The Bronx Rally

It's hard to enumerate all the takeaways from Trump's Bronx rally, which seems to have dominated yesterday's news. It's a contrarian's paradise.

Let's go to what almost nobody's mentioned, the attempt by the left at a counterdemonstration:

When I exit the park, I happen upon dozens of police officers in riot gear. Young men and women—draped in keffiyehs and many in N95 masks—are standing behind them on a giant rock, shaking a sign that says, “[redacted] Trump / [redacted] Biden / The people of the Bronx / We run this [redacted].”

“They don’t give a [redacted] about you,” the protesters chant at the Trump crowd, clapping between words.

The police were there in riot gear to anticipate any contingency, but my impression from the few accounts in the media is that there simply weren't enough potential counterdemonstrators there to start a riot, much as they would have wanted one. I imagine that the media was disappointed, too -- a riot would have been clickbait, and it would have fed the narrative that Trump supporters are brownshirts, but it didn't happen.

This brings me to something else that didn't happen -- the George Floyd-BLM riots of 2020-2023 began the Tuesday following the Memorial Day weekend of 2020, May 26 of that year. One of the conditions that fed those was the COVID lockdowns, when the authorites from Dr Fauci on down announced that rioters were exercising their first amendment rights:

Fauci said that public health officials like himself should caution protesters to wear a mask and keep it on at all times if they do go out to protest.

On the other hand, apparently holding a Trump campaign rally during the pandemic was not an equivalent exercise of first-amendment rights, as Trump canceled a good many throughout that campaign, and those he did hold were heavily criticized:

President Donald Trump’s campaign rallies led to more than 30,000 coronavirus cases, according to a new paper posted by researchers at Stanford.

. . . The researchers found that the rallies ultimately resulted in more than 30,000 confirmed cases of Covid-19. They also concluded that the rallies likely led to more than 700 deaths, though not necessarily among attendees.

On the other hand, the "researchers" didn't find any equivalent spike in COVID cases after the BLM riots!

Protests against systemic racism held in 300-plus U.S. cities following the death of George Floyd did not cause a significant increase in coronavirus infections, according to a team of economists who have published their findings in a 60-page paper released by the National Bureau of Economic Research; these somewhat surprising results are supported by Covid-19 testing data in many populous cities where demonstrations were held.

I was intrigued to watch one discussion of Thursday's Bronx rally where a commentator minimized it saying that Trump had huge crowds everywhere in 2020, but he still lost. No, actually, he didn't, he canceled a good many rallies throughout 2020, and the COVID moral panic attached a stigma to attending the ones he did hold. There was a contrarian opinion in 2020 that the COVID panic was generated specifically at least in part to limit Trump's ability to campaign via rallies, and whether the intent was there, it certainly succeeded in doing this.

In addition, BLM riots were tacitly endorsed by the public health authorities, while Trump rallies were discouraged, so BLM riots became one of the few outlets for people with cabin fever to vent their frustrations, when Trump rallies were represented as a public health menace. This year, people at least have a clearer choice between Trump rallies and BLM riots, and so far, with the campus pogroms as the exception, people seem to be choosing Trump rallies.

I doubt if there's time to gin up a new epidemic to have an equivalent effect before November -- the 2020 lockdowns began, after all, that March. Instead, we have the New Jersey and Bronx Trump rallies establishing powerful countervailing media examples -- in 2020, media coverage of BLM riots gave the impressionable "permission" to use them as an outlet, while "permission" to attend Trump rallies was implictly withheld.

In 2024, with the media somewhat befuddled and definitely behind the curve, Trump rallies are major media events. Trump is an entertaining figure in his own right, but South Bronx residents wearing MAGA hats are also a man-bites-dog story that the media has to cover in spite of itself. And the Bronx rally took place just before a slow news holiday weekend.

Do you seriously think Trump doesn't understand this? He's had four years to recalibrate and rethink his strategy, but it's also better to be lucky than smart. Trump at this point is both.

