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Item one: The coming Trump indictment

Finally, after decades, the law might be catching up with Donald Trump. The invitation to him to testify next week from Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg signals, according to many reports, that Bragg’s investigation into the Stormy Daniels matter is winding down and that an indictment of Trump may be imminent. The indictment would be for breaking election and business record laws by allegedly paying $130,000 in hush money to Daniels and subsequently covering it up.

 

Not his biggest crime, by a long shot. I’d rank it about fifth at best (fomenting an insurrection, accepting foreign help during a campaign, ordering a state official to “find” 11,780 votes, all the tax stuff over many decades, for starters). But even so, a felony.

 

Trump denies it, of course. He claims he had no interest in Stormy Daniels (whom he refers to as “Horseface”). It’s all a “Witch-Hunt,” like all the other hoaxes. His statement mentioned George Soros, the “Radical Left media,” Hunter Biden, and violent crime (although not the violent crimes allegedly committed by him, as in against his first wife and E. Jean Carroll).

 

The law grinds slowly. Politics, however, like Niagara Falls, never stops. So what are the politics of this? It likely has a marginally positive impact for Trump in a GOP presidential primary. It gives him another target, something else to whine about. I doubt his opponents will really be able to attack him over it; they’ll just sound like they’re defending the corrupt, Soros-backed, radical-left deep state.

 

One little-examined question, however, is whether an indicted Trump draws an anti-Trump Republican primary vote to the polls. For example, there are about 5.3 million registered Republicans in Florida. In the 2016 primary (the most recent competitive one), about 2.3 million people voted. That’s not bad, for a primary. Still, it means 57 percent of Republicans didn’t vote, and we can reasonably assume, because all the political science says so, that the primary voters were more extreme ideologically than nonvoters. So if half a million or so less-MAGA-oriented Republicans come out in a primary to vote against Trump, he loses. He maybe loses in that state to Ron DeSantis anyway, but the basic formula repeats elsewhere.

 

Anyway. Just reading his crazy statement is a chilling reminder of what life was like when we had to pay attention to that maniac every day. He’s just the most poisonous person ever. What a joyous day it would be if he were actually hauled off to a jail cell.

 

Item two: “I hate him passionately”

 

So now we know a little more: On January 4, 2021, Tucker Carlson texted someone: “We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights. I truly can’t wait. I hate him passionately.”

 

He went on to display this passion to his viewers by … promoting the Big Lie night after night. Presumably, the dark event that happened two days after that text sickened him, right? After all, it was an insurrection fomented by a man he hated passionately!

 

As we know, Carlson has now spent the subsequent 26 months promoting the idea that the insurrection was just another ho-hum day, never more toxically than this week, when he aired the video footage that Kevin McCarthy spoon-fed him so they could all promote an alternate reality. I watched Carlson’s show Wednesday night, when he actually referred to January 6 as—are you ready? I mean, are you really ready for this?—“peaceful, orderly, and meek.” Wouldn’t you know it, he forgot to note that 518 people have so far pleaded guilty to the peaceful, orderly, and meek behavior they engaged in that day. Outrageous as that was, Carlson didn’t really put up much of a case. The topic didn’t even take up the whole hour. By 8:33 p.m., he was on to lying about Ukraine, and then the show wound down with an interview with Russell Brand.

 

More broadly, Fox is in increasingly deep shit. The Dominion Voting Systems trial starts next month in Delaware. Fox, it’s been reported, is unlikely to settle. This should be the greatest courtroom drama since Perry Mason wrangled that confession out of a young Daniel J. Travanti. One presumes that Dominion has held back some of its best stuff (portions of the released material have been redacted). My father was a trial lawyer, and whenever I used to see something on the news and say, “That guy’s guilty as sin,” he would always rejoin: “Michael, you can’t really know unless you’re in the courtroom.” So remember that. But—and I daresay even Dad would agree, certainly on ideological grounds—if what we’ve seen so far isn’t evidence of intent to lie and mislead, I don’t know what is. I hope Dominion has great lawyers.

 

Item three: Jim Jordan goes pfffft

 

The horrible new House deep state committee, chaired by the horrible Jim Jordan and tasked with the horrible mission of unmasking radical Marxist FBI conspiracy theories, is off to a predictably horrible start. There’s reporting in The Washington Post this morning that some Republicans and “hard-right intellectual” types are dissatisfied with the committee’s progress so far. Thursday’s hearing was a train wreck.

 

The star witnesses were journalists Matt Taibbi and Michael Shellenberger, the dynamic duo who were spoon-fed (lots of spoon-feeding going on!) the Twitter files by Elon Musk. I didn’t watch, but the Morning Joe condensation on Friday made Taibbi in particular look ridiculous under questioning from Debbie Wasserman Schultz. The Florida congresswoman threw an old quote at Taibbi to the effect that once a journalist is taking handouts, he’s not really doing legit journalism anymore; she asked him if he stood by that quote; he smiled sheepishly as he paused for a few pregnant seconds to mull his options before settling on “yes.” It was humiliating to watch, let alone be the target of.

 

Meanwhile, there’s some additional grousing among Republicans about James Comer, the chairman of the oversight committee. Mind you, none of these criticisms are that Jordan and Comer are bonkers conspiracy theorists who are trying to prove things that never happened and thus are bound to end up looking preposterous. They are instead that the two aren’t being aggressive enough, focused enough, moving fast enough, that sort of thing. Said one hard-right intellectual: “Here’s the issue: What independent investigation did Jim Jordan do in advance of [Thursday]? He took an adapted screenplay from journalists’ tweet thread. Jordan should hand off the committee to a lawmaker who has the time to do it. This needs to be a big undertaking and they need a strategy and a dedicated, focused staff. They need to be dogs on a bone.”

 

Comer, meanwhile, continues to delight: He and Marjorie Taylor Greene are organizing a field trip for members of Congress to visit some of the January 6 “political prisoners” in jail.

 

And we have to take these people seriously, at least for the time being.

This week’s quiz: Life of pie … Keeping with the general category of food and history: fun facts about pizza

 

I’ve been buying those cauliflower crusts lately. They’re fine. Just bought (and am awaiting delivery of) my first chicken-based crusts. Go ahead and laugh; but check out those crazy-low carbs and sugars. Feedback to fightingwords@tnr.com. 

 

—Michael Tomasky, editor 

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