THE MEDIA IS EXALTING TRUMP BY TELLING US HOW MUCH HE'S BEING HUMBLED

In The New York Times a few days ago, Maggie Haberman told us that Donald Trump is being humbled by his experiences in criminal court:

For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little....

The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Mr. Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness, one he rode from a reality-television studio set to the White House.

...the shared sense among many of his advisers is that the process may damage him as much as a guilty verdict.

Now that the trial is underway, Jessica Bennett of the Times tells us the same thing:

... as Trump’s lawyers argued in opening statements, Trump is not merely the former president and presumptive Republican nominee. “He is also a man, he is a husband and a father,” one of them said. “He’s a person, just like you and just like me.” It was an attempt to humanize him — and yet all I could think, in that dreary courtroom, with a sour smell and a broken overhead clock, was that this is going to drive Trump mad.

For the next six weeks, four days a week, seven hours a day, including meals and coffee and bathroom breaks, Trump will be treated like an ordinary New Yorker, forced to sit in a drab 17-story municipal building.

Inside the court, the chairs were uncomfortable. It was so cold that reporters were bundled in heavy coats and scarves. (Trump wasn’t wrong when he complained, “It’s freezing.”) The speckled linoleum floors were drab, the fluorescent lighting was harsh, the rumpled shades were drawn. It was hard to see and hear. The monotony made my eyes droop....

Court let out early Monday, after the judge explained that an alternate juror had a dental emergency. You could just imagine Trump seething at the thought of his time dictated by a root canal.

Last week, Marc Caputo, one of the anti-Trumpers at The Bulwark, tweeted this:

Unable to speak when he wants and lacking a steady stream of Diet Coke, his favorite drink served to him constantly by staff at Mar-a-Lago, a decaffeinated Trump is now on Sleep Watch by the nation’s media in court https://t.co/D2xLMOnr6T

— Marc Caputo (@MarcACaputo) April 16, 2024

Today, Caputo writes:

TRUMP HAS MADE NO SECRET of his annoyance at being stuck in court. Forced to sit quietly and deprived of his steady stream of caffeinated Diet Cokes, which at Mar-a-Lago are served to him with regularity by ever-attendant waitstaff, Trump has been caught micronapping at the defense table.

“I’m catching up on my fucking sleep ’cause I’m bored,” he told one source.

If I despised Trump as much as The Bulwark's writers and editors say they do, I wouldn't have included that "catching up on my fucking sleep" quote, which is Trumpworld spin designed to portray the boss exactly the way he wants to be portrayed: as an angry alpha male who's too important for this kind of treatment. But even without the quote, I'm afraid that all this coverage, far from humiliating Trump, actually exalts him.

To make an obvious point, when an ordinary person is on trial, even in a high-profile case, we don't dwell on how uncomfortable the chairs and the building temperature make the defendant feel. We don't even do much of this for famous defendants -- did anyone ever tell us what O.J. Simpson's favorite mid-morning pick-me-up was, and add how noteworthy it was that he was being deprived of it?

Many people go to court and are forced to comply by courtroom rules. (I could add that many more people go to work and are forced to comply with workplace rules.) When the press tells readers that enforcement of courtroom rules is extraordinary in Trump's case, the message is that Trump is extraordinary.

It's probably unreasonable to expect reporters to avoid this kind of coverage, and obviously their audiences want it. But maybe the press needs to remember that what would really make Trump seem no better than an ordinary citizen would be treating him like an ordinary citizen -- in others words, like a person who just has to suck it up and accept the way things are done in court.

THEY'RE NOT HELPING YOU, DONNIE, BECAUSE THEY THINK YOU'RE GOD

Poor Donald Trump -- he wants another January 6 outside the courtroom, but his fans aren't delivering, as The New York Times reports:

Donald J. Trump was evidently not happy with what he saw out the window of his chauffeured S.U.V. as he rode through Lower Manhattan on Monday morning for the beginning of opening arguments in his first criminal trial.

The scene that confronted him as he approached the dingy courthouse at 100 Centre Street was underwhelming. Across the street, at Collect Pond Park, the designated site for protesters during the trial, only a handful of Trump supporters had gathered, and the number would not grow much throughout the morning....

