The Stages Of Grief

Over the past week, I think there's been a major shift in polite opinion, prompted in part -- but not completely -- by the Wall Street Journal piece that simply gave everyone permission to admit what people had been seeing for months, if not indeed years. The other factor is that Trump's conviction in the New York "hush money" trial gave him, if anything, a slight boost in the polls, but it also fed $400 million in donations in the week following the verdict.

This brings to mind the Kubler-Ross five stages of grief, denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. I think we can say that polite opinion in the wake of these developments has moved entirely past denial. A week ago, in the immediate wake of the guilty verdict and beginning to recognize that calling Trump a "convicted felon" wasn't going to change a thing, Harold Myerson got mad in The American Prospect, calling Trump The Martyr of Mar-a-Lago:

The political consequences of yesterday’s verdict won’t be clear until after November’s election, if then. While Trump’s bluster, belligerence, and bullshit may have failed him in court, they have also created his political base, made him MAGA’s man, and recentered the Republicans around a new constituency: millions of young men lashing out in all directions against, as Tom Edsall described it in his Wednesday New York Times column, their “precarious manhood.” . . . To the remade Republican Party, the party of precarious manhood, he is the victim of the same outsider-controlled system that victimized their young men; he is the martyr of Mar-a-Lago.

Others have moved into depression and acceptance. For instnace, Bill Maher:

Bill Maher predicted an Election Day defeat for President Biden, despite reiterating his support for the president, telling tech journalist Kara Swisher that former President Trump is likely to rally enough support for a second term.

“I would vote for [Biden’s] head in a jar of blue liquid over Donald Trump, but that doesn’t mean that I’m — first of all, I think it’s a moot point at this point. He’s going to f‑‑‑ing lose,” Maher told Swisher on an episode of his podcast.

Ed Kilgore in The Intelligencer writes Trump Conviction Shows There’s No 2024 Game Changer Coming:

Anyone holding their breath to see if a guilty verdict in the Trump hush-money trial would impact the election can now exhale. While it’s possible to look at the data and see a glass that is half-empty or half-full, the overall indication is that Trump’s conviction has not changed the race. And on balance, that’s good for the 45th president.

. . . [F]acts aside, Trump’s conviction and his overall status as a man perpetually on the wrong side of the law are being perceived through partisan lenses, which in turn will tend to encourage unaffiliated voters to discount them. It’s not fair and it’s not right, but it’s reality.

. . . [W]e’re in a presidential contest that appears to be all but impervious to the kinds of things that used to be called “game changers.” It’s time to accept at least as a rebuttable presumption that the game isn’t changing. And that has implications for future events like the presidential debates, the two major-party conventions, and the cut-and-thrust of the campaign competition as the November election grows nigh.

So polite opinion for now is moving from anger toward depression and acceptance that, first, Biden's condition has become an obvious problem, and second, that he's likely to lose in November. But Jim Geraghty at the NeverTrump National Review is making the next necessary point:

Way back in June 2022, I wrote, “I think the single most predictable ‘bombshell’ of the coming years is that sometime in 2025, someone like Bob Woodward or Robert Costa will publish a book with a title like Perpetual Crisis: Inside the Biden White House, and we will ‘learn’ something like, ‘the president’s official health report said he was in fine shape for his age. But behind the scenes, Jill Biden, Ron Klain, and Susan Rice were deeply concerned the president’s health was rapidly declining, and that he would soon be unable to perform his duties.’” This morning, the Wall Street Journal takes us another half-step toward that minimally shocking revelation, interviewing more than 45 sources and offering a grim portrait of President Biden behind the scenes: forgetful, mumbling, increasingly reliant on notes to remember basic facts, and seemingly oblivious to his own administration’s policies and decisions.

But Geraghty wonders what this really implies:

I’m not that worried when Biden says, in his Time magazine interview, that Vladimir Putin “wasn’t just going into Moscow” when he meant “wasn’t just going into Ukraine.” We all flub our words here and there, and in that example, Biden quickly corrected himself.

I’m much more worried about when Biden insists that he wasn’t told something and military leaders or members of his cabinet maintain, under oath, that he was. Biden had insisted during his infamously short-tempered interview with George Stephanopoulos that no one had recommended keeping a small group of U.S. troops in Afghanistan to keep order at the airport or anywhere else, specifically stating, “No one said that to me that I can recall.” A few months later, under oath before the Senate Armed Services Committee, U.S. Central Command general Frank McKenzie and Joint Chiefs chairman general Mark Milley both said they had recommended President Biden maintain 2,500 troops in Afghanistan.

. . . Biden’s long record of shameless BS makes it tough to tell when he’s misremembering or simply lying. When the president keeps insisting that inflation was 9 percent when he took office, is that just spin trying to get voters to blame Trump for inflation? Or does Biden really not remember that inflation didn’t start increasing until he had been in office a few months and signed some massive spending bills? Does Biden not remember assuring Americans, in July 2021, that “there’s nobody suggesting there’s unchecked inflation on the way”?

