Dallas Congresswoman Jasmine Crockett is going viral – just the way she wants it
Grace Yarrow – January 15, 2024
WASHINGTON — In summer 2021, about 50 Democrats from the Texas House arrived at the nation’s capital — absconding from Austin in a plot to block Republicans from passing a bill that would impose tighter restrictions on voting access.
Buzzing with excitement, the lawmakers took their places in front of reporters, with senior members and leadership moving toward the center to field questions. But Jasmine Crockett — a freshman from Dallas — stepped away from the group to take a call. She held up her phone to film her own live interview with a TV station, the dome of the Capitol building peeking out behind her.
That interview would be one of many that Crockett would take while camped out in Washington to discuss the Democrats’ quorum break, in a move that would raise the little-known lawmaker’s profile as she became an unofficial spokesperson for the dramatic political spectacle.
“There were people in leadership from my understanding that were not a fan of a freshman being a bit of a face of some of this,” Crockett said in an interview with The Texas Tribune.
Nonetheless, she accepted as many interviews as she could fit into her schedule, carrying two phones and a laptop to handle the crush of inquiries she received.
“I did not expect the world to pay attention,” Crockett said.
But she wanted them to.
Crockett, 42, didn’t get into politics to wait her turn. While she says she may have ruffled some feathers among her caucus peers at the time, her decision to grab the spotlight catapulted her career and provided the foundation for her to run for Congress the following year.
Crockett, who was elected to Congress in 2022 after serving one term in the Texas House, is shown in her Washington office Jan. 4, 2023. Credit: Michael A. McCoy for The Texas Tribune
Now a freshman in the U.S. House representing the Dallas-based 30th Congressional District, Crockett is once again finding her voice, seeking out moments to go viral and trying to make a name for herself in a deeper pool filled with bigger fish.
Her unfiltered musings and barbs while in Congress have helped her amass one of the largest social media followings in the Texas delegation, with an online audience of nearly a quarter of a million people on both X and Instagram. Her online reach is bigger than every other Texas Democrat, with the exception of Rep. Joaquin Castro of San Antonio, who has served a decade longer than Crockett has. And she’s been crowdsourcing the name for a new podcast, she’s considering.
Crockett got her first taste of going viral during a September hearing of the House Oversight Committee, which garnered media attention because of the Republican impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden. Crockett took aim at former President Donald Trump’s mishandling of classified documents, holding up printed photos from his indictment showing boxes of classified documents in the Mar-a-Lago bathroom.
“These are our national secrets, looks like, in the shitter to me,” Crockett said in a clip that was shared on Reddit and Tiktok. One fan edit of the moment set to music, created by a 16-year-old fan, raked in over 8 million views on TikTok.
Crockett spoke about the virality of the moment on CNN, saying younger Democrats are looking for their elected leaders to “push back” against GOP talking points. Actor Mark Hamill, of Luke Skywalker fame, reposted the video on X, supporting Crockett: “Omg is an understatement!”
U.S. Rep. Greg Casar of Austin, another freshman Democrat who sits beside Crockett in the Oversight Committee, said he often struggles to keep a straight face during Crockett’s speeches.
“She can speak so directly to people and bring humor to the table in a way that makes folks want to listen. And that’s what we need right now,” Casar said.
For her online followers, Crockett provides gleeful narration about the unfolding drama within the majority party, such as her updates on X about “SPEAKERGATE,” the fallout from the ousting of former Speaker Kevin McCarthy.
Recently, she’s chronicled on X the expulsion of New York Republican George Santos, who was booted from the House following a searing ethics report detailing misuses of campaign funds. “Maybe a cat fight if Santos spills tea during debate, today,” Crockett posted before the expulsion vote.
Her posts — often interspersed with popcorn or eyeball emojis — are told as though she’s recapping an episode of reality television to a friend: “Welcome to preschool … I mean our prestigious congress (darn autocorrect).”
Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, the ranking member on the House Oversight Committee, said that Crockett’s unique voice has proved to be an effective communication tool and that her expertise as an attorney is often on display.
He described her style as a combination of a lawyer’s “sharp analysis and lucid exposition” and a “Texan’s folksy and intimate manner.”
“Always a fighter”
Gwen Crockett said her daughter was a sharp-witted speaker from a young age.
In high school, Crockett participated in speech competitions. While in a production of “Little Shop of Horrors” at Rhodes College, a professor took notice of Crockett’s talent for public speaking and invited her to participate in a mock trial organization, where she first found her legal voice.
“I think that’s when it hit her that she wanted to become a lawyer,” Gwen Crockett said.
While at Rhodes College, Crockett was one of only 18 Black students and received threatening, anonymous racist mail.
“That was the first time that I felt helpless and felt targeted as a Black person,” she said. Crockett was paired with a Black female lawyer to help investigate who was sending the threats in the mail. Crockett now calls that lawyer her “saving grace” and another factor in her decision to pursue a legal career.
Jasmine Crockett studied at the Texas Southern University Thurgood Marshall School of Law and the University of Houston Law Center. After law school, she moved to Texarkana to be a public defender and later opened her own civil rights and criminal defense law firm.
She said her time representing thousands of Texans in court has given her firsthand experience with inequities in the justice system. Adam Bazaldua, a Dallas City Council member, said Crockett is “always a fighter for the most vulnerable.”
Crockett represented thousands of Texans’ cases and handled high-profile lawsuits involving police brutality and other cases involving racial injustice. In 2020, as she campaigned for a seat in the state House, she took on the cases of protesters arrested in the aftermath of the murder of George Floyd in Minneapolis.
Then-state Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, holds a bag that reads, “Protect Black People” at a joint press conference with the Texas Legislative Black Caucus, the Virginia Legislative Black Caucus, the Legislative Black Caucus of Maryland and the Texas Legislature Democrats in Alexandria, Va. on July 16, 2021. Credit: Eric Lee
Activist Rachel Gonzales wrote Crockett’s phone number on her stomach when she protested an incident of police brutality in Texas outside the state Capitol in Austin.
“I knew that she would be the first person to show up and fight if needed,” Gonzales said.
During those protests, Crockett consistently posted information for constituents on social media, according to her former chief of staff, Karrol Rimal. Receiving hundreds of calls, Crockett organized other attorneys to help advocate for protesters.