Mr. Trump had tried to gin up something noisier. Shortly after 7 a.m., he posted on his social media website that “America Loving Protesters should be allowed to protest at the front steps of Courthouses” and he followed this lament with a call for his supporters to “GO OUT AND PEACEFULLY PROTEST. RALLY BEHIND MAGA. SAVE OUR COUNTRY!”

Trump has argued that there's a double standard in how pro-Trump protesters are being treated in Downtown Manhattan and how pro-Palestinian protesters are being treated uptown:



I live near Columbia. The area around the campus actually is closed up like a drum, with police all over the place -- and yet there are still demonstrators, on and off campus. The courthouse where Trump is being tried isn't on lockdown, as the Times story tells us:

The area was not, in fact, completely closed down. The courthouse has remained open to the public, including spectators who want to attend the trial, pool cameras in the hallway — and even the sidewalk in front of the courthouse has remained open to pedestrian traffic.

So why isn't Trump getting backup from his fan base?

It could be because "the fever is breaking," but I doubt that. Trump's poll numbers vs. Joe Biden have slipped in recent weeks, but the race is still effectively tied (and given the GOP's Electoral College advantage, that would still mean a Trump victory if the election were held today).

One possible reason is that the January 6 prosecutions have persuaded many in MAGA Nation that they'll be arrested and thrown into the "gulag" if they protest on Trump's behalf, even peacefully. When Trump knew his first indictment was imminent and called for protests, quite a few of his supporters said they didn't want to protest, out of fear that they'd fall into a "trap."

In addition, I think many people on the right, especially those who live outside the Northeast, are terrified of New York City, which they've been told is a crime-ridden dystopian hellhole. They wouldn't dare enter the city without their guns, and they know they'd be in legal jeopardy if they packed heat here the way they do when they go to the local 7-11 to pick up some eggs.

But I think there's one more reason for the lack of pro-Trump protesters: They don't think they need to help him because he's so powerful.

This is Trump as right-wingers see him:

While he's in the courtroom, this fake courtroom sketch is wish fulfillment for quite a few people on the right:

you may not like it, but this is what making america great again looks like pic.twitter.com/7y1fCNj4f7

— Freckled Liberty 🔥 (@FreckledLiberty) April 19, 2024

And even the idea that Trump might go to prison generates fantasies of his ultimate triumph:

Democrats think prison will stop trump but after he wins and pardons himself you'll have THIS to deal with pic.twitter.com/iEZaxVvddw

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) September 3, 2023

If this is how you see Trump, why would you think he'd ever need your help?

Even the fans who aren't deluded by these "studly Trump" memes are likely to believe that they'll simply vote for him in November and all their troubles will be over. This is a delusion that isn't limited to the right -- in retrospect, it appears that many Barack Obama voters disengaged from politics after he won the 2008 election, on the assumption that he had everything under control. What's odd is that this might be happening on the right while Trump is a private citizen.

You know who doesn't think a studly hero will save them? The pro-Palestinian protesters on college campuses. Politicians in both parties disagree with them, so they're trying to make change happen all by themselves. The Trumpers think they can just kick back and let Don do it.

APPARENTLY IT WOULDN'T BE A PROBLEM IF THE ANTI-SEMITES AROUND COLUMBIA WERE REPUBLICANS THREATENING DEMOCRATS

The New York Times has assigned young reporters to cover the protests around Columbia University right now, so this story is much more nuanced than it would be if the usual middle-aged Times hacks were involved:

Days after Columbia University’s president testified before Congress, the atmosphere on campus remained fraught on Sunday, shaken by pro-Palestinian protests that have drawn the attention of the police and the concern of some Jewish students.

Over the weekend, the student-led demonstrations on campus also attracted separate, more agitated protests by demonstrators who seemed to be unaffiliated with the university just outside Columbia’s gated campus in Upper Manhattan....

Some of those protests took a dark turn on Saturday evening, leading to the harassment of some Jewish students who were targeted with antisemitic vitriol. The verbal attacks left some of the 5,000 Jewish students at Columbia fearful for their safety....