I can understand why Biden would want to forget certain inconvenient facts and regrettable guarantees. But it matters a lot if the guy making decisions as commander in chief and head of the executive branch actually can’t remember what he was told from day to day.

Whatr he's edging toward is the real question: it's not whether Biden will lose in November -- smart people have laid $400 million on that outcome in the past week alone. The question is whether Biden is fit to serve now, or indeed if he's been fit to serve for some months or years already. And if something needs to be done, the next problem is that his constitutional successor, the vice pressident, is probably less fit to serve than he is. We're facing not just a transition period between November and next January, we're facing a de facto interregnum now with no clear solution.

I call this a constitutional crisis. We haven't reached the stage where polite opinion can handle it.

The Real Unspoken Constitutional Crisis

Yesterday I referred once again to the UK constitutional crisis of 1936, when rumors of Edward VIII's intent to marry the twice-divorced Wallis Simpson were all over US, Canadian, and Australian papers, but there was a taboo against mentioning it in the UK press -- at least until some remarks by an obscure Church of England bishop were interpreted as the Establishment giving "permission" to bring it up publicly, although it had been a full-blown crisis behind the scenes for months. Edward abdicated within a week of the UK papers finally picking it up.

Greg Gutfeld, one of the most insightful commentators lately, referred last night as I did yesterday to the Wall Street Journal story of Joe faltering behind the scenes as a "permission slip" to talk openly about a smiliar constitutional crisis. At 4:30:

Now, is it news that Biden's a mess? No. We hear it every time he opens his mouth and the moths fly out. The White House doctor can pump him full of the leftovers from Hunter's desk, but they can't make him younger. Twenty-five years ago he was a plagiarist, but now he can't summarize the plot from See Spot Run.

But why put this story out now? Well, the piece was timed for this moment. It offered the green light for Wall Street, donors, billionaires, bosses, and normies who normally would not say they vote Trump, but to do so now. It tells them they don't need to vote for Joe. They are saying wink, wink, you can admit Joe stinks. . . or get angry when someone notices there is something very wrong with Biden that can't be cured with ice cream.

The message is it's not just your imagination, Grandpa really is fading fast. The only people imagining things are the ones telling you he's fine. They don't have the old man's best interest at heart, they just cling to power the way he's clinging to life. So this article is a permission slip you can pull out when anybody says, "But Trump is a convicted felon!" You simply say, "So?"

I think we've had a constitutional crisis that's so far been unspoken, but even if the Wall Street Journal is finally giving us the OK to talk about it, it's still skirting the real issue. An unnamed pool reporter did mention the real problem over a week ago:

“President Biden, will you be serving your full four-year term or handing over power to Vice President [Kamala] Harris,” the reporter asked.

“Are you OK? Are you all right?” replied Biden.

The pair struggled to hear each other over background noise.

The journalist repeated his question: “All four years or handing over?”

“You’re not hurt are you? I said are you OK? Did you fall on your head or something?” Biden cracked, before turning to Democratic lawmakers standing next to him.

Biden's replies, "Are you OK? Did you fall on your head or something?" aren't just "snippy", as they've been characterized; they carry a hint of menace. If you keep this up, you definitely won't be OK. When I first heard of Dr Steven Lomazow's books on Franklin Roosevelt's real medical condition, which had caused a similar unspoken constitutional crisis in 1944 when insiders recognized FDR wouldn't complete a fourth term, I was instinctively drawn to order one (FDR's Deadly Secret can be found inexpensively on used book sites), because I sensed a parallel.

The signs we're seeing almost daily, including Joe's embarrassing performance at the D-Day commemoration this week, make it more and more clear that Joe won't complete a second term. In fact, Dr Lomazow's findings suggest that the extent of Joe's health problems is being glossed over or concealed almost as much as Roosevelt's in the months before his death.

But the Democrat insiders in 1944 saw the issue clearly enough to force Roosevelt to drop Henry Wallace as vice president and replace him with a more credible candidate, who turned out to be Truman, by far the best choice that anyone could have made, when Wallace, whom FDR preferred to keep, would have been a disaster. The problem in 2024 is that Kamala Harris is this year's Henry Wallace, and nobody is going to replace her.

There are continuing calls from people like Joe Klein, Ezra Klein, Bill Maher, and Nate Silver for Joe to step down -- just this past Wednesday, Joe Klein wrote,

If Biden were to stand down, a vigorous young candidate—don’t ask me who—could win over the country with a single convention speech (as the aforementioned Obama did in 2004) and then roar to victory over a scattered, feral, felonious and dysfunctional Trump. Biden would seem ancient news by November.

