Donald Trump’s poll numbers increased after Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg indicted him for business fraud. Now it looks like he’ll be arrested again, this time for mishandling classified documents. Republicans will circle the wagons around him again, of course.
No one is above the law. But indicting the frontrunner for a major political party’s presidential nomination, a former president to boot, on charges with a maximum sentence of 400 years in federal prison sets the stage for a full-blown constitutional crisis. Is there some way to hold Donald Trump accountable for playing fast and loose with state and federal law, without forcing him to campaign while on trial or asking voters to head to the polls while the de facto leader of the Republican Party rots behind bars?
Consider how crazy this could get. Would Club Fed pipe in wifi for the debates? Can an inaugural ceremony be held in the visiting room? Who takes that 3 a.m. crisis phone call when the felon-in-chief is sitting in stir?
Biden and the Democrats fantasize about putting Trump in prison. If they calm down and think about it even for a moment, however, they should be able to see how badly doing this now, during an election, would inflame our highly combustible politics. Three prosecutors, all Democrats, all working for Democratic administrations with the support of Democratic-leaning corporate media organizations, are seen as waging nuclear lawfare to deny 70 million-plus Republican voters the right to support the presidential candidate and party of their choice.
I don’t know how this ends. Civil war? Random political violence? Polarization like you’ve never even dreamed of? Whatever happens, I guarantee it won’t be good.
There is a way out.
Offer Trump a plea deal.
At this writing, here is the legal lay of the land. Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 counts of falsifying business records, some related to paying hush money to porn actress Stormy Daniels. Legal experts think Bragg has a better-than-even chance to nail Trump in court, despite the novel construction of his case. Now Trump faces 37 counts for mishandling classified documents in federal court in Miami; his odds of walking away free are still worse there. Soon, in early August, Fulton County, Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis may join Indictment-a-palooza with her own set of felony charges, that Trump tried to interfere with the 2020 election.
Trump is famous for ignoring his lawyers’ advice. But he’s never before faced odds this long or downsides this steep. If a plea deal is offered, his legal team will be screaming at him to take it.
Assuming the former president is wise enough to listen—or listen to his second and third set of attorneys after he fires his first ones, for they too will be shouting at him to make a deal—the terms of a plea arrangement will have to satisfy the courts (i.e., Democrats) without enraging Team MAGA.
Charging parties in Georgia, New York and the Department of Justice would need to agree on a set of conditions that would ensure Trump was covered by any and all claims likely to be filed before the November 2024 election.
Now for the terms:
No prison.
By all means, disrespect Trump the man. Trump the former president and Trump the major-party candidate, however, represent the aspirations of tens of millions of Americans who felt unheard and unseen before he rode down the Trump Tower elevator in 2015. If you humiliate this man—trials, convictions, handcuffs, chains, jumpsuit—his supporters will feel his shame as their own. Furthermore, it would be impossible to overstate the international scorn and disdain that would be heaped upon the U.S. after a sordid spectacle better suited to an s-hole country in the developing world. We have a two-party system. If you hobble one candidate, tie him up in court and/or jail him, you no longer have the pretense of a democracy—you’ve created a one-party system. Biden will become America’s Saddam.
Who would ever listen to another pompous declamation about American exceptionalism?
For decades I was angry at Gerald Ford for pardoning Nixon because it sent the message that presidents are above the law. I was wrong. I have since come to appreciate Ford’s calm, common-sense Midwestern wisdom. Ford understood that America needed to move on, that to do otherwise would have meant we would have been talking about Nixon for the rest of the 1970s and beyond—the way we can’t stop obsessing over Trump now. Hard as it is to accept that Trump should walk free on so many charges, charges that his own administration pursued against far nobler people who went to prison as a result, if you want to salvage the republic Trump must be spared prison.
Federal prosecutors sometimes require that a politician drop out of politics as part of a plea deal. In 1982, for example, a Congressman from New York agreed to resign his seat in Congress, stay out of politics and to plead guilty to federal tax, narcotics and conflict-of-interest. Plea bargains filed by state DAs forced out the governors of Alabama in 2017 and Missouri in 2018.