More Kevin Morris And Nixon's Smokng Gun

I've long thought the whole public narrative about Kevin Morris, Hunter Biden's "sugar bro" who is generally reported to have "loaned" Hunter upwards of $6.5 million to settle his tax case and pay his rent and legal expenses, just doesn't fit. For starters, I'm not his accountant, but he and his wife have eight-figure homes in both New York and Malibu, he has a private jet, and their living expenses have to be through the roof. Morris himself is a failed writer and doesn't seem to have worked as an attorney for years. Nobody like that has $6.5 million in mad money.

I posted last week that sources close to Morris had told Politico that he could no longer afford to pay Hunter's legal bills. My suspicion was that Hunter's lawyer Abbe Lowell, who is reported to bill as much as $1500 an hour, had secured liens on Morris's New York and Malibu properties to be sure he gets paid, and Morris's wife, the Hollywood agent Gaby Morgerman, apparently the actual family breadwinner, had put her foot down. Others have speculated that either Morris or his wife had looked at the $6.5 million as an investment, hoping for some sort of future return from Joe, but reassessing Joe's prospects for reelection, had decided to cut their losses.

Considering how little we actually know, either of those expanations, or indeed any number of others, could be true. But new revelations add another wrinkle to the whole story:

The CIA appeared to instruct the Assistant United States Attorney (AUSA) for Delaware, Lesley Wolf, to block an Internal Revenue Service (IRS) team’s investigation into Hunter Biden from using his benefactor, Kevin Morris, as a witness, IRS whistleblower Gary Shapley said in an affidavit the House Ways and Means Committee released Wednesday.

Shapley, as a lead investigator for the IRS Criminal Division, was heading a probe into Biden in August 2021 when Wolf informed him that she and DOJ Tax Attorney Jack Morgan had been summoned to CIA headquarters in Langley, Virginia. Wolf, Morgan and the CIA discussed Hunter Biden’s associate and benefactor, Kevin Morris, Shapley said in the affidavit.

Shapley and his team were considering using Morris as a witness for their case against Biden, but Wolf apparently shut the possibility down.

“AUSA Wolf stated that they were provided a classified briefing in relation to Mr. Morris and as a result we could no longer pursue him as a witness,” Shapley stated.

According to Just the News,

It remains unknown why the CIA intervened in the case, how they became aware that the IRS investigators had targeted Morris as a witness and most importantly, who at the CIA issued the directive.

“We don't know whether it's that Kevin Morris has some sort of asset for the CIA, whether he has some sort of target or whether they have other derogatory information about him being a national security threat. But whatever it was, it was enough that Lesley Wolf and the prosecution team said we're not going to put him on the stand,” Tristan Leavitt, whose organization Empower Oversight is representing Shapley, told the “Just the News, No Noise” TV show on Wednesday.

This story may provide some context for Morris acting in some type of intelligence capacity, however remote and ill-advised:

The State Bar of California is investigating an ethics complaint brought against Hunter Biden’s attorney and “sugar brother” Kevin Morris by filmmaker Phelim McAleer, who wants the wealthy Malibu lawyer disbarred for allegedly infiltrating the set of his movie “My Son Hunter” using false pretenses to gather information for the first son.

to Se complaint, filed last week and obtained by The Post, McAleer alleges that Morris, who made a fortune representing the co-creators of “South Park,” flew on his private jet in November [2021] to Serbia, where the Hunter Biden biopic was being filmed, and pretended he was an independent documentary filmmaker producing content for “South Park streaming.”

“Kevin Morris was Hunter Biden’s lawyer who used deception and misrepresentation to spy on a movie project about his client to gather information to help his client,” the complaint alleges.

Again, the reaearch I've been able to do on the web about Morris suggests that by the time he met Hunter in 2019, at best, he had no regular income of his own, and in the link above, he described himself to McAleer's people in 2021 as a "retired attorney" -- he had in fact formally left his own law firm in 2020, but since 2009, he'd been attempting to make a career as a novelist, which ultimately failed. Who was funding the flight on his private jet to Serbia to poke around McAleer's movie project? Now the CIA can't be ruled out.

