Trump Derangement Syndrome

You don’t win an oral argument by painting a picture of reality that the judges don’t recognize. It’s an even worse idea to tell them to just blindly trust the judgments of others in deciding what the law is. That’s what government lawyer Michael Dreeben tried on Thursday in the Supreme Court argument over presidential immunity in Trump v. United States. Dreeben, a veteran advocate who has made more than 100 Supreme Court arguments, unaccountably acted as if he’d forgotten that he was arguing before a Court that believes in the rule of law — not the rule of lawyers.

The Supreme Court has let us down. The highest court in the land is now a tawdry instrument of Trumpism.

Such is the progressive line in the wake of last week’s oral arguments over Trump’s immunity claim.

In a headline, Slate deemed the arguments “The Last Thing This Supreme Court Could Do to Shock Us.” Salon huffed, “SCOTUS majority abandons conservative principles to mount bizarre defense of Trump’s immunity claim.” One headline at the Atlantic warned of “The Trumpification of the Supreme Court,” while another maintained, “Trump Is Getting What He Wants.”

The first thing to say about this is that, as a technical matter, all indications are that Trump isn’t going to get what he wants; the Court showed little indication that it is going to accept his sweeping claim of immunity.

Some of the collusion between President Biden and his party’s politicized lawfare campaign against his 2024 Republican opponent is so undeniable it can’t be hidden.

When the Supreme Court said it’d hear Donald Trump’s immunity claim in the January 6 case brought by special counsel Jack Smith, the former president’s enemies erupted in anger.

It was delay for delay’s sake. It was a rank political favor for an ally. It was utterly gratuitous in legal terms, since it’s a slam dunk that a former president doesn’t enjoy immunity for acts during his time in office.

As I’ve related a few times, Alvin Bragg, Manhattan’s elected progressive Democratic district attorney, is trying to hoodwink the jury into believing that (a) it is a crime for a candidate for public office to conspire with others to suppress politically damaging information, and (b) that Donald Trump was charged with such a conspiracy in the indictment that has resulted in the ongoing trial. In point of fact, there is no such information-suppression conspiracy crime in the law and the indictment against Trump does not charge a conspiracy — it charges 34 counts of falsifying business records with fraudulent intent to commit or conceal another crime.

The first of Donald Trump’s criminal trials kicked off in earnest this week in New York. Manhattan district attorney Alvin Bragg has charged Trump with 34 felony counts, alleging that he falsified records to cover up a ‘hush money’ payment to porn star Stormy Daniels.

It’s an unprecedented case. Never before has a former US president, or a leading candidate for an upcoming presidential election, faced criminal charges. There’s a good reason why America hasn’t had such a case before: seeking to jail your political opponent is generally understood to be something only banana republics do.

Former National Enquirer publisher David Pecker resumed his testimony on Tuesday as the first witness in former president Donald Trump’s “hush-money” criminal trial.

Pecker took the stand to answer questions from prosecutors about his longtime relationship with Trump and the discussions he had with Trump and his former lawyer Michael Cohen during the 2016 campaign, according to multiple reports.

The Democrats’ lawfare campaign against the putative 2024 Republican presidential nominee is paying compound interest. This is illustrated by pretrial rulings in Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg’s criminal prosecution of Donald Trump.

With the help of an elected progressive Democratic judge, Arthur Engoron, New York attorney general Letitia James managed to get Trump held civilly liable for persistent fraud — to the tune of $454 million (plus continually compounding interest), notwithstanding the absence of fraud victims.

The principal duty of judges in the United States is to protect Americans from government overreach. Judge Merchan is doing the opposite.

I observed in a post this week that, compared to some of Donald Trump’s other recent complaints about Judge Juan Merchan, there is more substance to his grousing about the judge’s denial of his request that the trial be adjourned for a day so that he may be in attendance at the United States Supreme Court next Thursday, April 25. That’s the day the justices will hear argument on the question of whether the former president has immunity from prosecution in the 2020 election-interference indictment brought in Washington, D.C., by Biden Justice Department special counsel Jack Smith.

There are competing legal and practical considerations here.

Today’s ruling class wants to maintain its power and privilege indefinitely.

Every now and then, liberal elites bluntly say what they think about Americans who support former President Donald Trump. Barack Obama accused them of “cling[ing]” to their religion and guns. Hillary Clinton placed them in a “basket of deplorables” (“racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic”) and advocated their “formal deprogramming.” President Joe Biden has called them a “threat” to democracy. Keith Olbermann said that Trump supporters “must be removed from our society.” MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough claimed that Trump supporters “hate America.” David Frum simply called them “jerks.” In the New Republic, Brynn Tannehill wrote that Trump supporters “love fascism.” White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre says that Trump Republicans “fit the definition of fascism.” Sportscaster Bob Costas branded Trump supporters as a “toxic cult.” Most recently, former NBC television host Katie Couric described Trump supporters as “anti-intellectual.”

Friday afternoon featured one of the more disturbing incidents one will ever see on live TV as, amid rolling coverage on cable news and streaming platforms of the Trump trial brought by far-left Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg, a man lit himself on fire in the so-called protest space outside the New York City courthouse.

His conspiracy names both Biden and Hillary why does only Trump get blamed?

The Donald Trump trial took a pause on Friday when a man set himself on fire near the courthouse over a cryptocurrency beef. After the police and medical personnel rushed to the scene, the trial resumed and a jury was seated to begin the case in earnest on Monday. In the words of a dismissed juror to the judge, “Good luck.” 

Judge Juan Merchan’s anti-Trump bias is so bad he isn’t even pretending to make the jury selection process fair.

Earlier this week, Fox News’ Jesse Watters reported on how the process has been rigged against Trump, and he brought up how liberal activists are trying to sneak onto the jury. 

Initial estimates that it would take weeks to seat a jury appear to have relied on a handful of mistaken assumptions.

Monday evening, after the first day’s slog of jury selection in former president Donald Trump’s so-called hush-money trial in Manhattan criminal court, it was being estimated that the process of finding twelve jurors and six alternates could take close to a month. But the pace picked up markedly Tuesday. By the end of the session, seven jurors had been seated.