David Axelrod calls this sort of thing a "fantasy", and the biggest part of it is the fantasy that Kamala Harris would simply sit quietly and stay on the ticket as vice president with a new party savior at the top. Kamala was chosen by Biden in 2020 as a concession to the Democrat far left and a message that should Joe not complete a term, his successor would be another far-left catspaw just as Joe has been. These conditions haven't changed, and Kamala as president would represent approval from the very top of the anti-Zionist and anti-Semitic wing of the Democrats. And that wing would never countenance a young, dynamic white Democrat who'd live another eight years and keep Kamala from succeeding to the office.

I think pro-Israel US megadonors have been among the earliest to recognize this problem: on one hand, Joe hasn't been a friend of Israel, but Kamala would be far worse -- and if Joe wins in 2024, we'll likely get Kamala well before 2028. The fact that megadonors are waking up to this is a big part of Trump's fundraising surge.

That's the real issue. As Trump donors and voters look toward winning in November, we've still got the problem of Joe remaining in office through January 2025 as his condition rapidly deteriorates. The question of who will win in November is increasingy moot, but we have a continuing crisis of what looks to be an unstable de facto interregnum between now and Inauguration Day, especially if Kamala succeeds Joe before then.

Jacked-Up Joe

Lately, I've been looking at Greg Gutfeld as one of the more insightful commentators. Here was his take on the Wall Street Journal's headline yesterday about Joe showing signs of slipping (at 0:30):

The Wall Street Journal revealed that Joe Biden may be suffering cognitive decline. Talk about breaking news. Nice work there, Wall Street Journal! I wonder what stocks your financial section will be recommending. Perhaps those little-known startups like Apple and Micsrosoft?

Tucker Carlson is even closer to the point. He brings up the backlash against former White House physician Ronny Jackson, who was publicly reprimanded by Barack Obama when he posted on Twitter during the 2020 campaign that Biden should undergo a cognitive test when he said in a speech, "My name is Joe Biden, and I'm a Democratic cndidate for the United States Senate." Tucker went on to say that Jackson was given

the uniform command of the people who run the Democratic Party throughout the 2020 campaign: Do not notice what Joe Biden is actually like. If you see him on television, turn away, because you might conclude he is fundamentally, physically, cogntively unfit for office. But you can't say that, and if you do, Barack Obama will scold you personally. . . . Well, fast forward a few years. Joe Biden is now the president, and his mental decline is now impossible to deny, and therefore it's no longer off limits. Barack Obama isn't going out and defending Joe's competence any more.

Everybody watching, everyone in the media, that would include Barack Obama's former advisors, is now in agreement that Joe Biden is senile and cannot govern the United States. . . . The problem with Joe Biden is he's cognitively unable to serve. But take three steps back, that's not Joe Biden's fault, it's not his fault he has dementia, no, the fact that Joe Biden is president is an indictment of the media and the Democratic Party.

Because they have known, contra what they're telling you now, Joe Biden's decline, his full-blown senility, has been obvious for more than three years. We noticed it, we're not doctors, by the way, we had no special animus toward Joe Biden at all, but we watched it, and we said this out loud for the first time, we checked today, on May 14, 2019.

Back in February, I posted on the UK constitutional crisis in the fall of 1936, when there were increasing rumors that Edward VIII planned to marry his lover, Wallis Simpson, although she was twice divorced, which at the time was against the doctrine of the Church of England, of which the king was titular head. The press had kept this completely under wraps until a Church of England bishop was thought to have referred to it in an address to his diocesan conference when he mentioned the king's need for divine grace. This was taken as "permission" for the press to cover the subject, and Edward abdicated a week after it reached the papers.

It's hard not to think something like this is happening here. We've had episode after episode over the past four years, they're becoming more obvious,more frequent, and harder to ignore. In France during his D-Day visit:

Joe Biden highlights in Normandy on the 80th anniversary of D-Day:

- Sits in an invisible chair
- Forgets where his seat is
- Talks about how many Russians died in Ukraine
- Gets pulled away by Docta Jill as Macron greets D-Day veterans. pic.twitter.com/sWFsYpt1o5

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) June 6, 2024

Dr Steven Lomazow, a New Jersey neurologist who is also a trustee of the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Library in Hyde Park, New York, has written two books on the quiet constitutional crisis of Roosevelt's health, FDR's Deadly Secret and FDR Unmasked. Although he's very pro-Roosevelt, he details how the White House, abetted by the press, covered up FDR's actual medical condition, especially during his third and very brief fourth terms.

Although it was more or less recognized that FDR had had polio, which paralyzed his legs, the press by general agreement never photographed him in a wheelchair, mostly depicting him standing under carefully staged conditions. But this was just the start. Photos from the 1930s show a dark lesion over his left eyebrow, which Dr Lomazow credibily attributes to a malignant melanoma that by 1940 had metastasized into both his brain and digestive tract.