But this also brings to mind one of the biggest presidential scandals ever, Watergate, and the so-called "smoking gun" in which Nixon tried to use the CIA to thwart another investigation. In a famous tape,

Haldeman explained to Nixon the cover-up plan: "the way to handle this now is for us to have Walters [CIA] call Pat Gray [FBI] and just say, 'Stay the hell out of this ... this is ah, business here we don't want you to go any further on it.'"

Nixon approved the plan, and after he was given more information about the involvement of his campaign in the break-in, he told Haldeman: "All right, fine, I understand it all. We won't second-guess Mitchell and the rest." Returning to the use of the CIA to obstruct the FBI, he instructed Haldeman: "You call them in. Good. Good deal. Play it tough. That's the way they play it and that's the way we are going to play it."

We may or may not ever learn the answers to the questoins Just the News asked -- "why the CIA intervened in the [Kevin Morris] case, how they became aware that the IRS investigators had targeted Morris as a witness and most importantly, who at the CIA issued the directive", but it's certainly within the realm of credibilty that orders came, as they did from the White House in 1972, to tell the CIA to wave another investigation off.

What won't go away for me, regardless of what does or doesn't come to light, is that nothing we've been told so far about Kevin Morris fits.

The Real Issue In The 2024 Election Is The 2020 Election

Let's face it, the whole New York hush money trial has been a distraction. Each day has new breathless headlines: will there be a hung jury? will Trump testify? what if Trump is convicted? what will Judge Merchan do next?

None of this matters. If there's a hung jury, Trump's progress will continue. If he's convicted, the pattern up to now has been the one since last fall: every time he's lost in a New York courtroom, his poll numbers go up. If he's jailed, I suspect his sons and other surrogates will campaign on his behalf, and his poll numbers will go up even more -- except I think even his opponents recognize this would be a disastrous outcome for them.

This view from the far left actually outlines the real issue with surprising insight:

[A] sizable number of voters either don’t remember or misremember the four turbulent years of the Trump administration. But paradoxically, educating voters about the potential consequences of a Biden defeat could annoy and alienate them by pushing Trump fatigue to new heights.

. . . A host of data shows that a crucial slice of the electorate has relatively sunny memories of the Trump years and a vague understanding of the extremist agenda his allies are putting together for a second term.

. . . The basic idea is to change perceptions of Trump the amusing and irreverent outsider to Trump the salesman for deeply unpopular policies and practices.

. . . But in an election Biden can win only by making it about his opponent, he’s lucky that in Trump he faces a challenger who is so eager to become the center of attention and offers daily evidence that he won’t go away gracefully.

But isn't the whole subtext here that right now, the big issue in the election is actually Joe Biden? The writer acknowledges that the electorate "misremembers" the Trump years as being sunny, but the inevitable follow-up is that they've concluded the wrong guy got elected in 2020, which is another way of saying the election was "stolen". So the strategy he's proposing is that the electorate should be told that Trump is really an awful guy, even worse than Biden.

This is the playbook James Comey is following in the MSNBC interview Tuesday night:

I don’t care how you feel about Joe Biden, you must vote for him because the consequences on the other side are too severe.

Those conmsequences being, as Comey lays out,

serious for the Justice Department and the FBI, because Trump is coming for those institutions. He knows their power. And I think he has regrets that he didn’t work hard enough to corrupt them last time. So he’s coming for them.

But the problem, as the electorate is beginning to see it, is that the deep state, not just the FBI and the DOJ, but the intelligence community, which unanimously declared Hunter's laptop to be Russian disinformation during the 2020 campaign, and even the National Institutes of Health, which foisted the COVID fraud on the public with lockdowns, masks, vaccines, and social distancing, all worked together to steal the election.

I cited an academic study yesterday that claimed that if the COVID death rate were 5% less, Trump would have won three of the swing states he lost in 2020, giving him an electoral college majority -- but it's generally recognized that the COVID statistics were heavily manipulated. If someone died in a motorcycle accident, for instance, he was counted as a COVID death if he happened to test positive.