“She never loses sight of the people,” Rimal said.
Crockett was elected to the Texas House in 2020, quickly becoming an outspoken figure in the Legislature. During her first legislative session, she filed 75 solo bills and co-authored another 110, three of which became law.
“Many freshmen, they just kind of sit there. They don’t say a whole lot because they’re trying to learn,” said former Texas Rep. Joe Deshotel, D-Beaumont. “But for her, the learning curve was very short. I mean, she jumped right in.”
Then-state Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, speaks at a Texas House Progressive Caucus at the Capitol on Sept. 20, 2021. Credit: Eddie Gaspar/The Texas Tribune
Those who worked with Crockett pointed to the quorum break trip as her breakout moment.
“I think there was maybe some jealousy. She got a lot of national attention. She really was a lightning rod,” said state Rep. Ron Reynolds, D-Missouri City, who sat next to Crockett in the state House.
Although the Democrats were ultimately unable to stop the Republican elections bill from becoming law, they boosted the national conversation around voter disenfranchisement.
Crockett touted her leadership in the quorum break when she campaigned for the U.S. House in 2022.
She now represents the seat that recently deceased Democrat Eddie Bernice Johnson had held since 1993. After announcing her retirement, Johnson quickly encouraged Crockett to run.
Crockett said she hoped to carry forward Johnson’s legacy.
“Around 9 am, my predecessor, who hand picked me to succeed her, passed away and all of a sudden, like many of my plans this year, my plan to end on a high note, came crashing down,” Crockett said in a post last Sunday on X where she also said she had just done a media hit on MSNBC. “I appreciate the calls and texts and just pray that she’s resting easy. When I’m feeling a lil lost, I’ll always lean in and see if I can hear your voice, Congresswoman.”
U.S. Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, D-Dallas, talks to Jasmine Crockett at Crockett’s election night watch party for a congressional seat in Dallas on May 24, 2022. Credit: Shelby Tauber for The Texas Tribune
“Pragmatic progressive”
Being outspoken and online naturally makes way for comparisons to Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a third-term representative who has attained near-celebrity status as the face of the progressive movement.
But Crockett, unlike Casar of Austin, is not a member of the “Squad,” a well-known group of congressional progressives who regularly garner national media attention and GOP condemnation.
Crockett draws a strong line between herself and those progressives. She says her “pragmatic progressive” policy goals make her more willing to work with the business community, in situations where members of the Squad may be less willing to compromise.
But Crockett said she and Ocasio-Cortez have a common goal of using social media to meet constituents “where they are.”
“I think some of us younger members are trying to better educate voters,” Crockett said.
Though she routinely tussles with the GOP — she called them “assholes” in a September interview and again in December — Crockett also says she knows the importance of finding common ground with colleagues across the aisle.
U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, walks through the U.S. Capitol on the second day the 118th Congress on Wednesday, Jan. 4, 2023 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Michael A. McCoy for The Texas Tribune
She’s found an unlikely ally in Republican Sen. John Cornyn, who Crockett calls her “best partner” in the Senate. The senior senator has promoted the STRIP Act, a bicameral and bipartisan bill that decriminalizes fentanyl testing strips. The bill is still awaiting committee action.
Cornyn said it was a “no-brainer” to collaborate with Crockett on legislation he said would benefit Texans.
“I think she’s been very approachable,” Cornyn said. “It’s not easy to get things done or bills passed in either of the two houses, especially if you don’t have a dance partner. So I offered to be her dance partner.”
Crockett introduced the companion legislation in the House with Rep. Lance Gooden of Terrell, who Crockett said is a trusted colleague and a dear friend.
“We argue and fight each time we are together, but we also hug and laugh equally as often,” Gooden said in a statement.
Crockett is running for reelection, and has drawn two primary challengers, Jarred Davis and Jrmar “JJ” Jefferson. But she said she has no intentions to stay in Congress long term.
She’ll spend the coming months campaigning both for herself and working to clinch a Democratic majority in the House due to her role as the caucus leadership representative from the freshman class, a fundraising position and an honor bestowed onto her by her freshman colleagues. She’s the first Black woman in that position, which she said adds even more pressure.
U.S. Rep. Jasmine Crockett, D-Dallas, casts her first vote on the House floor on the first day of the 118th Congress on Tuesday, Jan. 3, 2023 in Washington, D.C. Credit: Michael A. McCoy for The Texas Tribune
“I have to make sure this opportunity and door stays open for those that come behind me. Leadership in the Democratic caucus is about money. It’s a money game,” Crockett said.
Olivia Julianna, a 21-year-old Texan with over a million followers on social media, said Crockett’s rhetoric appeals to young people on social media, in contrast with other politicians’ “jargony” or “unattainable” speech.
The Gen Z political activist said Crockett regularly “steals the show” in Congress.
“That’s why people respect her so much, because she says what a lot of people are thinking, but they don’t have the platform to say,” Julianna said.
Disclosure: The University of Houston has been a financial supporter of The Texas Tribune, a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization that is funded in part by donations from members, foundations and corporate sponsors. Financial supporters play no role in the Tribune’s journalism.
But turning ideas into action when governments owe an unprecedented $88.1 trillion — equivalent almost to the world’s annual economic output — will be hard.
Public debt exploded during the pandemic and new borrowing this year is likely to break records in several big economies, leaving governments less able to respond to shocks such as financial meltdowns, pandemics or wars.
Even in the absence of a new crisis, soaring debt servicing costs will constrain efforts to tackle climate change and care for aging populations. Public services in many countries are already strained after successive budget cuts.
More worryingly still, as debt burdens grow, governments could find themselves unable to borrow more to service existing obligations and fund basic services adequately.
A government unable to finance its debt “would be forced to implement abrupt and painful” spending cuts or tax hikes, said Michael Saunders, a former member of the Bank of England’s monetary policy committee.
“And such a government may lack the fiscal space to respond to future adverse shocks, preventing fiscal support when it is most needed,” he told CNN.
Saunders, now a senior economic adviser at consultancy Oxford Economics, doesn’t think rich economies are approaching what is roughly equivalent to a personal credit limit and points to sustained investor appetite for government debt. But that’s not to say the limit won’t be tested “10, 20, 30 years from now.”