It appears that in the late 1930s, FDR was also diagnosed with prostate cancer, which by the time it was discovered in a secret Boston hospital visit was deemed inoperable. Beyond that, the president smoked two packs of unfiltered Camels a day, which led to incredibly high blood pressure, as well as congestive heart failure. His cardiopulmonary condition was so bad that when he flew, his doctors demanded that the plane fly no higher than 8,000 feet, even though the cabins were pressurized.

The result was that by the middle of his third term, Roosevelt's actual working day went from noon to about 4:00 PM, with a 90-minute afternoon nap. He was only 63 when he died in 1945, so he had these restrictions even in his late 50s. Cabinet members like Harold Ickes complained privately that Roosevelt's working day was too short to get any meaningful work accomplished, while others observed that FDR would ramble and repeat himself in discussions.

Lomazow thinks that despite all this, there were no credible substitutes for Roosevelt as a wartime leader, although by the 1944 campaign, it was generally understood that FDR would have to pick a more credible vice president than Henry Wallace, while Truman resisted selection because he was fully aware of Roosevelt's condition and was reluctant to be thrown into the role. But this was kept from the public. Nevertheleess, it was a de facto constitutional crisis that under the circumstances could only be resolved by Roosevelt's death, which insiders fully understood to be imminent in any case.

It's hard to avoid thinking we're heading for an equivalent crisis before the next election, but the additional complication is Vice President Harris. I think this is a major reason the big-donor lizard people are shifting toward Trump -- Biden is bad enough, but it's less and less likely he can last another four years, and we'd get Harris sooner than anyone expects. Trump is looking better by the day, even to the lizard people.

Yet More Kevin Morris!

It's remarkable how quickly the Trump hush money trial and conviction have faded into the rear view mirror -- by the weekend, legacy media was gloating that Trump was ahead by as low as 0.6 points in the meaningless RealClearPolitics popular vote average, but as of this morning, he's back up at 1.1, basically no change from before the verdict. So they've moved on to Hunter's gun trial, which is soap-opera clickbait with a juror getting weepy during Abbe Lowell's opening statement.

But I can't resist posting on one footnote. Kevin Morris, Hunter's "sugar bro", attended at least the first day of Hunter's trial on Monday to support him, although as I posted here, after spending at least $6.5 million to pay Hunter's lawyers and fund his lifestyle, he's said to be out of money. I've been increasingly skeptical of the conventional Morris narrative -- he's a "Hollywood lawyer" who stopped practicing law 15 years ago, and he's a "novelist" who was never able to sell a blockbuster despite his wife being one of the most powerful agents in the industry. In other words, he's basically been just a dilettante living off his wife for more than a decade.

And his wife is probably key to the most recent development in the story. In my post two weeks ago, I concluded, "It looks like Mrs Kevin has staged an intervention, and she's cut Kevin off." A story in yesterday's New York Post confirms my surmise:

“His entire family has abandoned him because they were livid when they found out he was bankrolling everything,” a source close to the Morris family told The Post.

Morris’s daughter Dulcie Lou even confronted Hunter Biden recently, telling him to “stop taking advantage of my father,” the source said.

Dulcie Lou hasn't commented since this news broke -- but I went looking for more background on her. Here's a 2021 photo:

The horse is named Big Shot. As of 2019,

In 2018 Big Shot moved up to the 3’6” green hunter division and won enough classes and championships to be named the U.S. Equestrian Federation 3’6” Green Hunter Horse of the Year. He also began competing in USHJA International Hunter Derbies in 2018, earning reserve champion at the derby at Blenheim (California) in June, quickly followed by big wins in international derbies at Franktown Meadows (Nevada) and the Giant Steps Charity Horse Show (California). The 8-year-old gelding also does double duty in the junior hunter ring with owner Dulcie Lou Morris.

This essay gives additional background:

People involved in the equestrian disciplines . . . . fly on private planes, vacation in the islands and flaunt their wealth in astounding and egregious ways.The economics speak for themselves: If you want to be competitive in the regular divisions, the average price for a horse at competition level is around $100,000 and stretches well past that. The cost for boarding at a more minimalistic barn is at least $1,000 per month. There are more extravagant barns with costs ranging into the millions that have full lounges, gyms, swimming pools, kitchens and any amenity the mind can conjure. Since the horses are treated like athletes and there’s a lot of pressure on their joints, they also get regular injections and courses of treatment. At base level, owners must factor in thousands per year in veterinary costs to maintain their joints and a minimum of $250 every eight weeks to have their hooves maintained by a farrier.