This is why the various show trials, the New York civil cases, the New York hush money case, the Fulton County case, and the federal indictments, resonate with the electorate -- and they do; Trump's rise in the polls began in September-October 2023, corresponding with the start of his New York civil fraud trial under Judge Engoron. Trump has claimed on a near-daily basis since then that these cases are "election interference", and this is essentially an extension of the claim that the 2020 election was "stolen".

So far, the proposed counter-strategy from the Democrats, to convince the electorate that Trump is worse -- he'll ban abortion, say, or he'll disband the FBI -- isn't working. The main difficulty is that although the Democrats were able to hide Biden's worst shortcomings in 2020 by using COVID as an excuse, since he's been president, some level of public exposure is unavoidable, and in recent months, he almost never appears without some level of slurring, malapropisms, gaffes, and confusion. The electorate has factored in that this was largely hidden in 2020, which furthers the impression that there was something not legitimate in that election.

So what's the Democrat alternative? Incressingly, the calls are for Joe to drop out.

If the polls still look this bad in early August, after a big debate and tens of millions more in spending, Biden must make a big decision.

. . . even Biden will have to explain why an historically unpopular president is losing to a historically unpopular opponent.

. . . The Biden campaign understandably wants to project the idea that this race isn’t over. If it can’t remove by early August the suspicion that it is, it could be that the real race hasn’t even begun.

But the pieces that try to game out any such scenario all have the air of fantasy. None mentions Vice President Harris as the single likeliest successor to Joe if he does drop out; they all do, however, list the usual Plan C suspects, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, and astonishingly, J B Pritzker or Josh Shapiro -- neglecting to consider the far-left wing of Democrats will never tolerate a Jewish nominee. This is a measure of the dream world these pundits inhabit.

But another aspect of this wishful thinking is the almost certain response of the electorate should Joe drop out in August and be replaced with anyone -- the public will see it as simply one final, desperate attempt to steal the election. An attempt to portray, for instance, Gavin Newsom or Gretchen Whitmer (with Pritzker and Shapiro ruled out) as a "normal" candidate who will restore decency in the face of "extremist" Donald Trump would be seen as cynical and yet another attempt to steal an election with a sudden do-over when the orignal candidate doesn't work.

The issue that won't go away, barring some miracle, is the 2020 election. That's what the 2024 election is really about.

The COVID Morning After

It's been a long time since I've seen anyone in church, in a store, or even on the street, wearing a mask; it was a long, slow process -- but it's also irreversible. In fact, LA County tried to reinstate masks in health care environments just this past January, at a time when I was having to go to Kaiser pretty frequently. So starting then, I put a mask in my pocket just to be sure -- and Kaiser had in fact put up masks-required posters here and there. But when I got to the waiting room, I asked the assistants if masks were mandatory, and they said no -- in fact, they weren't wearing them, and most of the people in the waiting room weren't, either.

Even Kaiser, specifically ordered by the health department to reinstate masks, tacitly ignored the order. The county dropped it again a month later.

We've actually entered a belated period of official, or at least semi-official, never-mind acknowledgement of a COVID moral panic. For instance,

Testifying earlier this year in a closed-door interview before the Select Subcommittee on the Coronavirus Pandemic, a transcript of which was released this week, former NIH Director Francis Collins confessed that the government’s sweeping social-distancing guidance wasn’t backed by the science we were all supposed to be following.

. . . “I did not see evidence, but I’m not sure I would have been shown evidence at that point,” Collins replied.

But what about four years later?

“Since then, it has been an awfully large topic. Have you seen any evidence since then supporting six feet?” the staffer asked.

“No,” the former NIH director conceded.

There is even a recent tendency to acknowledge unofficially that COVID vaccines had serious side effects:

The pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca on Tuesday [May 8] said it is withdrawing its COVID-19 vaccine worldwide citing low demand and a "surplus of available updated vaccines" since the pandemic.

. . . The vaccine — called Vaxzevria — was one of a number of shots released onto the market by pharmaceutical companies aimed at preventing people from catching COVID-19.

The company said it would proceed to withdraw Vaxzevria's marketing authorizations within Europe. The vaccine was never approved in the U.S. by the FDA.