Testing the limit
The United Kingdom — the world’s sixth-biggest economy — offers a cautionary tale of how badly things can go wrong when investors reject a government’s plan to borrow.
In September 2022, the pound and UK government bonds, or gilts, sold off sharply, partly in response to plans by former Prime Minister Liz Truss to issue more debt in order to pay for tax cuts. Mortgage rates and other borrowing costs soared as investors demanded much higher premiums for owning UK debt.
The Bank of England was ultimately forced to intervene and pledge to buy gilts on “whatever scale is necessary.”
“Were dysfunction in this market to continue or worsen, there would be a material risk to UK financial stability,” Dave Ramsden, a senior official at the central bank, said at the time. “This would lead to … a reduction of the flow of credit to the real economy.”
While central banks can provide temporary emergency support, they cannot finance government deficits in lieu of bond investors.
Just ask crisis-stricken Argentina, where for years the central bank printed pesos to help the country’s spendthrift government continue paying interest on its debt and avoid default. That tactic caused the value of the currency to plummet and prices to rocket. Annual inflation exceeded 211% last month, the highest level in three decades.
A risky year of elections
Government budgets will face renewed scrutiny this year from investors on high alert for politicians tempted to make promises in a bid to win over voters.
Half the world’s population is going to the polls. That swathe of elections means little incentive for belt-tightening among incumbent administrations, while also raising the prospect that incoming leaders will seek to make their mark with new tax and spending plans.
Already, debt is shaping up to be a key issue in this year’s US elections, which will culminate in the presidential election in November. Record levels of public borrowing have become a major point of contention between Republicans and Democrats, aggravating standoffs over the national budget that periodically threaten to starve federal agencies of funds and prevent them from operating.
Mounting debt and political brinksmanship have already taken their toll on America’s credit rating, which typically affects borrowing costs for the government, businesses and households.
Fitch cut its rating on US sovereign debt to AA+ from the top AAA grade last August, citing political polarization as a factor in its decision. Meanwhile, in November, Moody’s warned that it could also remove the United States’ last remaining perfect rating from the big three ratings agencies.
“One of the key elements sustaining a country’s credibility on its ability to repay (debt) is political consensus,” said Raghuram Rajan, a former governor of the Reserve Bank of India.
“It’s not unimaginable that if democracy takes a downturn in the United States, if there is a sense that there will be a political calamity,” the value of US sovereign bonds would fall, he added. And that would increase the government’s borrowing costs.
AI to the rescue?
Even if the worst scenarios are avoided, the increased cost of servicing debt after a recent rapid rise in official interest rates is siphoning ever greater amounts of money away from vital public services — and making it harder to address the climate crisis.
According to reports in UK media, Britain’s main opposition Labour Party has scaled back some of its enormous green spending plans because of concerns about adding to country’s debt burden.
In the current financial year, which ends on April 5, the UK government is expected to spend more on debt interest (£94 billion, or $120 billion) than on either education or defense, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, a fiscal watchdog.
In the United States, interest costs on a common measure soared to $659 billion in fiscal year 2023, which ended on September 30, according to the Treasury Department. That’s up 39% from the previous year and nearly double what it was in fiscal year 2020.
In 2023 the government spent more to service its debt than it did on each of housing, transport and higher education, according to the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget, a non-profit.
The surge in advanced economies’ debt that those hefty interest payments partly illustrate coincides with slowing economic growth and a rise in the number of the elderly relative to working-age people. Against that backdrop, it’s unclear how the world will dig itself out of its debt hole.
“What could rescue us relatively painlessly is if we have huge productivity improvements without job losses,” Rajan, now a professor of finance at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, told CNN, suggesting that artificial intelligence could hold the key.
Many cities across the United States could become ghost towns by 2100
Adam Schrader – January 14, 2024
A man wears a protective face mask crossing a quiet West Side Highway in Manhattan during rush hour amid the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in April 2020. File Photo by John Angelillo/UPI
Jan. 14 (UPI) — Many cities across the United States could become ghost towns by 2100, according to new research published Thursday.
“Close to half of the nearly 30,000 cities in the United States will face some sort of population decline,” researchers from the University of Chicago in Illinois wrote in a journal article published in Nature Cities.
Major cities in the Northeast and Midwest are already slowly losing population. While cities in the South and West regions are experiencing a population increase, some major cities in Alabama, Georgia and Tennessee are slowly depopulating, the researchers found.
Cleveland, Buffalo, and Pittsburgh could see depopulation of 12 to 23 percent by 2100 while cities like Louisville, New Haven and Syracuse — not currently showing declines – likely could soon.
“You might see a lot of growth in Texas right now, but if you had looked at Michigan 100 years ago, you probably would have thought that Detroit would be the largest city in the U.S. now,” Sybil Derrible, one of the researchers, told Scientific American.
The study briefly looked at possible causes for these population changes, from the effects of an aging population to changes in the economy, wages and access to transportation — as well as things like climate change and similar factors.
“In the Northeast and Midwest, urban cities with lower median household income are more likely to experience depopulation over time,” the study authors wrote.
“Such trends could exacerbate socioeconomic challenges experienced by lower-income households in these regions, given that population decline can create affordability concerns with infrastructure services.”
Meanwhile, the research showed that urban cities with increasing populations in the South and West tend to have a higher reliance on vehicles. The study was conducted by a team originally commissioned by the Illinois Department of Transportation to analyze the challenges in the state over time.
“In the Midwest, urban cities with both low and high vehicle ownership, defined as percent population with two or more vehicles per household, are likely to gain population along with some suburban and periurban cities with low vehicle ownership,” the study authors wrote.
The study also looked at the effects of migration possibly curbing urban population decline in some area. Smaller cities like those on Long Island in New York and around Chicago currently experiencing population loss may still grow thanks to immigration.
“The number of depopulating cities in the Northeast and Midwest will be higher than in the South and West regions (although many cities in the North and Midwest will still grow),” the study reads. “In California, the southern coast may lose population, while the northern coast may gain population.”
‘This to Him Is the Grand Finale’: Donald Trump’s 50-Year Mission to Discredit the Justice System
The former president is in unparalleled legal peril, but he has mastered the ability to grind down the legal system to his advantage. It’s already changing our democracy.