But Jewish students who are supporting the pro-Palestinian demonstrations on campus said they felt solidarity, not a sense of danger, even as they denounced the acts of antisemitism.

“There’s so many young Jewish people who are like a vital part” of the protests, said Grant Miner, a Jewish graduate student at Columbia who is part of a student coalition calling on Columbia to divest from companies connected to Israel.

And in a statement, that group said, “We are frustrated by media distractions focusing on inflammatory individuals who do not represent us” and added that the group’s members “firmly reject any form of hate or bigotry.”

This has become a major story, so I imagine some older Times reporters will bigfoot their way onto the Columbia beat, and the coverage will become more one-sided in its denunciations of Israel's critics.

There does seem to be some nasty and violent rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) on the periphery of campus, as this report from Columbia Spectator notes:

Pro-Israel counterprotesters stood on the Sundial on Saturday evening waving Israeli and U.S. flags and playing Israeli and Jewish music and the U.S. national anthem from a loudspeaker. In front of the Sundial, an individual held a sign reading “Al-Qasam’s Next Targets” with an arrow pointing at the protesters. Al-Qassam is the military wing of Hamas....

On Broadway near the 116th Street subway station, protesters chanted, “We say justice, you say how? Burn Tel Aviv to the ground,” according to a video posted by Students Supporting Israel President Eden Yadegar....

Parker De Dekér, CC ’27, told Spectator that on Wednesday night, when he was walking by Lerner Hall wearing a yarmulke, someone sitting at the tables outside of Lerner shouted, “You keep on testifying, you fucking Jew.” When he exited campus, he removed his yarmulke....

De Dekér continued that as he was helping a friend move his luggage through Lerner Hall on Thursday evening while wearing a yarmulke, one individual said, “We are so happy that you Zionists are finally leaving campus,” and another said, “You wouldn’t have to leave if you weren’t a supporter of genocide.”

On Friday afternoon, De Dekér said that while leaving campus and getting into an Uber, an individual on Amsterdam Avenue shouted an antisemitic slur at him, telling him to “Keep on walking.” De Dekér has since decided to leave campus for the time being and is staying with a friend outside of New York state.

The directly menacing language addressed to people like De Dekér is a clear threat. But some of the fantasy scenarios of violent retribution sound like the sort of thing Republicans get away with all the time in this culture. As Amanda Marcotte notes, here's Marjorie Taylor Greene wishing America would use antiaircraft weapons on unarmed migrants crossing America's Southern border:

Israel has some of the best unmanned defense systems in the world.

I’ve previously voted to fund space lasers for Israel’s defense.

America needs to take our national security seriously and deserves the same type of defense for our border that Israel has and proudly uses. pic.twitter.com/oDeDqTXvQQ

— Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene🇺🇸 (@RepMTG) April 18, 2024

And then there's Tom Cotton:

Sen. Tom Cotton, R-Ark., appeared to encourage people to murder anti-war protesters. If protesters stop traffic, he tweeted, "take matters into your own hands to get them out of the way." This echoes not just many years of far-right rhetoric applauding vehicular homicide, but the 2017 murder of anti-racism protester Heather Heyer at the hands of a white supremacist. Cotton tried to clean up his statement by later claiming he just meant dragging protesters out of the way, which is still assault.

And Kari Lake:

... failed gubernatorial candidate and current Republican candidate for the Arizona Senate seat Kari Lake recently told a crowd, "We are going to put on the armor of God. And maybe strap on a Glock on the side of us just in case." ...

This is hardly the first time Lake has made joking-but-not-really threats of violence. Last June, she told a crowd she had a "message tonight for Merrick Garland, and Jack Smith, and Joe Biden" and went on to warn: "Most of us are card-carrying members of the NRA. That's not a threat, that's a public service announcement."

The right has been like this for decades, with few consequences. Remember this from 1994?

Just days after [Senator Jesse] Helms, a Republican from North Carolina, created a furor by saying that President Clinton was not up to the job of Commander in Chief, he told The News and Observer, a newspaper in Raleigh: "Mr. Clinton better watch out if he comes down here. He'd better have a bodyguard."