Trump’s ability to campaign and potentially regain the presidency in a fair election is essential to assure Republicans that they have not been victimized by a weaponized government. Democrats and Never Trump Republicans will find this tough to digest. Surely a man who incited the January 6th Capitol riot doesn’t deserve to be president. But democracy requires at least two candidates, neither behind bars or banned from participating.
If not prison or proscription, what?
Fines. Big fines.
Forbes estimates Trump’s net worth at $2.5 billion. Let the two states and the federal government split $2 billion, payable within a year of settlement. If he defaults, clap him in cuffs and frog-march him out of his hidey-hole, whether it’s Mar-a-Lago or the White House.
For a man who values money more than anything else, taking a financial haircut would represent real accountability. His agreement to pay a significant public settlement would serve as tacit acknowledgement of his guilt. No amount of grandstanding at his rallies would convince anyone of his innocence.
For God’s sake, offer Trump a deal before it’s too late.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
As we head into a Trump versus Biden rematch nobody really wants, it’s hard to argue that the American electoral system is really a democracy.
The problem is not that the electorate is polarized, siloed into self-reinforcing media echo chambers and mutually contemptuous — that’s the cause. The problem is that neither the partisans of the left nor those of the right can imagine themselves, for even a second, on the other side of the ideological divide.
This phenomenon is perfectly illustrated by the spectacular rise of Donald Trump’s Republican primary poll numbers, first following his indictment for business fraud by Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg, and then after Florida Governor Ron DeSantis announced his run. According to conventional (liberal) wisdom, both these events should have hurt Trump politically. What the heck, Democrats wondered, is going on with those wacky GOP voters?
Donald Trump thinks, at least he claims he does, that the deep state and the media are out to get him. Judging the long list of congressional investigations, Justice Department inquiries (which were subsequently determined to have been unjustified), multiple impeachments and criminal charges that have targeted him, the former president’s paranoia appears to be grounded in reality.
Trump brilliantly projects his personal and political travails upon his supporters. “In reality they’re not after me, they’re after you,” he tweeted in 2019. “I’m just in the way.” After The Donald, in other words, would come a deluge of liberal statism gone wild: more taxes, fewer guns, migrants stealing your job, cities awash in bums and criminal gangs, transwomen raping your daughter in the ladies room.
You can’t defeat Trump unless you undermine his relationship with his supporters, who view him as a guardian and an unrepentant advocate for their values and concerns, and love the fact that he drives liberals crazy. Want to get under Trump’s skin? Get zen, stop reacting and call him out for the promises he broke to right-leaning voters.
Democrats, however, can’t begin to understand conservatives’ concerns or the mindset of voters who share them. Stuck in their New York Times/NPR/MSNBC bubble, in which everyone who votes Republican (especially for Trump) are inbred, uneducated, racist hicks too stupid not to impale their brains when they pick their noses, they attack Trump for the things they dislike about him—which, to his supporters, are features rather than bugs. They deploy tactics that would diminish a politician in their eyes, only to elevate him among MAGA types. Rather than separating Trump from his voters, everything Democrats do is pushing them closer together.
Detach yourself emotionally from your visceral dislike of the short-fingered vulgarian and it’s easy to see why a party whose base sees itself as beleaguered and aggrieved rallied around Trump after a liberal Democratic DA arrested him in order to fulfill a political campaign promise. Yet Democrats still believe that more of the same will yield different results.
Filing criminal charges against Trump over the classified records found in Trump’s office at Mar-e-Lago “suggests a fateful new reckoning is looming over Trump,” CNN mused on May 18th. Wait, there’s more! If could be that Trump’s Biggest Legal Danger Comes From Georgia as New York magazine said, and Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis has signaled that indictments over election interference might be filed against Trump this summer.