By Michael Kruse – January 12, 2023
Michael Kruse, senior staff writer at POLITICO and POLITICO Magazine.
POLITICO illustration by Emily Scherer/Photos by Getty Images, iStock
NEW YORK — What happened in Room 300 of the New York County Courthouse in lower Manhattan in November had never happened. Not in the preceding almost two and a half centuries of the history of the United States. Donald Trump was on the witness stand. It was not unprecedented in the annals of American jurisprudence just because it was a former president, although that was totally true. It was unprecedented because the power dynamic of the courtroom had been upended — the defendant was not on defense, the most vulnerable person in the room was the most dominant person in the room, and the people nominally in charge could do little about it.
It was unprecedented, too, because over the course of four or so hours Trump savaged the judge, the prosecutor, the attorney general, the case and the trial — savaged the system itself. He called the attorney general “a political hack.” He called the judge “very hostile.” He called the trial “crazy” and the court “a fraud” and the case “a disgrace.” He told the prosecutor he should be “ashamed” of himself. The judge all but pleaded repeatedly with Trump’s attorneys to “control” him. “If you can’t,” the judge said, “I will.” But he didn’t, because he couldn’t, and audible from the city’s streets were the steady sounds of sirens and that felt absolutely apt.
“Are you done?” the prosecutor said.
“Done,” Trump said.
He was nowhere close to done. Trump’s testimony if anything was but a taste. (In fact, he said many of the same things in the same courtroom on Thursday.) This country has never seen and therefore is utterly unprepared for what it’s about to endure in the wrenching weeks and months ahead — active challenges based on post-Civil War constitutional amendments to bar insurrectionists from the ballot; existentially important questions about presidential immunity almost certainly to be decided by a U.S. Supreme Court the citizenry has seldom trusted less; and a candidate running for the White House while facing four separate criminal indictments alleging 91 felonies, among them, of course, charges that he tried to overturn an election he lost and overthrow the democracy he swore to defend. And while many found Trump’s conduct in court in New York shocking, it is in fact for Trump not shocking at all. For Trump, it is less an aberration than an extension, an escalation — a culmination. Trump has never been in precisely this position, and the level of the threat that he faces is inarguably new, but it’s just as true, too, that nobody has been preparing for this as long as he has himself.
Former President Donald Trump, flanked by his attorneys, waits to take the witness stand at New York Supreme Court on Nov. 6, 2023, in New York City. | Eduardo Munoz Alvarez/AP
Trump and his allies say he is the victim of the weaponization of the justice system, but the reality is exactly the opposite. For literally more than 50 years, according to thousands of pages of court records and hundreds of interviews with lawyers and legal experts, people who have worked for Trump, against Trump or both, and many of the myriad litigants who’ve been caught in the crossfire, Trump has taught himself how to use and abuse the legal system for his own advantage and aims. Many might view the legal system as a place to try to avoid, or as perhaps a necessary evil, or maybe even as a noble arbiter of equality and fairness. Not Trump. He spent most of his adult life molding it into an arena in which he could stake claims and hunt leverage. It has not been for him a place of last resort so much as a place of constant quarrel. Conflict in courts is not for him the cost of doing business — it is how he does business. Throughout his vast record of (mostly civil) lawsuits, whether on offense, defense or frequently a mix of the two, Trump has become a sort of layman’s master in the law and lawfare.
“He doesn’t see the legal system as a means of obtaining justice for all,” Jim Zirin, the author of Plaintiff in Chief: A Portrait of Donald Trump in 3,500 Lawsuits, told me. He sees it rather as a “tool,” said Ian Bassin, a former White House lawyer in the administration of Barack Obama and the current executive director of Protect Democracy, “in his quest to command attention and ultimately power.” But it’s not merely any tool. It’s his most potent tactic and fundamental to any and all successes he’s had. “There’s probably no single person in America,” said Eric Swalwell, the Democratic member of Congress from California and a former prosecutor and Trump impeachment manager, “who is more, I would say, knowledgeable and experienced in our legal system — as both a plaintiff and as a defendant — than Donald Trump.”
Many have been confounded by the legal system’s inability to constrain Trump, by his ability to escape at least thus far any legal accounting for behavior that even some leaders of his own party excoriated — and why that reckoning might never come. To understand this requires seeing Trump in a new mode — not as a businessman-turned-celebrity-turned-politician, or as a nationalist populist demagogue, or as the epochal leader of a right-wing movement, but rather as a legal combatant. “This is not a political rally — this is a courtroom,” the judge admonished him at one point in November in New York. It was only in the most technical sense correct. Just as he had upended the norms inside the New York courtroom, Trump has altered the very way we view the justice system as a whole. This is not something he began to do once he won elected office. It has been a lifelong project.
Starting in 1973, when the federal government sued him and his father for racist rental practices in the apartments they owned, Trump learned from the notorious Roy Cohn, then searched for another Roy Cohn — then finally became his own Roy Cohn. He’s exploited as loopholes the legal system’s bedrock tenets, eyeing its very integrity as simultaneously its intrinsic vulnerability — the near sacrosanct honoring of the rights of the defendant, the deliberation that due process demands, the constant constitutional balancing act that relies on shared good faith as much as fixed, written rules. He has routinely turned what’s obviously peril into what’s effectively fuel, taking long rosters of losses and willing them into something like wins — if not in a court of law, then in that of public opinion. It has worked, and it continues to work. Trump, after all, was at one of his weakest points politically until the first of his four arraignments last spring. Ever since, his legal jeopardy and his political viability have done little but go up, together. Deny, delay and attack, always play the victim, never stop undermining the system: Trump has taken the Cohn playbook to reaches not even Cohn could have foreseen — fusing his legal efforts with his business interests, lawyers as important to him as loan officers, and now he’s done the same with politics. He’s not fighting the system, it seems sometimes, so much as he’s using it. He’s fundraising off of it. He’s consolidating support because of it. He’s far and away the most likely Republican nominee, polls consistently show. He’s the odds-on favorite to be the president again.
