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DMZ America Podcast Ep 173: Trump Reelected!

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Ted Rall

DMZ America co-hosts Ted Rall (from the Left) and Manila Chan (from the Right) analyze Donald Trump’s shocking reelection victory and the Republican sweep of Congress. What should we expect from a second Trump term: A federal ban on abortion rights? Mass deportations? Tariffs on Chinese imports? An end to the war in Ukraine? Gaza?

The Democratic blame game has already begun. Corporate DNC Democrats say Harris couldn’t have done anything differently, but that can’t possibly be true. Were working class voters turned off by glitzy campaign events showcasing Hollywood celebrities at a time when they were struggling with high prices and stagnant wages? Was progressive turnout depressed by Harris’ refusal to throw them a bone, especially on the genocide in Gaza? Did Democrats overreach with lawfare and an endless barrage of attacks against Trump rather than state an affirmative policy case for Kamala?

Or is it just a very conservative country?

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Keywords: Donald Trump, 2024 election results, 2024 election, 2024 campaign, fascism, authoritarianism, deportations, migrants, immigration crisis, tariffs, trade, age, elderly, Ukraine, Gaza, Israel, Democrats, blame, House, Senate, House races, Senate Races, Hollywood, celebrities, lawfare, indictments,convictions

Civics 2023

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Ted Rall

Clinton was impeached over lying about oral sex, Trump was impeached twice, Biden will likely be impeached soon and Trump faces 78 felony counts on various rounds of charges. Lawfare as political combat has become normalized to the point that, in the future, elections will matter less than the courts to politicians.

After Impeachment, Clinton Paved the Way for Trump

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Ted Rall

            The laws of political physics, it seemed, had been reversed.

            The president had been exposed as a pathological liar and a serial cheater. The butt of relentless jokes on television comedy shows and online, his reputation and legacy in tatters, he endured the ultimate opprobrium a federal official can face under the American constitutional system, impeachment, as well as the worst indignity possible for a lawyer, disbarment.

            The president, of course, was Bill Clinton. The year was 1998. But just when it seemed that he was doomed to slink off into the humiliation of single-digit approval ratings and Richard Nixon-esque oblivion, the opposite happened. Despite Monica Lewinsky and “it depends on the meaning of is” and impeachment, Democrats didn’t abandon him. To the contrary, they came to his defense.

Senate Democrats refused to ratify impeachment with a formal conviction. Liberal voters, including many whose support for Clinton had been tepid at best, rallied around a president they thought had been unfairly and excessively targeted by a partisan independent counsel, Ken Starr. They didn’t care that Clinton, an attorney, had lied under oath in a legal proceeding over a credible sexual harassment allegation. Republicans, they believed, had weaponized the legal system and the constitutional process over a minor personal matter in order to kneecap the leader of their party and, by extension, discredit liberalism as a whole.

            As the impeachment process dragged on, Clinton’s team deployed political jujitsu embodied by Hillary’s description of the crisis as having been caused not by her husband’s affair with Lewinsky or his lying about it under oath, but by vicious Republicans and their “vast right-wing conspiracy.” Clinton’s approval ratings soared to 70%, an all-time high. “Clinton’s resilient popularity presents a puzzle,” Pew Research’s Molly Sonner and Clyde Wilcox of Georgetown University wrote in 1999. “Why, in the midst of a tawdry scandal, were his approval ratings so high?”

            Now Democrats are asking themselves similar questions about Donald Trump, whose approval ratings among Republicans have increased following each round of criminal indictments, like a Hydra that grows several heads to replace each one you cut off. Republicans aren’t ditching Trump. They love him more than ever. To the New York Times, “These series of falling dominoes—call it the indictment effect—can be measured in ways that reveal much about the state of the Republican Party.”

            “The rally around the flag is not a new phenomenon in American politics, but Donald Trump has certainly taken it to a new level,” Tony Fabrizio, a GOP pollster who works for Trump’s super PAC, told the Times.

            Perhaps. But it was Bill Clinton, who socialized with Trump for decades, who first demonstrated that a clever politician, no matter how beleaguered or which party he leads, can frame specific charges against his person as a partisan attack against all his supporters. For Democrats in 1999, Clinton may have been a jerk—but he was their jerk, and they would be damned before they let the Republicans, whom they despised, destroy him.

Republicans in 2023 are playing out a similar dynamic.

Unlike Trump, who never admits fault, Clinton issued half-hearted apologies of the “I’m sorry you’re upset” variety. “I take my responsibility for my part in all of this,” he said after conceding that, after having declared that he had not had sex with “that woman, Monica Lewinsky,” in fact, he had had oral sex. “That is all I can do. Now is the time—in fact, it is past time—to move on,” he argued. To Republicans’ disgust, Clinton’s plea resonated with Democrats. MoveOn.org, the liberal policy group and PAC, began as an email petition group that asked Congress to “Censure President Clinton and Move On to Pressing Issues Facing the Nation.” It was one of the first political viral sensations on the Internet.

            By any objective standard, the Republicans’ impeachment effort backfired, beginning with the 1998 midterms. “The Republicans were all full of themselves going into the election,” then–Democratic Representative Martin Frost of Texas, who chaired the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, told The Atlantic. “They expected to pick up 20 or 30 seats.” They got clobbered.

Most analysts cite 2000 Democratic nominee Al Gore’s reluctance to embrace Clinton and understand that he had been rehabilitated as one of the vice president’s major campaign mistakes; indeed, Clinton might have won a third term had he been allowed to run again. In 2001 Clinton left office with the joint-highest approval rating of any modern president, along with FDR and Ronald Reagan. He became a sought-after speaker and eminence grise within his party. A recent YouGov poll finds that 49% of respondents like him, compared to 32% dislikes.

