...Yesterday, Trump began the day by posting an advertisement
for the fourth “series of Trump digital trading cards,” or NFTs (which are
unique digital tokens) featuring heroic images of Trump. People who buy 15 or
more of them—at $99 apiece—get a physical trading card as well. Trump said that
the physical card has a piece of the suit he wore at the presidential debate,
and Trump promises to sign five of them, randomly. Up to 25 people who buy
$25,750 worth of the cards with cryptocurrency will be invited to a gala next
month at his Jupiter, Florida, golf club.
In the ad, Trump made it a point to emphasize his enthusiasm
for cryptocurrency, an emphasis that dovetails with Trump’s recent promotion of
an “official” cryptocurrency project. He linked to a Telegram channel run by
his sons Don Jr. and Eric that, at the time, was called “The DeFiant Ones [sic]” but
has been renamed “World Liberty Financial.” While there is little public
information about the project, the channel has almost 50,000
subscribers.
Hawking merchandise was an odd move for a presidential
candidate, and it suggested his focus is elsewhere than on the election. Also
today, Trump announced that he plans to make former Democrats Robert Kennedy
Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have endorsed him, honorary members of his
transition team. Kennedy told right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he
would “help pick the people who will be running the government.”
That afternoon, Trump announced that the terms for the
September 10 presidential debate had been set, but the fact it came from him
alone suggested he was trying to get his way by simply declaring he had won.
Indeed, the Harris campaign said the issue hadn’t been settled, and ABC News,
which is holding the debate, did not comment.
Late that afternoon, special counsel Jack Smith filed a
superseding indictment against Trump in the federal criminal case concerning
Trump’s attempt to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election.
After the Supreme Court decided on July 1, 2024, in the aptly named case
of Donald J. Trump v. United States, that Trump cannot be charged
with crimes committed as part of his official duties, the criminal case Smith
had filed against him for his attempt to steal the election had to be reworked
to eliminate those actions the court deemed official.
A new grand jury heard the evidence for this indictment,
avoiding concerns that the previous grand jury might be swayed by evidence that
they had heard before but was no longer admissible. The new indictment removes
those matters but retains the four original charges and clarifies that they
concern actions that are not official duties. Legal analyst Joyce White Vance
of Civil Discourse notes that while the old indictment
referred to Trump as a former president, this one refers to him as “a candidate
for president.”
Trump greeted the announcement with a long, unhinged rant on
his social media company, saying that “[t]he people of our country will see
what is happening with all of these corrupt lawsuits against me, and will
REJECT them by giving me an overwhelming Victory on November 5th for President
of the United States….”
“For those counting,” legal analyst Andrew Weismann wrote,
“FIVE separate grand juries (scores of citizens) have now found probable cause
that Trump committed multiple felonies.”
That evening, Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman of NPR
explained the story behind the surprising photos of Trump on Monday giving a
thumbs-up over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The reporters wrote that
“[t]wo members of Donald Trump's campaign staff had a verbal and physical
altercation Monday with an official” at the cemetery, where “[f]ederal law
prohibits political campaign or election-related activities.” When a cemetery
official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering the section where
the grave was located, “campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official
aside.” A Trump campaign spokesperson said the official who tried to prevent
the staff from holding a political event in the cemetery was “clearly suffering
from a mental health episode.”
And now the U.S. Army has weighed in on the scandal
surrounding Trump’s visit to Arlington National Cemetery for a campaign photo
op, after which his team shared a campaign video it had filmed. The Army said
that the cemetery hosts almost 3,000 public wreath-laying ceremonies a year
without incident and that Trump and his staff “were made aware of federal laws,
Army regulations and [Department of Defense] policies, which clearly prohibit
political activities on cemetery grounds.”
It went on to say that a cemetery employee “who attempted to
ensure adherence to these rules was abruptly pushed aside…. This incident was
unfortunate, and it is also unfortunate that the… employee and her
professionalism has been unfairly attacked. [Arlington National Cemetery] is a
national shrine to the honored dead of the Armed Forces, and its dedicated
staff will continue to ensure public ceremonies are conducted with the dignity
and respect the nation’s fallen deserve.”
“I don’t think I can adequately explain what a massive deal
it is for the Army to make a statement like this,” political writer and veteran
Allison Gill of Mueller, She Wrote, noted. “The Pentagon avoids
statements like this at all costs. But a draft dodging traitor decided to lie
about our armed forces staff, so they went to paper.”
The deputy Pentagon press secretary Sabrina Singh said the
Department of Defense is “aware of the statement that the Army issued, and we
support what the Army said.” Hours later, Trump campaign manager Chris LaCivita
reposted the offending video on X and, tagging the official account for Army
Secretary Christine Wormuth, said he was “hoping to trigger the hacks” in her
office.
In Talking Points Memo, Josh Marshall reported that the Trump campaign’s plan was to lay a wreath at Arlington National Cemetery to honor the 13 members of the U.S. military killed in the suicide bombing during the evacuation of Kabul, Afghanistan, in August 2021. They intended to film the event and then attack Vice President Kamala Harris and President Joe Biden for not “showing up” for the event, which they intended to portray as an “established memorial.”
*****
The elephant in the room these days is that most Republicans,
along with many pundits, are pretending that Trump is a normal presidential
candidate. They are ignoring his mental lapses, calls for authoritarianism,
grifting, lack of grasp on any sort of policy, and criminality, even as he has
hollowed out the once grand Republican Party and threatens American democracy
itself.
It’s hard to look away from the reality that the Republican
senators could have stopped this catastrophe at many points in Trump’s term, at
the very least by voting to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial. At
the time, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Out of one hundred senators, you have
zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single
one.” Republican senators nonetheless stood behind Trump. “This is not about
this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,”
then–majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always
been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they did not foresee
senators abandoning the principles of the country in order to support a
president they thought would enhance their own careers. Assuming that lawmakers
would jealously guard their own power, the Framers gave to the members of the
House of Representatives the power to impeach a president. To the members of
the Senate, they gave the sole power to try impeachments. They assumed that
lawmakers, who had just fought a war to break free of a monarch, would
understand that their own interests would always require stopping the rise of
an authoritarian leader.
But the Framers did not foresee the rise of political
partisanship.
In the modern era, extreme partisanship has led to voter
suppression to keep Republicans in power, the weaponization of the filibuster
to stop Democratic legislation, and gerrymandering to enable Republicans to
take far more legislative seats than they have earned. The demands of this
extreme partisanship also mean that members of one of the nation’s major
political parties have lined up behind a man whom, where he running this sort of
a campaign even ten years ago, they would have dismissed with derision.
Finally, devastatingly, the partisanship that made senators
keep Trump in office enabled him to name to the Supreme Court three justices.
Those three justices were key to making up the majority that overturned the
nation’s fundamental principle that all people must be equal before the law. In
July 2024 they ruled that unlike anyone else, a president is above
it.
In May 2016, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham
famously observed: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed.......and we
will deserve it.”
—Heather Cox Richardson
Notes:
https://www.wrbl.com/news/youll-pay-the-most-for-coffee-in-these-states-new-report-finds/
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/27/us/harris-trump-election
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2024/08/27/us/harris-trump-election#trump-transition-rfk-tulsi-gabbard
https://www.cnn.com/2024/08/27/politics/trump-superseding-indictment-january-6/index.html
https://www.npr.org/2024/08/27/nx-s1-5090925/trump-indictment-jan6
https://storage.courtlistener.com/recap/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149/gov.uscourts.dcd.258149.228.0_1.pdf
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