It seems to me that there are two issues here. One is that if Kevin has hired Abbe Lowell to defend Hunter, Mr Lowell, who is said to bill up to $1500 an hour, is doing typical expensive lawyer things to make sure he gets paid, which could well include liens on Morris properties, or simply outright cash payments against monthly billing. I've got to think this is starting to threaten the Morris family lifestyle, including Dulcie Lou's equestrian career.

The second problem is that people who are rich enough to do equestrian are likely the sort of rich people who pay publicists to keep them out of the news, especially the tabloids. They simply don't want their names connected with notorious crackhead con artists like Hunter Biden -- and neither do they want photos of their husbands and fathers taking bong hits in the national press, much less naked photos of their husband's and father's protégé romping with Russian hookers.

For that matter, they really don't want to be thought too close even to Joe Biden, who is looking more and more like a clownish loser. That family is getting close to cutting Kevin loose, if you ask me. I don't think that marriage has much of a future -- but is this a trend? For the ultra-wealthy, there's no question that Trump is just a little too arriviste -- but if you get right down to it, Joe, Hunter, Dr Jill, Hallie, and that whole crew aren't just trashy, they're catastrophic. Worse than the Clintons. They don't go with equestrian outfits.

As I've been saying, times are changing.

UPDATE: My wife responds, "I'm on Dulcie Lou's side. At least she wants to be a successful equestrian."

Gutfeld Agrees With My Take

As a successful comic, Gutfeld has an instinctive insight into humor, but standup is also a peculiarly American institution, part of our popular culture. For the last several days I've been talking about Trump's relation to the popular culture superhero paradigm, in which a reactive superhero consistently improvises to escape the elaborate schemes of an intellectual, deliberative supervillain. We see this when Batman fights the Joker. but we see it even more clearly as we watch the Road Runner foil the elaborate machinations of Wile E Coyote.

Gutfeld made a very similar point in last night's monologue. At 3:28:

So the saga of Donald J Trump continues. Really, what did we talk about before him? . . . But have you noticed the reaction to the Trump conviction? It's more muted than my TV during Jesse's show. Of course, there are the usual nut cases where anything related to Trump is cause for incontinence. [Switches to clip of Joy Behar on The View talking about "leaking".] So Joy Behar wets herself in Costco. . . . But, aside from Joy and some has-been actors, where's all the noise? No one's dancing in the streets, weeping, or peeing with Joy.

The truth is, even some on the left admit this prosecution wasn't justice. Some recognized they were going too far even before the verdict. It's like if you're in a fight with your spouse and you make a casual comment about her meat loaf, and you go oh, [bleep], I'm in for it. And they're right, the verdict resulted in a bump in Trump's polling and a massive $200 million bump in donations. TWO HUNDRED . . . two hundred million, that's more than I make in a year. It even crashed Trump's donation site[.]

. . . So, how does Trump do it? How does he turn a conviction into an electoral windfall? How does he turn his adversary's energy into power? I call it the eternal cliffhanger theory. With Trump, when one act finishes, it sparks an equally thrilling next one. It's like the orange Harry Potter. And what [prompts?] the cliffhangers are those who are obsessed with taking him down. It's a perpetual motion machine. Their attacks can't help but set the stage for,"what will he do next?" And what he does next then creates another cause for attack. You think you've killed him? Nah, there is he in the next chapter to raging applause.

On one hand, we might almost see this as a case of life imitating art, we have the paradigm of the Road Runner cartoon, or Harry Potter, or Batman vs the Joker, or even Sherlock Holmes vs Professor Moriarty. We might trace the paradigm at least as far back as Til Eulenspiegel, something Gutfeld echoes by working medieval scatological references into his analysis of the character's current manifestation.

He sees the cliffhanger as Trump's device. Has Biden killed him yet? Nah. What will Biden try next? On one hand, this is a standard way to hold an audience's attention -- to find out what happens, stay tuned through the commercial break. On the other hand, Trump's peculiar innovation has been to use the cliffhanger to focus not on Wile E Coyote's latest catastrophe, but on Trump. The pattern isn't simply on the reactive superhero, although insofar as Trump is the Road Runner, he's a sort of anti-intellectual Occam's Razor, defeating the coyote's overly complex plans.

But Trump is also the more complex Dark Knight Rises version of the superhero, someone who's imperfect, not just David vs Goliath but more like David vs Saul. This is also turning out to have a remarkable appeal. Clinton polster Mark Penn poses the conundrum of how this works for Trump in this interview:

Q: Let's start with President Biden's approval rating, which remains unchanged at 44%. What does that mean that it didn't move month to month?

Penn: . . . Below 45%, it's hard for a president to get reelected. Below 40, I would say it's impossible. Below 45, it's certainly not impossible, but hard. . . . Importantly, when people look back, and I ask the job approval rating for President Trump, Trump gets a 55% job approval rating. So that 11-point gap is a critical part of what's motivating voters in these polls, and Biden has either got to bring his up or bring Trump's down.