Precedent and common sense indicate that any criminal indictment by a Democratic prosecutor will be viewed by Republican voters as more political grandstanding over offenses that are trivial, ginned up, or both. Democrats are blind to this reality. Republicans aren’t different than you and me; if a passel of Republican DAs were to go after Joe Biden at the same scale over analogous offenses, they too would close ranks around the president.
Well-funded, popular in his home state and articulate, DeSantis poses the only substantial (albeit long-shot) threat to Trump’s bid for the GOP nomination.
As a populist culture-warrior who has carefully studied Trump’s appeal, DeSantis knows he has to attack Trump from the right, on issues like the COVID-19 lockdown, abortion, spending and crime, marketing his administrative experience. Having established his bona fides on illegal immigration, the Florida governor might jab Trump for completing less than 400 miles of his promised “border wall” along the nearly-2,000-mile border with Mexico, which, Trump’s promises aside, Mexico did not pay for. “Donald likes to talk,” I’d say if I were him, “but that’s all he’s got—lots of loud words, no action.”
At this point, however, DeSantis’ culture-war red-meat is like a restaurant with great desserts and boring entrees—he’s got tasty extras but where are the basic policy items? So it remains Trump’s nomination to lose. As for the general election? There’s no indication that the Democrats have learned anything about Trump’s vulnerabilities since they underestimated him in 2016.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
Florida Governor Ron DeSantis will tout his military experience in his race for President. But his experience at Guantanamo torture camp includes highly credible allegations that he volunteered to watch brutal torture and approved of what he saw.
Trump is like the mythical hydra. The more you attack it, the stronger it gets. Now he’s been found liable for sexual assault. Maybe he really does need to murder someone to get reelected.
As the 2024 presidential campaign begins in earnest, political cartoonist Ted Rall, (from the Left) and Scott Stantis (from the Right) dig into what looks like an 1892-style political rematch, between former and possibly future President Donald Trump, and current President Joe Biden.
Trump appeared on CNN for the first time since 2016, at a raucous town hall meeting that received widespread criticism from liberals and their mainstream media allies. He advised congressional Republicans to be willing to risk default in the debt-limit crisis, signaled that he would reduce or eliminate military aid to Ukraine, and made fun of Jean Carroll, the columnist who won $5 million from a jury that found him liable for sexual battery and defamation. Trump is just Trump being Trump as usual, but what else did we expect? The question now is, will old Trump 2016 win, or will old Trump 2020 lose?
The Republican-controlled House oversight committee has its sights set firmly on the current president, Joe Biden, the First Lady and other members of his family. The first family acquired $13 million from unknown sources a few years ago, and Hunter Biden’s infamous laptop seems to indicate that the money may have originated from covert and corrupt sources in places like Romania, Uzbekistan, Ukraine and China. If the president really accepted bribes and kickbacks from foreign countries, this could be the biggest scandal in American presidential history.
Columbia University announced the winners of the Pulitzer Prizes earlier this week, and with all such pomposity, there’s a lot less than meets the eye to the proceedings. Scott and Ted dish on everything you need to know about how this particular sausage is made, as well as the self-dealing and conflicts of interest on a staggering scale.
Watch the Video Version of the DMZ America Podcast:
DMZ America Podcast Ep 101 Sec 1: Trump Returns
DMZ America Podcast Ep 101 Sec 2: Biden’s Brewing Scandals
DMZ America Podcast Ep 101 Sec 3: Behind the Pulitzers
A new Washington Post-ABC News poll places the President’s approval rating at a record low, 36%. In the modern era, no president has been reelected with numbers like these.
58% of Democrats want their party to nominate someone other than Joe Biden in 2024. Of Democrats.
If the election were held today, Donald Trump would beat Joe Biden by four points.
Only 32% of voters think Biden has sufficient mental sharpness to do a president’s job.