            There are numerous differences between Clinton’s sex-tinged scandal and Trump’s legal challenges. But the reactions of their respective partisans—circle the wagons, stand by their man, ignore the facts, screw the other party—are strikingly analogous.

(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.)

Hail to the Jailbird President

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Ted Rall

All Hail the Prisoner-in-Chief | Ted Rall's Rallblog

            Each time Donald Trump has been indicted, his poll numbers went up—among Republican voters who closed ranks around him in response to what they decried as politically motivated “lawfare.” Now he enjoys a commanding lead for the GOP nomination.

            Of course, it’s one thing to win the nomination of your party, an exercise that requires motivating the hardcore partisans who form the ideological base. To prevail in a general election, conventional wisdom says, you’ll need to appeal to moderates and swing voters. Democrats pivot right after their summer convention; Republicans don’t pivot left as much as they pull back their red meat appeals to the right.

            That said, corporate media seems determined not to plumb the depths of  cluelessness-driven embarrassment they displayed in 2016, when the New York Times told readers on election morn that Hillary had an 85% chance of winning. “Trump is not only in a historically strong position for a nonincumbent to win the Republican nomination, but he is in a better position to win the general election than at any point during the 2020 cycle and almost at any point during the 2016 cycle,” CNN reports.

            Still, the question remains. Can the ultimate base-dependent candidate reach beyond his MAGA partisans as he seeks reelection?

            Two factors suggest that he can.

            One is a data point: A June 21st Quinnipiac poll found that 62% of voters believe that the Department of Justice has been weaponized against Trump and that the federal charges against him for mishandling classified documents, for which he faces more than 400 years in prison, are politically motivated. Biden and the Democratic Party probably don’t even admit it to themselves—but that includes a lot of Democratic voters. 28% of Democrats think Trump’s legal troubles are more about politics than his wrongdoing.

            And here’s a major warning sign: 65% of independents agree.

            Some of those Democrats think Trump’s the victim of a witch hunt—and they love it. Anything to get rid of him works for them. An AP-NORC poll from April found that 57% of respondents thought Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s charges against Trump for falsifying business records were politically-motivated; the same percent (not the same cohort) approved.

            And yet—those independents. Neither red nor Blue No Matter Who, a good portion of them disapprove of the way Trump has been targeted. Even among the Democrats, some want Trump gone while not liking the way he’s been forced to play subpoena whack-a-mole. As the charges and hearings pile up, those feelings can only increase in number and intensity.

            The other factor is a major component of America’s national character; we love us an underdog. We’ve subscribed to the  underdog myth “ever since 13 scrappy colonies went up against the largest empire in the modern world. The beauty of America is everybody can think of themselves as an underdog in some way,” historian Ed Ayers told NPR in 2018.

            Brian Balogh, another historian, added: “We have people like Donald Trump, who has styled himself as an underdog. I mean in fact, Donald Trump came from quite a wealthy background, but he’s somebody who feels no matter what kind of advantage he has in politics, the whole system is rigged against him. I don’t think you can understand Donald Trump unless you understand that the vast majority of people who voted for [Hillary] Clinton came from counties where the economy is contributing a disproportionate amount to the GDP, and those who voted for Trump came from counties where, where they live is underrepresented in America’s economy. They are literally underdogs.”

            Swarming Trump with civil lawsuits, state and federal indictments has fed into Trump’s longstanding narrative that this heir to a multimillion-dollar real-estate empire who attended an Ivy League school and hobnobbed with starlets and presidents is actually a victim of a cabal of privileged coconspirators, and not merely a sad-sack punching bag but a noble warrior fighting more for everyday people than himself. Joe and Jane Sixpack don’t stow military plans in their bathroom or pay hush money to porn stars or rip off aspiring college kids or try to overturn elections, yet they empathize more with the perpetrator of these deeds than the authority figures attempting to hold him to account. Truly, it’s a political miracle.

            What these prosecutors don’t seem to know (and probably shouldn’t care about) is that we, the people, hate their guts much more than we look down on the crass self-dealing and personal corruption of someone like Trump or, for that matter, Biden. Everyone has gotten a ticket or a tax bill they thought was unfair. Everyone has felt disrespected by a cop and unheard by a judge and screwed over by the government and, in general, the justice system. (My favorite relevant aphorism: we don’t have a justice system, we have a legal system.) Americans disapprove of the Supreme Court by a 2-to-1 margin, 41% think civil courts are unfair and 80% want substantial reform to the criminal justice system.

            For some voters, the choice won’t come down to Trump and Biden. It’ll be Trump versus The System writ large. If I were Trump, even if I were sitting behind bars on election day—especially—I’d like my odds.

(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.)

Rise of the Spite-o-cracy

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Ted Rall

Democrats who are currently prosecuting Donald Trump promised in their election campaigns to do so. Now Trump is promising to do the same thing to Biden if he gets elected. Here comes an endless cycle of spite-based lawfare.

Pick One Box

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Ted Rall

Facing multiple criminal indictments, Republican frontrunner Donald Trump might be in prison by election day 2024. Joe Biden, the Democratic incumbent and party frontrunner, is currently older than 96% of all Americans, a number that will only become bleaker by next year. It’s hard to argue that American democracy is alive and well. Which box will you choose?

20 Years to Life—in the White House

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Ted Rall

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.

For God’s Sake, Give Trump a Plea Deal

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Ted Rall

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.)

 

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