Mr. Helms said soldiers disliked President Clinton because he had avoided service during the Vietnam War, supported homosexuals in the military and had reduced military spending.

And then there was Ann Coulter, who told an interviewer in 2002, “My only regret with Timothy McVeigh is he did not go to the New York Times Building.” And, of course, there was Ted Nugent:

In 2007, he said the following during a concert: "Obama, he's a piece of shit. I told him to suck on my machine gun. Hey Hillary [Clinton], you might want to ride one of these into the sunset, you worthless bitch."

The people in and around Columbia who are genuinely anti-Semitic and menacing just need to pick their targets better. If they'd learn to direct their threats at Democrats, and at institutions perceived as part of the Great Liberal Conspiracy, they could say whatever they want.

WE'RE PREMATURELY DECLARING VICTORY OVER TRUMP AGAIN

For the thousandth time, we've begun to think we've really got Trump this time! David Frum writes:

For nine years, Trump has dominated the Republican Party.... Enough of the Republican base supported him. Everybody else either fell in line, retired from politics, or quit the party.

... Trump won almost every fight that mattered....

On aid to Ukraine, Trump got his way for 16 months. When Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, they approved four separate aid requests for Ukraine, totaling $74 billion. As soon as Trump’s party took control of the House, in January 2023, the aid stopped. Every Republican officeholder understood: Those who wished to show loyalty to Trump must side against Ukraine....

[But now] Trump’s party in Congress has rebelled against him—and not on a personal payoff to some oddball Trump loyalist, but on one of Trump’s most cherished issues, his siding with Russia against Ukraine....

He has deflated to the point where he could no longer thwart Ukraine aid in Congress. Ukraine won, Trump lost. That may be a repeating pattern in the year ahead.

Reading this, you might imagine that the entire House GOP delegation has been afraid to support Ukraine aid until this week, out of an unwillingness to risk Trump's wrath. But in July 2023, a majority of House Republicans voted to reject bills proposed by Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene that would have blocked military aid to Ukraine. Two months later, a majority of House Republicans voted to retain Ukraine aid in a Pentagon appropriations bill. For quite a while, Republicans linked Ukraine aid to the passage of an immigration bill, and so the aid never passed, but it was perfectly acceptable to be a Republican in Congress and express support for Ukraine aid -- it's not like believing that Trump should have been convicted in one of his impeachment trials, which is a red line Republicans have crossed only at their peril. It's a big deal that Speaker Mike Johnson allowed a vote on the Ukraine aid bill, but support was there. Not every Republican is a Putin bootlicker yet.

Trump opponents increasingly seem to believe that President Biden has this election won -- at the betting site PredictIt, Biden leads Trump 54%-44%, after a rapid improvement in his fortunes over the past few months:

And this Maggie Haberman piece in The New York Times conveys the impression that Trump simply can't be Trump anymore now that his New York criminal trial has begun:

For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little....

The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Mr. Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness, one he rode from a reality-television studio set to the White House.

...the shared sense among many of his advisers is that the process may damage him as much as a guilty verdict. The process, they believe, is its own punishment.

Trump's superfans, of course, think he's Jesus, so a process they regard as persecution will only confirm them in that belief. Will swing voters peel away as Trump is accused of wrongdoing every day, and is trapped in a courtroom rather than out attacking enemies? Maybe, but I'm not sure that's how this works when you're dealing with a criminal who has a big persona. Think of Trump as an organized crime figure -- a Mafia don or a Latin American druglord. Do guys like that really seem diminshed by the process of being on trial? They look diminished when they're convicted and jailed, but until then, they look like people who are important enough to be tried in a courtroom full of reporters. Trump in an orange jumpsuit would seem diminished. Right now, he seems like a dangerous animal in a cage -- restrained, but still a threat.

Sure, this might really be the beginning of the end for Trump. On the other hand, we've been promised the beginning of the end so many times over the past nine years that we ought to be skeptical. I'll start to believe the Trump era is ending when Biden leads in most polls by at least 5 points, enough to overcome the GOP's built-in Electoral College advantage. We're not there yet. We're not really close.

WAR! WHAT IS IT GOOD FOR? (GETTING REELECTED!)

