How We Got To The Precipice Of A Trump II Presidency
INSIDE: Elon Musk ... David Clements ... Charlie Kirk
A lot of things happened. Here are some of the things. This is TPM’s Morning Memo.
What Might Have Been
As we head into the final weekend before the most momentous election in U.S. history, we got a faint echo Thursday of what might have been.
Special Counsel Jack Smith submitted a new filing in the Jan. 6 case against Donald Trump. The particulars of it hardly matter at this point, but for the record it was a response to Trump’s belated challenge of the legality of Smith’s appointment.
In reminding the court how the case arrived at this point, Smith wrote:
In November 2022, it was known publicly that the defendant was the subject of two ongoing federal criminal investigations. The first investigation involved potential criminal violations in connection with the 2020 presidential election, and the second investigation involved the defendant’s alleged retention of classified documents at his residence in Mar-a-Lago and related obstruction of justice. On November 15, 2022, while both investigations were pending, the defendant declared his candidacy for the presidency in 2024.
It’s a sobering reminder of how Trump’s aggressive strategy of delay succeeded in avoiding accountability for his alleged criminal conduct. The Mar-a-Lago case has been dismissed by the egregious U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon, and the Jan. 6 case has been knee-capped by the similarly egregious six-justice right-wing supermajority of the Supreme Court. Even his conviction in New York state has been called into question by the Supreme Court and his sentencing delayed until after the election.
And so it is that we head into the election of our lives unable to rely on the rule of law to dispatch a flagrant criminal like Donald Trump. He has seized on the opportunity to position himself to retake the White House and then make the criminal cases against him go away for good. But he’s done more than that. So much more.
In barnstorming the country threatening to uproot the Constitution, exact retribution against his perceived foes, and use the military against the “enemy within,” among other threats and fomentations, Trump has promised to reorder civic life in an authoritarian image, undermining the rule of law not just for him but for all Americans. If he wins, those promises become a mandate.
If he loses, the criminal cases against him are revived. The rule of law has a chance to be resurrected and hardened against future attack. The worst case scenario will have been averted, but the work to keep this from ever happening again will have just begun.
The Disinformation Environment
CNN: Election officials are outmatched by Elon Musk’s misinformation machine
WaPo: Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger warned that a video purporting to show Haitians claiming that they illegally voted for Kamala Harris is fake and likely the product of a Russian troll farm.
WSJ: Foreign Adversaries Target Specific Demographics in Attempt to Sway U.S. Election
Election Threats Watch
LawFare: David Clements: The Evangelist of Election Refusal
NBC News: ‘There’s no white knight coming’: Federal authorities will face limits responding to 2024 election lies
TPM’s Khaya Himmelman: Swing State Election Officials Are Preemptively Shutting Down Rogue Clerks
By The Numbers
A series of new Marist College polls of the Blue Wall states is out. These are all likely voter numbers:
President:
Senate:
PA-Sen: Bob Casey 50%, David McCormick 48%
MI-Sen: Elissa Slotkin 52%, Mike Rogers 46%
WI-Sen: Tammy Baldwin 51%, Eric Hovde 48%
Tea-Leaf Reading
Data points, not predictions:
Doug Sosnik: Why Trump Has a More Plausible Path to the Presidency, in 19 Maps
Politico: Trump lagging in early vote with seniors in Pennsylvania
Aaron Blake: Polls show Harris with big lead, ranging from 19 to 29 points, among those who have already voted.
2024 Ephemera
Politico: Kamala Harris has more than twice as many donors as Trump’s campaign apparatus.
WaPo: MAP: Where millions of Americans have cast ballots during early voting
Politico: European Green parties implore Jill Stein to withdraw her candidacy.
A Deeper Dive On What SCOTUS IS Up To In Election Cases
Georgetown law professor Steve Vladeck was so appalled by the Supreme Court’s intervention this week in the Virginia purge of supposed non-citizen voters that he’s out with a special edition of his weekly newsletter:
[W]hether you like the bottom line the justices reached or not, these kinds of cases are the precise disputes in which all of us—state election officials; voters; and everyone in between, including the Court itself—would be better off with more clarity as to why the Supreme Court did what it did. For reasons sketched out below, I’m skeptical that such an opinion would’ve been persuasive; but it sure would’ve been better than what we got.
Stay tuned for the Supreme Court’s pending decision in a election case in Pennsylvania.
Trump Sues CBS News In One-Judge Texas District
Donald Trump filed a specious lawsuit against CBS News, claiming it interfered in the presidential election by editing a 60 Minutes interview Kamala Harris. Trump filed the lawsuit in the Texas district where it is assured of being assigned to the sole federal judge there: the notoriously reactionary Trump appointee Matthew Kacsmaryk.
Quote Of The Day
Jamelle Bouie, on the historical consequences of a Trump II presidency:
Free of the guardrails that kept him in place the first time, affirmed by the Supreme Court and backed by allies and apparatchiks in the conservative movement, Trump will merge the office of the presidency with himself. He will shake it from its moorings in the Constitution and rebuild it as an instrument of his will, wielded for his friends and against his enemies. In doing so, he will erode the democratic assumptions that undergird our current constitutional order. And he will have the total loyalty of a Republican Party that itself is twisting and abusing the counter-majoritarian features of the American system to undermine and unravel democracy in the states it controls.
LOL
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Prof. Vladeck's excoriation of the latest Scotus outrage points out laudably the dangers of Court interference in ELECTION issues seemingly beyond its reach, with the PA Supreme Court's "naked ballot" decision in its crosshairs. What we are seeing here is the likelihood of tRump/GOP "They cheated!" lawsuits flowing up to Scotus as election results show tRump losing, and the danger that the "partisan hack" majority, in tRump's view, can somehow contrive to either award tRump a win when he clearly lost, or delegitimates a Harris win by ruling in favor of GOP suits that close the gap but doesn't take a majority EV win away.
Whatever, but the Court has signaled loudly and clearly that they are open to taking on election cases normally within the province of state courts, as in the matter of *Bush v Gore*, and will try to interfere with "time, place, and manner" of state jurisdiction over elections. Prof. Vladeck is spot on when he noted that the VA decision, and possibly a PA ruling, come with NO convincing explanation...Scotus decides because it can, end of.
Unless I missed it — maybe! — David didn’t quite actually explain how we got to this point. So two fun facts I’m going to keep kind of simple because details would make one feel even worse than today’s post does. In no particular order.
The vine is that we’re facing a fork in the road this election. But maybe we passed that fork when the Democrats decided 30+ years ago that they wanted to be less alienating to Republican special interests. I’ve touched on this often so need to go over it again now.
More relevant as to how Trump can be elected: most voters are committed to their party. Once Republican primary voters picked Trump in 2016 and he was elected, he became the party and vice versa. If one’s a Republican voter, one’s a Trump voter full stop. (Not a defense for voting for Trump; there is none.)