Q: Why do you think Trump's is so high at 55%? . . . What's that about?

Penn: Well, you have to say nostalgia, in the sense that people are evaluating things in the past . . . at the time, Trump never got a 55% job approval. So he is getting in retrospect, and perhaps in comparison, a 55% job approval, higher than he got when he was actually doing the job, but nevertheless, that's the fact, that's how the voters see it.

So we have to extrapolate another factor, we can explain Trump only in part as a comic book superhero, the Road Runner, or Til Eulenspiegel, whose character doesn't change, and whose escapes are predictable. There's a change in the audience's view of Trump that we don't see in the simpler paradigms. This has to do with what I think is another important factor, the growing recognition that there was something wrong in 2020, and maybe not primarily the election.

People are rethinking 2020. The current testimony of Dr Fauci in front of the House reflects this. Just yesterday:

Dr. Anthony Fauci has said that Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene's vocal criticisms of him during a congressional hearing on the COVID-19 pandemic had increased the number of death threats against him.

. . . Monday's hearing quickly deteriorated into partisan attacks, with Fauci facing the most hostility from Greene, a Georgia Republican. She refused to address him as "doctor," called for him to be prosecuted "for crimes against humanity" and said he "belongs in prison."

The national mood is changing. Biden wants to lock Trump up -- but Trump has been saying lock them up all along, and people remember it.

Trump In Jail?

The possibility of prison for Trump when Judge Merchan sentences him on July 11 quickly arose on Friday:

'The View’ co-host Sunny Hostin, who seemed quite pleased with the developments, shared on the air that she had spoken with someone from Bragg’s office.

. . . “I spent this morning speaking to someone from the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. They’re called street fighters. He believes that they will recommend a one-year term in prison. And that is because when you spend a year in prison in New York or under, you serve in Rikers Island,” Austin said.

According to Hostin, this recommendation serves not just as punishment but as a stern message to society that such conduct will not be tolerated again.

Victoria Taft at PJ Media answered, Of Course They'll Put Trump in Jail, and Trump himself made it plain that he's fully aware of the contingency:

“I’m okay with it,” Trump said when asked about the potential of house arrest or even jail during a “Fox & Friends Weekend” interview that aired on Sunday. “I saw one of my lawyers the other day on television saying, ‘Oh, no, you don’t want to do that to the president.’ I said, don’t, you know, beg for anything. It’s just the way it is.”

Acknowledging it “could happen,” Trump went on to say, “I don’t know that the public would stand for it, you know.” Trump also said, “I think it’d be tough for the public to take. You know, at a certain point, there’s a breaking point.”

There's no question we're in uncharted territory. My view for some time has been that Biden finds himself in desperate straits much earlier in the campaign cycle, a couple months before the nominating conventions and five months before the election, than any of his predecessors, who like McGovern and Dukakis were only occasonally down in the polls early, while others like Carter and Hillary seemed to be doing well right up to the election. But given what have often now been characterized as dire omens for his reelection prospects, Joe is clearly under pressure to turn things around, and jailing Trump is starting to look like a real option.

The best news of all is that Trump's attorneys are taking this seriously and are presumably pereparing their strategies, which given the nature of such things will be kept highly confidential. On the other hand, a legal defense is only part of Trump's task, which is an overall political campaign, and the odd thing up to now is how well he's been dealing with the circumstances he's been given. As I noted the other day, the pop culture hero is always in a reactive state, it's the thoughtful, devious villain who's always coming up with new obstacles for which the hero must improvise an escape -- and of course, this he does.

This is starting to make centrist Democrats nervous. Thus Dean Phillips, who briefly ran against Joe in this year's primaries, tweeted New York Gov Hochul:

Donald Trump is a serial liar, cheater, and philanderer, a six-time declarer of corporate bankruptcy, an instigator of insurrection, and a convicted felon who thrives on portraying himself as a victim.@GovKathyHochul should pardon him for the good of the country.

— Dean Phillips (@deanbphillips) June 1, 2024

Wait a moment. He's saying Trump is somewhere between Aaron Burr, Tokyo Rose, the Rosenbergs, Jefferson Davis, and Jeffrey Epstein, and he should be pardoned for the good of the country? Why shouldn't Trump be in the supermax with El Chapo, Ted Kaczynski, Ramzi Yousef, and Robert Hanssen? As well pardon all those others. I don't understand.

He's clearly sensing a whiff of impending catastrope.

He's not the only one.

Democratic ex-New York Gov. David Paterson says he would have wanted President Biden to consider pardoning Donald Trump in his hush-money conviction if the prez had the power.

Paterson, speaking Sunday on 77 WABC radio’s “The Cats Roundtable,” agreed with Trump’s gripes that the case was “rigged.