As Trump was on the witness stand on Nov. 6, Judge Arthur Engoron (bottom) all but pleaded repeatedly with Trump’s attorneys to “control” him. “If you can’t,” the judge said, “I will.” | Spencer Platt/Getty Images; Pool photo by Brendan McDermid
“He has attacked the judicial system, our system of justice and the rule of law his entire life,” said J. Michael Luttig, a conservative former federal appellate judge and one of the founders of the recently formed Society for the Rule of Law. “And this to him,” Luttig told me, “is the grand finale.”
The 2024 presidential election, in the estimation of Paul Rosenzweig, a senior counsel during the investigation of President Bill Clinton and an assistant deputy secretary in the Department of Homeland Security in the administration of George W. Bush, isn’t a referendum on Joe Biden. It isn’t even a referendum, he said, on Donald Trump. “This election,” he told me, “is a referendum on the rule of law.”
More unnerving, though, than even that is an idea that has coursed through my conversations over these past several months: That referendum might already be over. Democracy’s on the ballot, many have taken to saying — Biden just said it last week — but democracy, and democratic institutions, as political scientist Brian Klaas put it to me, “can’t function properly if only part of the country believes in them.” And it’s possible that some critical portion of the population does not, or will not, no matter what happens between now and next November, believe in the verdicts or other outcomes rendered by those institutions. What if Trump is convicted? What if he’s not? What if he’s not convicted and then gets elected? What if he is and wins anyway? More disquieting than what might be on the ballot, it turns out, is actually what might not.
“Our democracy rests on a foundation of trust — trust in elections, trust in institutions,” Bassin said. “And you know what scares me the most about Trump? It’s not the sledgehammer he’s taken to the structure of our national house,” he told me. “It’s the termites he’s unleashed into the foundation.”
Trump (left) stands with his father, Fred Trump, in Brooklyn in 1973. That year, the federal government sued Trump and his father for racist rental practices in the apartments they owned. | Barton Silverman/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
‘Attack, attack, attack — no matter what the merits are’
The United States v. Fred C. Trump, Donald Trump, and Trump Management, Inc., filed by the Department of Justice on October 15, 1973, put a 27-year-old Donald Trump for the first time on the front page of the New York Times. He also used it to introduce himself to a man who was already an infamous rogue — Cohn becoming because of this case Trump’s most indispensable mentor.
Cohn, “clearly one of God’s most imperfect vessels” but “one of the most extraordinary, demonized, and misunderstood figures of 20th-century American politics,” Steve Bannon wrote in the 2023 Skyhorse Publishing reprint of Nicholas von Hoffman’s biography, “is more relevant today than when the book was originally published in 1988.” Bannon’s not wrong. And that’s because of Trump and what Trump has become. Pre-Trump, though, and before Cohn was disbarred and died in 1986 from complications from AIDS, Cohn was in post-World War II America a particular sort of poisonous force — the top attorney and aide to red-baiting Sen. Joseph McCarthy in the 1950s who then in the ’60s and ’70s turned his ill repute into a career as “ a legal executioner” for celebrities, executives and mob bosses. He didn’t pay his bills. He didn’t pay his taxes. He was shameless and remorseless and “ famous among lawyers for winning cases by delays, evasions and lies.” He was indicted four times, for bribery and conspiracy, for extortion and blackmail, for stock-swindling and obstruction of justice and filing false reports — and never once convicted. He was, to the people who knew him and watched him with some combination of wonder and disgust, “a bully,” “a scoundrel” and “as politically incorrect as they come.” Trump was transfixed.
Top: People sit outside Trump Village, a two-building apartment complex, in Brooklyn in 1973. Bottom: Donald and Fred Trump visit a tenant in one of their Brooklyn apartment buildings in Brooklyn in 1973. | Barton Silverman/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
And the federal race case was Trump’s first tutorial. “He went to court,” as Trump would put it, “and I went with him.” Cohn said the Department of Justice had “no facts to support the charges” that were “barebones” and “without foundation.” Cohn accused the feds of going after the Trumps’ organization because it was “one of the largest in the field.” He accused them of a “smear” that caused “damage” that was “never going to be completely undone.” Cohn filed a countersuit for a stunning $100 million that a judge tossed out as “frivolous” but not before it generated headlines and attention for a young Trump spoiling for a publicized fight. He accused a young female prosecutor of staging a “Gestapo-like investigation” with “undercover agents” wiretapping Trump offices and “marching around” like “storm troopers banging on the doors” — all charges the judge was forced to take the time to dismiss. And Cohn delayed, and delayed and delayed, frustrating for years a series of government attorneys who in court briefs repeatedly bemoaned Cohn’s “noncompliance” and “dilatory tactics” and “blithe disregard.” The director of the Open Housing Center of the New York Urban League worried that Cohn on behalf of Trump was, in spite of the evidence, actually “winning.”
Trump, with Roy Cohn beside him, speaks during a news conference where they announced a lawsuit against the National Football League in 1984. | Marilynn K. Yee/The New York Times via Redux Pictures
They weren’t. At least not officially. Because the DOJ got Trump and his father to sign a consent decree promising they would comply with the Fair Housing Act and create preferential vacancies and pay for ads for those vacancies and hire and promote minorities and self-report their progress. The agency called the agreement “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.” But Trump? He called it a win. He had been allowed to sign the decree without copping to guilt, and if that wasn’t quite a triumph, it also wasn’t in any real way a defeat. “Did Trump get nailed? No,” Cohn’s cousin, David Lloyd Marcus, told me. “He basically got out of it.” Trump had siphoned from Cohn lasting lessons. “He learned that the evidence can be irrelevant,” Zirin told me. He learned that “the law doesn’t matter, the government’s mission doesn’t matter,” Marcus told me. He learned “that you could use the law to sort of bend circumstances to your will,” former Trump attorney Ty Cobb told me. “Attack, attack, attack — no matter what the merits are — fuck the merits — attack, attack, attack,” longtime New York attorney Marty London told me. “That was Roy Cohn’s methodology that was adopted by Donald Trump.”
More than anything, though, Cohn had shown Trump not simply how to turn a loss into a win but how to turn a case on its head — how, in other words, to take the United States v. Trump and make it Trump versus the United States.
