the size of Trump's victory in November.