This, as grim is it all is, is the good news. Enjoy, Democrats! Because it’s downhill from here. The economy is, as usual stupid, the biggest issue; just as the campaign begins this fall, so will a recession, according to the Federal Reserve Bank. Then there’s Hunter Biden’s pesky laptop, the gift that keeps on giving to the Republicans. Whether Joe proves to be “the big guy” who gets slices of kickbacks or the $13 million that mysteriously wound up in his bank account in 2017 and 2018 turns out to be a bribe paid by an Uzbekistani telecom or some other scandal related to the crack-addict deadbeat-dad son who refuses to shut up, it’s beginning to smell a lot like whoop-ass.
Biden reminds me of the classic “Tales from the Darkside” episode in which a grandfather is too stubborn to admit that he’s dead even as chunks of flesh slip off his face. The American people have a clear, loud message for the president, which he refuses to hear: we hired you for one term. Which is kind of what he promised.
It isn’t, of course, too late to reverse course. Nothing prevents the president from announcing: “Well, on second thought, actually I’d like to spend more time with my great-great-grandchildren.” Who knows? With Joe an officially lame duck, Kamala Harris might step up and impress us with her border czarina gig—or her new AI thingie.
Could be he’s up to some 17-dimensional chess, as suggested by my fellow Centerclip contributor Rina Shah. Shah recently mused, and I think she’s on to something, that Biden officially announced in order to clear the field of Democratic competitors and set the stage for him to anoint his chosen successor whether they be Harris or someone less impressively unpopular. Such political bait-and-switch would be a new low—but don’t forget, we are talking about a guy who got 51 former intelligence officers to manipulate a presidential election for him, while risking World War III.
Short of these two options, what can an incumbent president who is disliked, disrespected and deemed to be dim, do to dodge defeat?
We know what Democrats plan to do: what worked in 2020.
Biden will point out that he’s not Trump. “Compare him to the alternative,” Biden surrogate Senator Chris Coons (D-DE) says. He won’t campaign. “Frankly, the best way to run for re-election as president is to be president,” Coons argues. He’ll avoid debating his Democratic primary challengers. He’ll hope Trump goes to prison (as if the legal system could act quickly).
But 2024 isn’t 2020. The pandemic is over. America is outside again. Americans expect their president to be out there with them.
“Watch me. It’s all I can say.” That’s what Biden says whenever a reporter asks whether he’s too old for his job. Trouble for him is, we have been watching—for three years—and the results are in that Washington Post-ABC News poll. Fair or not, we don’t like what we see.
Biden and the Democrats can’t talk their way out of the widespread perception that the president is past his due date. Cries of “ageism” are falling on deaf ears, including among the 62% of voters over age 65 who think Biden is too old. There’s one possible solution: stop hidin’ Biden.
Put the President out in front of the White House press corps every single day of the week, fielding unscripted questions, no cheatsheets allowed. Have him do weekly town halls, including in hostile Republican territory. Grant presidential interviews to vicious right-wingers like Sean Hannity—and don’t forget left-wing progressives. If Biden does all that for months on end and manages to hold his own, he might turn some of us into believers.
Biden’s staffers and advisers, many of whom worked for Obama, are not stupid people. They know what must be done to save this doomed reelection campaign. Unfortunately, they know they can’t do it. Biden isn’t up to a tough race.
So here the Democrats go, eyes wide-open, standing like idiots on the tracks as the train appears in the distance and slowly draws nearer. Disaster is as avoidable as can be. They can amble off those tracks any time. All they have to do to save themselves is make a move.
Right now, they’re paralyzed.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis and co-hosts “The Final Countdown” radio show Mon-Fri 10 am – 12 noon ET. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
If we had a wide variety of parties and candidates to choose from, it would be credible to say that we the people have the democracy that we deserve. But we don’t.
Coupled with leaks from inside his campaign, President Joe Biden’s announcement video indicates the general tenor and strategy of his upcoming reelection bid.
Biden’s messaging is especially notable for what it’s missing.
Absent from the voiceovers and images is a reference to the COVID-19 crisis. Biden was arguably elected in the first place in large part, if not primarily, in reaction to Donald Trump’s inexplicable attacks on science and common sense in the face of the coronavirus. Biden took office after hundreds of thousands of Americans had died, presided over distribution of vaccines and billions of dollars in federal aid to employers and workers who might otherwise have been financially obliterated, and declared an end to the emergency. You’d think he’d take a wholly-justified victory lap. Perhaps his team believes a mention of the American Rescue Plan would trigger accusations that the stimulus package triggered inflation.