The Trump Parc East building, which was formerly known as 100 Central Park South, is seen in New York City in 2016. | Frank Franklin II/AP
‘Suddenly you are being sued. It gives you a headache’
If the ’70s were a training ground, the ’80s were a proving ground. And if Cohn was a weapon —“a weapon for me,” as Trump told the writer Ken Auletta — so, too, was the law and the legal system itself. Lawsuits were as central as public relations or loans from banks to the building of Trump’s business and the burnishing of his brand. And he came to understand during the decade of the ’80s that he didn’t have to play defense. He could just start on offense.
Trump bought the 15-story apartment building at the prime location of 100 Central Park South in 1981. He wanted to turn it into a fancier condominium. He just needed the mostly rent-controlled tenants to get out, and he quickly began legal proceedings to try to make that happen, filing with the city applications for permits for eviction and demolition. He sued one tenant for not paying his rent even though he had. He also got the company he had hired to run the building to cut back on services, like security, hot water and heat. At one point he made a plainly disingenuous offer to the city to house free of charge some of the area’s homeless in the building’s few vacant units. “I just want to help with the homeless problem,” he told the Times. He put tin on the windows of the empty apartments to make the whole building look shabby. One of the tenants told the Times, it felt like they were “living under a state of siege.”
So the tenants pooled money to hire attorneys to sue back. And judges sided with the tenants, not him, and so did state and city agencies, ruling that Trump had initiated “spurious” and “unwarranted litigation” that added up to “an unrelenting, systematic and illegal campaign” to “force tenants from their housing accommodations at the earliest possible time.” By 1985, Trump had built Trump Tower, opened two casinos in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and been on the cover of GQ. But Central Park South? This, as New York magazine put it on its cover, was “A Different Kind of Donald Trump Story” — “a fugue of failure, a farce of fumbling and bumbling.” The tenants had had it. “This merchant, this gambler, this Atlantic City man-whore,” one of them told a reporter for a British magazine. “He wants to be Jesus. He wants to be Hitler. He wants to be the most powerful thing in the world.”
Stymied, Trump in December of that year filed, of all things, a $105 million racketeering suit — in effect accusing the tenants’ attorneys and state and city agencies of conspiring against him in a criminal enterprise. He shared the details with the New York Post before he even filed the papers in court.
Trump, shown above in 1986, wanted to turn 100 Central Park South into a fancier condominium after buying it in 1981. He just needed the mostly rent-controlled tenants to get out. | Mario Suriani/AP; Bettmann Archive via Getty Images
“He had a temper tantrum,” Rick Fischbein, one of the attorneys for the tenants, told me recently. “He sued the firm. He brought a RICO action,” said David Rozenholc, another one of the attorneys for the tenants, “to try to get leverage.” It was “frivolous” and “absurd,” Rozenholc told me. But still: “You are an attorney representing a client, and suddenly you are being sued. It gives you a headache, it gives you a problem, it gives you an issue — you have to deal with it, you have to hire a lawyer …”
That lawyer was Marty London. “We attacked the claim on the merits, and quickly,” London told me. And time was of the essence, he explained, in large part because the firm’s bank account had been frozen because of the size of Trump’s claim. Any undue delay would accrue to the benefit of Trump and to the detriment of the defendants — and the judges seemed to understand. “It took a month to get it dismissed,” London recalled, and the appeal was similarly fast-tracked. “Further pleading would merely waste the time and resources of the litigants as well as divert scarce judicial resources,” an appellate judge concluded, denying Trump’s motion to replead “with prejudice.”
“Trump saw that the way to beat these people, these tenants, it was not on the merits, because there were no merits,” London told me. “So what you do is attack the lawyer,” he said. “You make the lawyer so afraid of Trump that he quits. That’s what he tried to do.”
But the lawyers did not quit. London even got a judge to order Trump to pay Fischbein’s firm $700,000 in fees, including London’s costs in the RICO case. Fischbein hung on the wall of his office a framed copy of Trump’s check along with a blue-T-shirt with a boast: “ I was sued by Donald Trump for $105 million.”
“He lost,” Fischbein told me last month.
Eventually, though, Trump turned 100 Central Park South into a condo called Trump Parc East. “His public position now,” Wayne Barrett would write in his book about Trump published in 1992, “was that the tenant battle had delayed his project just long enough for him to benefit from the boom in the market. So he announced that he had made money from the protracted conflict.” The upshot in The Art of the Deal: “All’s well that ends well.” A legal loss, Trump reasoned, didn’t have to be a loss overall.
A portrait of Donald Trump hangs inside Mar-a-Lago in Palm Beach, Fla., in 1995. | Ron Galella via Getty Images
‘He uses the legal system to tire people out’
Trump was in deep financial distress in the early ’90s. The arc of his life could have been irrevocably altered — and that of the nation, it turns out — had he been truly brought low by his debts, and had a passel of people with power made different decisions. That image he sought to convey, that brand he wanted to burnish — money maestro, billionaire business boss — in this window of time might have been tarnished forever. “Survive ‘til ’95,” Trump liked to say. He did it with family money. He did it through bankruptcy. He did it by turning his casinos into public money — a lifeline that was “the general public” in “middle America” trusting Trump and buying literal stock called DJT. He did it by turning Mar-a-Lago into a private club — and a lawsuit into a golf course. And he did that by opening up a whole new legal front in Florida — in Palm Beach.
“He sued the county,” former county commissioner Karen Marcus told me, “over airport noise.”
It was June of ’95. This had been a Trump pet peeve for years — almost ever since he had bought Mar-a-Lago 10 years before. But now he actually filed a suit for $75 million in damages because one of the flight paths for Palm Beach International Airport took low-flying planes directly over Mar-a-Lago. “Mar-a-Lago can no longer be enjoyed for its original purposes of relaxation, entertaining and everyday living,” the suit said. The next week, county commissioners sued him back, hiring a law firm for $190 an hour. “I think it’s ridiculous Mr. Trump has taken on the taxpayers of Palm Beach County,” commission chairman Ken Foster said at the time, “thinking his pockets are deeper than ours.” It’s exactly what he was thinking.
Top: A plane flies over Mar-a-Lago in 1999. Bottom: (Left to right) Businessman Alfons Schmitt, Trump, and golf course architect Jim Fazio at the Trump International Golf Club groundbreaking ceremony in Palm Beach in 1997. | Art Seitz/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images; Davidoff Studios/Getty Images
“I first met Trump in the late ’80s,” former Palm Beach town councilman and mayor Jack McDonald told me. “And for all those years,” he said, “the strategy’s been quite clear.”