. . . According to the Telegraph, AstraZeneca admitted for the first time in court documents that its COVID-19 vaccine can cause rare side effects such as blood clots and low blood platelet counts. The admission came via a U.K. class action lawsuit that sought $125 million for almost 50 victims of AstraZeneca vaccine side effects.

According to the New York Times, in a May 3 story,

[T]housands of Americans believe they suffered serious side effects following Covid vaccination. As of April, just over 13,000 vaccine-injury compensation claims have been filed with the federal government — but to little avail. Only 19 percent have been reviewed. Only 47 of those were deemed eligible for compensation, and only 12 have been paid out, at an average of about $3,600.

Some scientists fear that patients with real injuries are being denied help and believe that more needs to be done to clarify the possible risks.

“At least long Covid has been somewhat recognized,” said Akiko Iwasaki, an immunologist and vaccine expert at Yale University. But people who say they have post-vaccination injuries are “just completely ignored and dismissed and gaslighted,” she added.

. . . The European Medicines Agency has linked the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines to facial paralysis, tingling sensations and numbness. The E.M.A. also counts tinnitus as a side effect of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, although the American health agencies do not. There are more than 17,000 reports of tinnitus following Covid vaccination in VAERS.

. . . Questions about Covid vaccine safety are core to Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s presidential campaign. Citing debunked theories about altered DNA, Florida’s surgeon general has called for a halt to Covid vaccination in the state.

In New Jersey, all charges against the gym owners who famously defied Gov Murphy's lockdown orders in May 2020 were finally dismissed:

Ian Smith and Frank Trumbetti — co-owners of Atilis Gym in Bellmawr — racked up the summonses after they kept their workout spot open in May 2020 despite Gov. Phil Murphy’s mandate to close non-essential businesses.

At one point, cops even arrested some gym rats as they left the building — and the owners were hit with scores of summonses and eventually ordered to pay about $165,000 in fines for violating public health emergency rules, according to NJ.com.

Several of the charges — which included violating a governor’s orders, operating without a mercantile license, creating a public nuisance and disturbing the peace — could have landed the duo in jail for six months, according to their attorney, John McCann of Oakland, New Jersey.

But late last month, a municipal judge in Winslow Township dropped the charges — following a nearly four-year legal battle, McCann told the outlet.

What we're seeing is the result of a gradual, but pervasive, reevaluation of the COVID moral panic, especially the recognition that a moral panic is what it was. There has also been a fairly widespread, if never offically acknowledged, assumption that the COVID panic affected the 2020 election -- but see even this academic discussion, The COVID-19 pandemic and the 2020 US presidential election:

Our results indicate that COVID-19 cases had a significant negative effect on the Trump vote share in the 2020 presidential election (in comparison to 2016). . . . In particular, the negative impact of COVID-19 incidence on Trump’s support is stronger (1) in states without a formal stay-at-home order, (2) in states that Trump won in the 2016 presidential election, (3) in swing states, and (4) in urban counties.

. . . These effects not only are significant and robust to many robustness checks but they are also quite sizable. A simple counterfactual exercise shows that, ceteris paribus, if the number of COVID-19 cases had been 5 percent lower, Trump would have won Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin—likely resulting in his re-election.

This academic conclusion, based on at least one group's statistical analysis, corresponds to the widedly held but officially discredited view that the 2020 election was "stolen", at least in the sense that COVID has always been thought by some people to have been a manufactured crisis that was in fact intended to sway the 2020 election. The revelations we're beginning to see are reinforcing that view and reinforcing the view that the respectable consensus line on COVID was deliberately deceptive.

Nobody is really saying much about this in current public discourse -- even Trump himself has tended to drop claims that he often made last year that the 2020 election was "stolen" -- except that we might even say he's made that particular point, or perhaps more accurately, he's more recently been making a slightly different point that they're now trying to steal the 2024 election.

There can be no question, though, that respectable opinion has completely missed the effect of the great COVID reassessment on the country's political mood. There's been an unspoken reassessment of COVID, an unspoken reassessment of the 2020 election, and an unspoken reassessment of Trump.

"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.