There’s still time. Anyway, like it or not, Republicans will make the economy their top issue. If I were Biden, I’d have a simple response to the inflation question: which would you choose? Losing your job and therefore 100% of your earning power? Or dealing with inflation and losing 10%? Republicans wouldn’t have done anything to help you. Thanks to me, there are “help wanted” ads all over the place instead of bread lines. You’re welcome.
Trump, of course, was also silent about the best part of his record in 2020. A President Hillary Clinton would have been far more cautious and slower, dotting every I and crossing every T with the FDA and so would have fallen short of the remarkable achievement of Trump’s Operation Warp Speed. Trump’s decision to play exclusively to his right-wing base, running away from his big win, cost him votes even among people whose lives were saved by his gamble.
Also missing from Biden’s rap is Ukraine, where he is fully vested in that proxy war to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars. No doubt, falling support among voters for arming and funding Ukraine is responsible for that omission. Americans like a winner and hate a loser; results of this summer’s fighting will impact the race.
The most glaring absence, of course, is any indication of what Biden will do to improve the lives of voters and the people they care about should he win reelection. In the old days, we called these statements “campaign promises.” Are Democrats worried that Biden wouldn’t be able to fulfill his pledges because Republicans might control one or both houses of Congress after 2024? Do they want voters to forget the promises he flaked out on last time—a $15-an-hour minimum wage, a legislative push for student loan forgiveness (as opposed to the half-hearted, clearly doomed-from-the-start executive order), a legal path to citizenship for undocumented workers? Whatever the reason, substituting vague pabulum like “I’d like to finish the job” in place of an actual platform violates Electoral Politics 101. Why should people vote for you if you aren’t promising anything new and improved?
Biden has one thing right: abortion will be a good issue for Democrats. 85% of Americans, a record high, now support, abortion rights with or without exceptions. Republican actions following the overturning of Roe v. Wade, reek of right-wing overreach, making even evangelical Christian conservatives uncomfortable. Pregnant women—including those who spent tens of thousands of dollars undergoing in vitro fertilization—have nearly died since the Dobbs decision prompted doctors to wait to abort their fetuses until they were coding. Each case like this makes for a potentially devastating Democratic attack ad—just wait until the first death.
Perhaps the biggest misfire in the 2024 cycle thus far has been Biden’s hammering away against “extreme MAGA Republicans,” often in conjunction with footage from the January 6th Capitol riot. American elections are always about the future, never the past, and in a country as ahistorical as this one three years had might as well be an eternity. January 6th was a shameful and embarrassing chapter in history, but it’s no more worth wallowing in than were the September 11th terrorist attacks, which we have finally managed to put behind us. It wasn’t a coup d’état, it wasn’t an insurrection, we weren’t close to dictatorship and Biden looks silly when he says otherwise.
To the extent that January 6th offers red meat to the Democratic voting base, its negative potency is stronger still. The tiny subset of protesters who invaded the Capitol building cannot reasonably tarnish the thousands more attendees who attended and did not go inside, much less Republican voters or Trump supporters as a whole, yet it’s impossible to interpret the implication any other way. The problem for Biden is not that a base strategy turns off swing voters—there are so few of them, it’s high time for Democrats to start ignoring them anyway—but rather that refusing to shut up about January 6th energizes the GOP by feeding their narrative that they are beleaguered by evil coastal elites and demoralizes progressive voters, who yearn for a party that fights for significant policy change rather than bickering over symbolism.
(Ted Rall (Twitter: @tedrall), the political cartoonist, columnist and graphic novelist, co-hosts the left-vs-right DMZ America podcast with fellow cartoonist Scott Stantis. You can support Ted’s hard-hitting political cartoons and columns and see his work first by sponsoring his work on Patreon.)