“He uses the legal system,” said Alan (no relation to Karen) Marcus, a Trump publicist at the time, “to tire people out.”
“He thinks the lawsuit will be easier for him to bear than his opponent,” a person in Palm Beach familiar with Trump who requested anonymity to speak candidly told me recently. “He doesn’t think he’s going to win necessarily,” this person continued. “He thinks that he’ll spend more money than the other side will, including municipalities, even Palm Beach, and that all of those expenses are much more wearing on government officials than they are on Donald Trump.”
And he was right.
By November ’95, the county’s attorneys told the county commission the Trump airport suit was going to cost the county perhaps more than $1 million. By April of ’96, the county’s attorneys and Trump’s attorneys were talking about a settlement. By September, it was official: Trump agreed to drop the suit. In return he got the right to lease at $438,000 a year — for at least 30 years, and up to 75 — 214 acres of untouched scrub land by the very same airport so he could build the golf course that is now Trump International Golf Club in West Palm Beach. To boot, the county promised to keep the planes from flying directly over Mar-a-Lago.
Trump’s attorney called it “a win-win.” Plenty of people in Palm Beach had feelings that were decidedly more mixed. “I realize you’re settling a lawsuit, but you’re giving up the use of that land for 75 years,” former county commissioner Bill Medlen told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel at the time. Said the Palm Beach Post’s editorial board: “Rather than getting him out of their hair, they have gotten themselves into a 30-year lease with the litigious Mr. Trump.”
Indeed, for the litigious Mr. Trump, a Palm Beach coda came a decade later. In 2006, he put up in front of Mar-a-Lago an American flag that was so big it was against town code — 15 by 25 feet of the Stars and Stripes mounted atop an 80-foot pole. It was bait. The town took it. The fine was $1,250 a day. Trump sued — for $25 million — arguing his giant flag was constitutionally protected speech. “No American should have to get a permit to fly the flag,” he crowed in interviews. Eventually, of course, Trump and the town settled — he made the flag a little smaller, the town waived the fines — but for Trump it was another legal draw that was in all other ways nothing but a win.
A large 15-by-25-foot American flag flies over Mar-a-Lago in October 2006. | Alyssa Schukar/The Palm Beach Post via AP
“It was a success for him in terms of how he was viewed across America,” McDonald, who was the mayor of at the time, told me. “Because that all of a sudden,” said McDonald, who was once a member of Mar-a-Lago but not anymore and told me he’s never voted for Trump, “made him this great American patriot.”
“I think he learned right on this little island a lot of the techniques that he used to become president,” said Laurence Leamer, the author of a book about Trump, Mar-a-Lago and Palm Beach. “Trump came down here just not giving a damn, pushing and pushing, pushing the town, pushing the law.”
According to Tim O’Brien, who came out with a book about Trump in 2005 and and was sued because of it, Trump sued him because of the brand — “to create it, maintain it, and cast it forever in amber.” | Peter Kramer/Getty Images
‘The Rosetta Stone of Donald Trump’s hallucinations’
By the time of the Palm Beach flag flap, any ’90s taint was gone, the overwhelming initial success of “The Apprentice” having reintroduced Trump to much of the country not as a hokey, aging emblem of the high-flying, go-go ’80s but as a still preeminent and ubiquitous tycoon — as a billionaire. The brand was somehow intact, and now again on the rise, and it needed to be protected at all costs.
So he sued Tim O’Brien.
“This book,” O’Brien told the Palm Beach Post when TrumpNation came out in the fall of 2005, “is about how a cartoon character became one of the most famous businessmen in America.”
Plenty of things in the book were unflattering. O’Brien quoted Trump, for instance, saying he had been “bored” when Marla Maples was walking down the aisle at the second of his three weddings. He pegged the Trump Organization as “a teeny operation.” And Trump told the author some things that stood out then and stand out even more now. “If you don’t win, you can’t get away with it,” Trump said. “And I win, I win, I always win …” He also said he considered crying a sign of “weakness” and as an example brought up mob boss John Gotti — the “Teflon Don.” Gotti, Trump told O’Brien, “went through years of trials. He sat with a stone face. He said: ‘Fuck you.’”
None of that, though, is why Trump sued O’Brien. He sued O’Brien essentially because of two sentences that cut straight to the core of the brand.
“Three people with direct knowledge of Donald’s finances, people who had worked closely with him for years,” O’Brien wrote, “told me that they thought his net worth was somewhere between $150 million and $250 million. By anyone’s standards this still qualified Donald as comfortably wealthy, but none of these people thought he was remotely close to being a billionaire.”
Tim O’Brien, shown above in 2017. After O’Brien’s book came out, Trump in the press described him as “a third-rate writer,” a “loser” and “a whack job.” | Matt Winkelmeyer/Getty Images
Donald J. Trump v. Timothy L. O’Brien was in some sense a direct extension of Trump versus the other Trumps — Jules and Eddie Trump — from the suit back in the ’80s.
Those Trumps’ use of their own name, Roy Cohn wrote in court papers in December of 1984, “can only be viewed as a poorly veiled attempt at trading on the good will, reputation and financial credibility of” his client. Their use of the corporate name of the Trump Group, Cohn concluded, was therefore “untenable.” It was a bold claim not least because Jules and Eddie Trump, South African emigrants, were big businessmen themselves — by some measures bigger, in fact, than Donald Trump. One of the main reasons Donald Trump even knew of Jules and Eddie Trump, after all, was that the other Trumps had just bid to buy a drugstore chain for $360 million. The other Trumps’ attorneys’ response was basically bafflement at the notion of “barring the defendants from using their family name.” The legal back-and-forth nonetheless went on for five years.
The other Trumps’ attorneys during their deposition of Trump in not so many words tried to make the case that Trump was a serial legal scourge. They peppered him with questions about the number of times he’d been deposed.
“I really don’t know,” he said. It “unfortunately” was “a part of doing business.” Trump grew testy the longer this line of query lasted. He called their questions “ridiculous.” He complained they were “trying to harass me.”