Benjamin Netanyahu's war strategy is well on its way to achieving its primary goal: preserving the political career of Benjamin Netanyahu. The Jerusalem Post reports:

In two recent surveys, the Likud Party and Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu have received the highest levels of support since the Oct. 7 massacre. In the first [poll], conducted by Maariv, ... Likud now holds 21 seats, a peak since the [war] began on October 7....

The survey also highlights a tightening race for Prime Minister, with Benny Gantz receiving 42% of the support compared to Benjamin Netanyahu's 37%. The gap between the two has significantly narrowed, with Gantz's lead shrinking from 12% to just 5% over the past week.

According to the Maariv survey, the National Union Party leads with 31 seats....

In a separate but mandated survey by Direct Polls published on Channel 14 this week, a shift in public sentiment shows Gantz's National Union declining sharply, from over 40 seats to just 22. Meanwhile, Likud would garner 26 seats if elections were held today.... Additionally, the coalition parties would have 58 seats versus 52 for the opposition, including 10 seats shared between Ra'am and Hadash-Ta'al.

Let me be cynical: Electorally, it's good to be a leader in wartime, and, at least up to a point, it's better to be a leader in a prolonged war than a brief war that can be described as a success. George H.W. Bush drove the Iraqis from Kuwait, declared victory -- and lost his reelection bid. George W. Bush got mired in Afghanistan and Iraq, never captured or killed Osama bin Laden -- and became the only Republican presidential candidate to win the popular vote in the past 36 years.

Years-long quagmires are bad for politicians -- ask LBJ -- but Bibi is probably at or close to the sweet spot right now. He has two main goals -- saving his own ass and getting Donald Trump elected -- and there's a decent chance he'll achieve both. Everything else is secondary for him.

COULD TRUMP LOSE THE ELECTION BY TRYING TO IMPRESS HIS DEAD FATHER?

In The New York Times, Nate Cohn writes:

Was Trump Benefiting From Being Out of the News?

Donald J. Trump appears to be a stronger candidate than he was four years ago, polling suggests, and not just because a notable number of voters look back on his presidency as a time of relative peace and prosperity.

It’s also because his political liabilities, like his penchant to offend and his legal woes, don’t dominate the news the way they once did.

In the last New York Times/Siena College poll, only 38 percent of voters said they’d been offended by Mr. Trump “recently,” even as more than 70 percent said they had been offended by him at some point....

Similarly, many voters seem to be tuning out his myriad legal challenges. A majority of voters said they thought he had committed federal crimes, but only 27 percent of registered voters in the last Times/Siena poll said they were paying “a lot of attention” to the news about the legal cases against him....

It seems plausible that the lack of attention paid to Mr. Trump contributed to his early strength in the polling....

The Times/Siena poll offers some evidence to support this idea. Mr. Biden has a 95-3 lead among Biden 2020 voters who say they’ve been offended recently by Mr. Trump, while Mr. Trump wins 19 percent of those who say they’ve been offended by him before, but not recently.

Similarly, Mr. Biden leads, 93-5, among Biden ’20 voters paying attention to Mr. Trump’s legal problems, while he gets 78 percent among those who aren’t paying very close attention or less.

If Cohn is right, then Trump will inevitably be hurt by his first criminal trial, because it will lead to a great deal of media coverage portraying Trump in a bad light, regardless of the outcome. Right?

I'm not sure that's a safe assumption. Trump survived his civil trials with strong poll numbers, largely because those trials were rarely the top story in America, or even the top story locally here in New York. A past and possible future president of the United States was charged with rape, defamation, and financial chicanery, and the media mostly yawned.

The media might get bored with his criminal trial as well -- already I can see it slipping from its prominent spot on news organizations' front pages, in favor of Israel's attack on Iran and probably, soon, the new Taylor Swift album. But maybe Trump will keep our eyes focused on him, even if it's to his detriment. He's already showing signs of being an insolent defendant:

It's likely that insolence will hurt Trump's chances for an acquittal, but he can't not do this -- his father drilled into him the notion that the worst possible sin for a man is to be "weak," and he's still trying to please Dad, who's been dead for decades. There's a real possibility that Trump will be even more insolent and obnoxious than he was in his civil trials.