“There are a lot . . . of erroneous qualities to that trial,” Paterson said. “Some of the people who are involved: A person who worked at the White House somehow wound up in the Manhattan DA’s Office.

But the Governor of New York can pardon people for New York crimes, which is Phiiips's rationale. Another former New York governor, George Pataki, has the same worries later in the link:

Former New York Republican Gov. George Pataki joined Paterson in blasting the prosecution of Trump — and both governors warned it could boomerang on Biden and other Democrats.

. . . “They have opened a can of worms here that can go anywhere,” he said of Democrats pushing for Trump’s conviction.

Fragmentary evidence over the weekend suggests the verdict and the potential for a prison sentence are in fact having the opposite of the intended effect.

The stunning felony conviction of former President Donald Trump garnered headlines around the world and created sharp political arguments across the U.S. But did it affect the presidential race? The answer is yes. It seems to have actually helped Trump, the June I&I/TIPP Poll shows.

. . . In the head-to-head poll between President Joe Biden and Trump, it’s now a statistical toss-up, 41% to 41%. But that’s an improvement for Trump from May, when he trailed Biden by 2 percentage points in that month’s I&I/TIPP poll (42% Biden to 40% Trump). The June poll has a margin of error of +/- 2.5 percentage points.

The conviction and now the threat of prison time have created a fundraising windfall for Trump:

'This might be a little inside information, but as I was leaving my house about 37 seconds ago, I asked my wife, what are we up to now?' Eric Trump told Fox News' Maria Bartiromo on her show Sunday Morning Futures.

And [Lara] said, just in terms of small dollar, we're well over $70 million. This is $21 donations, $43 donations, right, small dollar donations.'

The former president's son continued: 'If you add the large dollar donations to it, you're over $200 million.'

But as Eric Trump suggested, there are lizard people getting on board. My former schoolmate and Clintonista Robert Reich sounds the alarm:

Elon Musk and the entrepreneur and investor David Sacks reportedly held a secret dinner party of billionaires and millionaires in Hollywood last month. Its purpose: to defeat Joe Biden and re-install Donald Trump in the White House.

The guest list included Peter Thiel, Rupert Murdoch, Michael Milken, Travis Kalanick, and Steven Mnuchin, Trump’s treasury secretary.

The Daily Mail link just above added this:

Israeli-American Miriam Adelson, the wife of the late casino magnate Sheldon Adelson, has reportedly pledged $100 million to the Trump campaign in the days since his criminal conviction, according to The Forward, a Jewish outlet.

. . . She is the latest of a number of billionaires that have pledged to help the former president regain his grasp on power.

Last week, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman similarly decided to make public his support of Trump.

The private equity behemoth said his decision to back the ex-president was in part motivated by the anti-semitism seen on college campuses in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war.

Given this level of support from extremely influential people, along with the likelihood of major consequences from the public if Trump is jailed, I suspect there will be some sort of intervention before this can take place. The basic problem is that Joe has never been fit for office, and as he gets more desperate, he poses a real threat of an unstable interregnum that will happen even before the election.

"Don't Underestimate Joe's Ability To . . . "

What almost nobody has mentioned about Joe's Friday Dr Evil grin is that it was made just incidentally following his announcement of a new Gaza cease-fire plan, which itself incidentally followed his comments on Trump's conviction.

Under the guise of announcing a proposed ceasefire agreement in the Israel-Gaza war, Biden took to a podium in the White House state dining room at 1:30 p.m. on Friday. He began his statement not with details of the peace plan but rather with a lecture about how the “rule of law” prevailed in Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s case against Trump. “Donald Trump was given every opportunity to defend himself,” Biden said of his 2024 Republican presidential rival. “And after careful deliberation, the jury reached a unanimous verdict. They found Donald Trump guilty on all 34 felony counts.”

. . . “It’s reckless, it’s dangerous, and it’s irresponsible for anyone to say this was rigged just because they don’t like the verdict.”

But that wasn't what Joe was actually there to announce. He actually had big news on Gaza:

US President Joe Biden has urged Hamas to accept a new Israeli proposal to end the conflict in Gaza, saying that "it's time for this war to end".

. . . Speaking at the White House on Friday, Mr Biden said that the first phase of the proposed plan would include a "full and complete ceasefire", the withdrawal of IDF forces from populated areas and the exchange of hostages for Palestinian prisoners.

"This is truly a decisive moment," he said. "Hamas says it wants a ceasefire. This deal is an opportunity to prove whether they really mean it."

The ceasefire, he added, would allow more humanitarian aid to reach the beleaguered territory, with "600 trucks carrying aid into Gaza every single day".

The second phase would see all remaining living hostages returned, including male soldiers. The ceasefire would then become "the cessation of hostilities, permanently."

