Short takes #2
Trump stalls the DOJ. Again... DeSantis kidnaps asylum-seekers to own the libs... Brits queue for days to see a lead-lined box… Mornings will be Licht vs Licht vs Licht… Saving it for the book.
How Trump keeps getting away with it
In a lifetime of shady dealing, Donald Trump has never been indicted (unless you count his two impeachments as indictments). He’s lost some big civil suits (among them: a $25 million settlement for the Trump University swindle, $2 million for funneling funds from his “charity” foundation to his political campaigns, and 60 lost cases in pursuing bullshit election claims), but he’s never faced a criminal trial. So far.
In light of Judge Cannon’s widely derided ruling that halted the Justice Department from pursuing their investigation into Trump’s stolen documents, Dahlia Lithwick talked with Mary Trump and Norman Ornstein about how Trump manages to skate time and again in a lifetime of criming.
Mary Trump locates her uncle between the weak people he exploits and the strong people who exploit him. He’s not at the top of the food chain but sandwiched in the upper-middle.
… there are always people smarter and more powerful than Donald who’ve figured out how they can make use of him. If it were just Donald, he’s not savvy, he has specific skills. I mean he is quite good at manipulating the media. He’s very good at finding people weaker than he is to carry his water for him. But if it weren’t for people like Mark Burnett, or the bankers at Deutsche Bank, or Mitch McConnell, or Vladimir Putin, I don’t think Donald would’ve gotten as far as he’s gotten.
Norm Ornstein urges Congress to set new limits to the jurisdiction of the courts
But what we also see with Judge Cannon is that he finds enablers in the judiciary everywhere. Here you have a woman who manifestly does not belong on the bench, who was jammed through days after he lost the election, put in place because she was a longtime member of the Federalist Society, and was actually under 40 when she was there, never should have taken this case in the first place.
[Congress] can by legislation say, “No, we’re not going to let some insane district court judge who is ruling only because of forum shopping by extremists to basically rule over the entire country.”
Read the Transcript. Hear the Podcast.
DeSantis kidnaps asylum seekers and steals the news cycle
In a week of coverage dominated by a dead Queen, Trump’s legal woes, Ukrainian battlefield advances, and improved chances of Democrats holding the House, Gov. Ron DeSantis once again demonstrated his skill at elbowing his way into the news cycle.
Following Texas Gov. Greg Abbott and Arizona’s Doug Ducey, DeSantis rounded up some migrants and shipped them north. But, since Florida has no border with Mexico, DeSantis had no local migrants to ship. So, he went to Texas to round up some asylum seekers—most of whom had walked for months to escape persecution in their native Venezuala—luring them with false promises of jobs and assistance and flying them to Martha’s Vineyard in Massachusetts. While jobs are plentiful in Martha’s Vineyard during summer’s tourist season, most of those evaporate after Labor Day.
It would be satisfying if DeSantis’s cynical cruelty lands him in court—both in civil suits and criminal charges. But that’s not likely. What’s more certain is that he’s achieved the goal of burnishing his own reputation among MAGA Republicans looking to 2024 and beyond. He did not, however, achieve his goal of owning any libs.
I’m waiting for the first post-flight polling to see whether his lead in the 2022 governor’s race against Charlie Crist has grown or shrunk.
The Queue
A long thread about the long queue—”a triumph of Britishness”. Worth reading.
But, then again, Twitter being Twitter, there are also Tweets that view The Queue differently.
Morning television: All-Licht All-the-time
Chris Licht’s first big move at CNN will be to craft a new morning show to compete both with the one he crafted for MSNBC and the other one he crafted for CBS.
Dylan Byers explains in Puck that the show is
… a project that is near and dear to Licht’s heart, given his career-defining stints as executive producer of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” and “CBS This Morning”—two programs that offer a template for Licht’s new CNN show and against which Lemon & Co. will compete.
The move also gives Licht a couple of bonus points in his quest to neuter the network. Shifting Don Lemon to mornings will also knock Brianna Keilar off her morning perch, silencing what Byers calls, “her forceful condemnation of Republican impropriety in the Trump era.” It will also open a spot in primetime for a “less overtly progressive lineup.”
Josh Marshall (paywall) sees two other aspects to Licht’s moves. Externally, they’re public signals to Trump World that CNN should no longer be seen as a liberal bête noir—as Marshall puts it, they’re “designed to generate mass schadenfreude”. Internally, they’re warning shots to scare the rest of the staff into falling in line with the new corporate direction.
It is again classic Trump: Keep people around you in a state of suspense and uncertainty because it gives you leverage over everyone. It’s a style of performative dominance.
FOR FURTHER READING: Keith Olbermann shares his memories of Licht’s efforts in 2010 to neuter MSNBC, getting Markos Moulitsos banned from guest appearances on the network.
Chris Licht is there to dismantle the liberal parts of CNN. I know this because I worked with him at MSNBC, where he decided part of his job was to try to dismantle the liberal parts of MSNBC. He is a corporate lackey. Worse, he’s a corporate henchman.
Saving it for the book
Hardly a week goes by without another journalist (or two) publishing a book about The Former Guy. Each new book discloses some previously unknown details of Trump’s venality, corruption, ignorance, and/or vengefulness. Next up: The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021 (September 20) Peter Baker of The New York Times and Susan Glasser of The New Yorker. New quotes include:
Lindsey Graham calling Trump (but not to his face) “a lying mother----er" but "a lot of fun to hang out with.”
Melania castigating Trump over his COVID response, “"You're blowing this."
Chief of Staff John Kelly responding to Trump’s refusal to lower the White House flag to half-staff when John McCain died: "If you don't support John McCain's funeral, when you die, the public will come to your grave and piss on it."
And the book after that one: Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America (October 4) by Maggie Haberman of The New York Times, quotes Trump as telling an aide he wouldn’t leave the White House, “We’re never leaving. How can you leave when you won an election?” She also reports that he sought advice from the valet who fetched a Diet Coke for him whenever he pressed a red button on desk.
Like clockwork, each new book sparks a chorus of condemnation that the authors withheld the good stuff from their daily reporting so they could save it for their books. I’m not convinced that’s a problem. None of the new revelations has substantively changed our understanding of Trump. Nobody’s changed their opinion. What the books ad is simply colorful, corroborative detail. But the portrait of Trump has been fixed since the moment he glided down the golden escalator in Trump Tower.
You may see it as saving it for the book. I see it as saving it for the midterms.