On some level, you can't blame him. This is what impresses his biggest fans. Apart from the fact that the system is clearly afraid to punish him, even when he's clearly violating direct orders from judges, there's the fact that Trump has probably rallied the entire GOP to himself by being a defiant asshole whining about persecution.

But if his antics are worse than before, he might alienate general-election voters who haven't thought about how much of an asshole he is in the past couple of years. Maybe, instead of being a quiet, polite defendant, he'll hurt his poll numbers with obnoxiousness, just because he's desperate to impress Dad.

On the other hand, the press might decide that Trump's behavior is just dog-bites-man and barely cover it. That's more or less what happened in the civil trials. Trump was quite obnoxious and did things that would have led to jail time for most other people, yet it was never as big a story as, say, university professors testifying in Congress about anti-Israel protests. But if we're lucky, his endless quest to be the toughest guy in the room will be his downfall.

WILL CHICAGO 2024 BE LIKE CHICAGO 1968?

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore notes that Democrats will hold their convention in Chicago this year, at a time when left-wingers are angry at the party about its involvement in a war. So will 2024 be like 1968? Kilgore says no -- but I think there's somewhat more risk than he's willing to acknowledge. Here are some of the reasons he's not worried:

Gaza isn’t Vietnam.

... There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year....

Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Vietnamese military and civilian casualties ran into the millions during the period of U.S. involvement.

Yes, but when I watch how people in America talk about crime, or economic conditions, I question whether it's appropriate to use objective measures to compare the past and the present, given the fact that so many Americans base their response on vibes. Crime is down, inflation is cooling, jobs are plentiful, yet Americans talk as if we have murder rates comparable to the crack years and an economic struggles comparable to 1970s double-digit inflation.

Gaza protests clearly aren't as widespread as Vietnam protests in the 1960s. But I bet the issue will draw huge crowds to Chicago. (One way I'm certain that 2024 will be like 1968 is that there's likely to be much more anger at the Democratic convention than at the Republican convention, even though the Republican nominee in both years was more hawkish than the Democrat.)

Brandon Johnson isn’t Richard Daley.

Chicago mayor Richard J. Daley ... was the epitome of the old-school Irish American machine politician and from a different planet culturally than the protesters at the convention.

Current Chicago mayor Brandon Johnson ... is a Black progressive and labor activist.... While he is surely wary of the damage anti-Israel and anti-Biden protests can do to the city’s image if they turn violent, Johnson is not without ties to protesters. He broke a tie in the Chicago City Council to ensure passage of a Gaza cease-fire resolution earlier this year. His negotiating skills will be tested by the maneuvering already underway with protest groups and the Democratic Party, but he’s not going to be the sort of implacable foe the 1968 protesters encountered.

But in 2024, Johnson is more likely to be attacked for failing to be repressive than for being repressive. Footage of any violence or property damage will be endlessly looped on Fox News -- and probably on CNN and the legacy networks.

(On the other hand, the modern police tactic is to bottle up such demonstrations and keep them far from their targets. That's not great for free speech, but it might keep these demos from getting out of hand.)

The whole world (probably) won’t be watching.

The 1968 Democratic convention was from a bygone era of gavel-to-gavel coverage by the three broadcast-television networks.... Today’s media coverage of major-party political conventions is extremely limited and (like coverage of other events) fragmented. If violence breaks out this time in Chicago, it will get a lot of attention, albeit much of it bent to the optics of the various media outlets covering it. But the sense in 1968 that the whole nation was watching in horror as an unprecedented event rolled out in real time will likely never be recovered.

Yes, but what will "the optics of the various media outlets covering" the convention be like? Fox will be looking for chaos instigated by young pro-Palestinian protestors, many of them from elite colleges, whom it will characterize, accurately or not, as anti-Semititic -- but so will The New York Times, if its current news judgment is any indication:

I don't think there'll be as much chaos in the streets of Chicago this year as there were in 1968. I think modern crowd control tactics will limit the chaos. I think many people tune out politics altogether these days and won't notice any news from the convention. But while history probably won't repeat in Chicago, it might rhyme a little.