But as of yesterday, Netanyahu turned out not to be on board:

"Israel’s conditions for ending the war have not changed: The destruction of Hamas military and governing capabilities, the freeing of all hostages and ensuring that Gaza no longer poses a threat to Israel," Netanyahu said.

"Israel will continue to insist these conditions are met before a permanent ceasefire is put in place. The notion that Israel will agree to a permanent ceasefire before these conditions are fulfilled is a non-starter," he added.

Remarking on the significance, Times of Israel observed that "His comments, in a rare statement published on the Sabbath and only in English, came after United States President Joe Biden announced Friday that Israel had proposed a three-phase deal for a ceasefire in Gaza in exchange for Hamas releasing hostages, told the terror group to accept it and urged the Israeli government to stand behind it."

Let's consider that Joe's top priorities since last October have been, first, to regain the lead over Trump in presidential polling, and second, to appease the anti-Zionist wing of Democrats and end US support for Israel without alienating Jewish Democrats, who are major donors and influencers. He apparently has hoped to accomplish the second goal by brokering a cease-fire in Gaza before the IDF can eliminate Hamas there entirely. But his obstacles to accomplishing both goals are Trump on one hand and Prime Minister Netanyahu on the other, and since October, he's gotten nowhere with either.

According to the BBC this morning,

Two far-right Israeli ministers have threatened to quit and collapse the governing coalition if Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu agrees to a Gaza ceasefire proposal unveiled by US President Joe Biden on Friday.

Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich and National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir said they were opposed to striking any deal before Hamas was destroyed.

So far, the White House is continuing to put a happy face on developments:

However, the White House said on Sunday it expected Israel would agree to the plan.

"This was an Israeli proposal. We have every expectation that if Hamas agrees to the proposal - as was transmitted to them, an Israeli proposal - then Israel would say yes," White House national security spokesperson John Kirby told ABC News.

But Joe's track record on holding back the IDF in Gaza hasn't been good. Earlier last month,

President Joe Biden on Monday [May 6] urgently warned Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu against launching an offensive in the southern Gaza city of Rafah as the divide between the two leaders continues to grow along with the mounting Palestinian death toll.

The call between Biden and Netanyahu came as Israel appeared to be moving closer to a major military operation to root out Hamas militants in Rafah — something that Biden and his top aides have repeatedly told Israeli officials will only lead to more death and worsen the despair in the war-ravaged territory.

This had no effect; the IDF is apparently in the mopping-up stage in Rafah as this is written:

The Israeli military is in central Rafah, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) confirmed in a statement Friday, despite international concern and anger over its military operation in Gaza’s southernmost city.

. . . Over the [May 25-26] weekend, Israel launched an airstrike on a displacement camp in the city, killing dozens and creating global outrage. The strike also took out two Hamas leaders, Israel said.

. . . “The word tragic doesn’t even begin to describe it,” US Vice President Kamala Harris said of the incident on Tuesday. But neither she or President Joe Biden have said the strike crossed a red line for US support.

The problem is that Joe has been feckless in accomplishing the goal the anti-Zionist wing of Democrats has set for him, while he's steadily losing the confidence of centrist Jews like Alan Dershowitz. In fact, the short form of what's going on is that Netanyahu is the one who's been effective, not only in the Israeli political environmemt, but in the US as well. As I've already said, Netanyahu spent much of his early career in the US, and to survive with US politicians like Obama and Biden against him, he's had to be a US politician as well.

But this brings us to Trump. Trump has alleged that Thursday's guilty verdict “is all done by Biden and his people” and “in total conjunction with white house and the DOJ.” Whether this is strictly true remains to be seen, but I think a reasonable interpretation of the "lawfare" strategy in this case would be that it aims to split moderate Republicans from a MAGA base by making Trump seem at minimum unscrupulous and out of control, but also a criminal.

So far, this has had the opposite effect, since it's buoyed Trump in the polls since his indictments last year, and it's now driven moderates like Senators McConnell and Collins to support Trump publicly. Even Mitt Romney remarked,

“Bragg should have settled the case against Trump, as would have been the normal procedure. But he made a political decision,” Romney said, according to Coppins. “Bragg may have won the battle, for now, but he also may have lost the political war. Democrats think they can put out the Trump fire with oxygen. It’s political malpractice.”

So Romney is implicitly agreeing with Trump's position that this was a political prosecution. In effect, with the "lawfare" strategy, Joe has rearranged the political landscape from 2016 and 2020, putting the moderate Republicans, never comfortable with Trump in either of those elections, into Trump's corner for 2024. Other evidence is still anecdotal, but one clear result is that chants that sound like "Let's go, Brandon!" but are actually anti-Biden, have returned to big athletic events.

This can't be the outcome Joe thought he'd have. Don't underestimate Joe's ability to . . .