The other Trumps’ attorneys astutely went back to the beginning. They brought up the DOJ’s case from 1973. Trump bristled. “We acknowledged no wrongdoing,” he said before quickly attacking the inference of racism that hung in the air. “Your clients come from South Africa,” he said, “so don’t tell me about it.”
It was a split decision in the end. A judge concluded that “the name ‘Trump’ is well-recognized in the New York real estate development community, but the court does not think this is the same as being ‘unique.’” Trump did, however, successfully petition the Patent and Trademark Office, which ruled the other Trumps could keep using the name the Trump Group but could not keep the Trump Group trademark. The other Trumps had spent $250,000 in legal fees, because they could, but still: “It was very costly,” Jules Trump would tell the Miami Herald, “and a huge waste of time.” Not for Donald Trump. In his mind, the name was the brand, and the brand belonged to him.
Trump sued fellow New York businessmen Eddie (left) and Jules Trump in the 1980s because they had the same last name.The legal back-and-forth nonetheless went on for five years. | Paul J. Richards/AFP via Getty Images; Monica Schipper/Getty Images
Now, though, in 2005, here was O’Brien’s book. “The thrust of the book,” the suit stated, “is that Trump is an unskilled and dissembling businessman” — his attorneys saying Trump was worth at least $2.7 billion, seeking $5 billion in damages and calling the book “defamatory,” “malicious” and “egregiously false.” Trump went on the offensive in the press as well, describing O’Brien as “a third-rate writer,” a “loser” and “a whack job.”
A judge at first ruled that O’Brien had to reveal his sources, those three people “with direct knowledge” of Trump’s finances — but O’Brien’s lawyers won a series of appeals based on the broad protections for reporters provided by the nation’s libel laws. “The libel laws are very bad,” Trump told the New York Post in 2009. Those laws in essence said O’Brien had to have demonstrated “actual malice” and a “reckless disregard” for the truth in reporting what he did, and an appeals court finally in 2011 reaffirmed “no triable issue as to the existence of actual malice.”
“That case never had a chance of success,” Michael Cohen, Trump’s fixer of a lawyer at the time, told me. “His hope was that he could intimidate O’Brien,” he said. It was also, Cohen added, a threat of sorts meant for other reporters — “a warning shot,” he said.
But that’s not really why Trump sued O’Brien, O’Brien told me when I told him what Cohen had said. It was all about the brand, O’Brien said, just as it’s always been — “to create it, maintain it, and cast it forever in amber.”
“And his deposition was an eternal embarrassment,” O’Brien added. “That deposition is the Rosetta Stone of Donald Trump’s hallucinations, about how he runs his business, how much money he has, how he values things, and who he is in this world.”
“Have you ever lied in public statements about your properties?” Trump was asked.
“When you’re making a public statement, you want to put the most positive — you want to say it the most positive way possible,” he said.
“I’m no different from a politician running for office.”
Trump signs copies of his audio business course — produced by Trump University — called “How to Build a Fortune”, in 2006 in New York City. | Louis Lanzano/AP
‘The Roy Cohn stuff is still really ingrained in him’
Trump University, Donald Trump had announced in 2005, was going to be “Ivy League-quality” with “world-class faculty” ready to “teach you better than the best business school.” What it ended up being, according to “students” and staff, was “a joke” and “a lie.” So some of them sued him. Customers filed class-action suits starting in 2010. And then the attorney general of New York filed a sweeping $40-million civil suit in 2013, charging that thousands of people paid up to $35,000 for what in the main was a sham, leaving them with scant lessons of any value but mired in mountains of debt and regret. “Trump University,” Eric Schneiderman said, “with Donald Trump’s knowledge and participation, relied on Trump’s name recognition and celebrity status to take advantage of consumers who believed in the Trump brand.”
Trump was on defense again — reminiscent in this respect of the DOJ case from a full 40 years before. And even without Cohn in his corner, of course, Trump went to work in time-tested ways. “The Roy Cohn stuff is still really ingrained in him,” said Ty Cobb, the former Trump attorney. “I have thoughts about Roy Cohn,” longtime politically connected New York P.R. man George Arzt said, “almost every time I see Donald Trump.”
Trump’s new Cohn?
It wasn’t Michael Cohen, and it wasn’t anybody else, said Lawrence Douglas, an Amherst College professor who’s written extensively about Trump and the law.
“It’s Donald Trump.”
The big difference, though, was that Trump now was much more squarely playing politics, too. He had talked about running for president in the late ’80s. He had launched a brief third-party bid in 2000. But by this point he was considering more seriously a run for the White House. He spent a lot of 2011 stoking the racist “birtherism” lie that Barack Obama had been born in Kenya and therefore was not a legitimate commander in chief. He thought hard about running in 2012, and though he didn’t, his endorsement meant something in the GOP. And he had his eye on 2016 — and the damning, mounting legal problems stemming from his for-profit “school” were a problem.
“No one, no matter how rich or famous they are, has a right to scam hardworking New Yorkers. Anyone who does should expect to be held accountable,” Schneiderman told the New York Daily News. Trump is “going to have to face justice,” he said on CNBC. “And he doesn’t like doing that.”
What Trump University ended up being, according to “students” and staff, was “a joke” and “a lie.” | Gregory Bull/AP
Trump attacked Schneiderman personally, calling him “a lightweight” and “a sleazebag” and countersuing for (a familiar) $100 million. He hit him legally, calling the suit “incompetent.” And he attacked Schneiderman politically — the suit, he said, was “thug politics.”
Trump had made to Schneiderman in 2010 a $12,500 donation. “He was very unhappy because he wanted me to do much more than that,” Trump said on Fox News. “He wanted me to introduce him to a lot of my friends, my big business friends. I didn’t have time for it. He came up to my office. And, in fact, I actually gave him a contribution before he was elected. I think he was down in the polls. But it was never enough for him.”
“By the way,” Trump told George Stephanopoulos on “Good Morning America” on ABC, “he meets with President Obama on Thursday evening in Syracuse. He meets with him. On Saturday at 1 o’clock, he files a suit. So I’m gonna ask you …”
“So you’re saying President Obama is behind this?”
He didn’t answer. He just repeated himself. “He’s been looking into this thing for two years. He brings a lawsuit on Saturday afternoon, right after he meets with President Obama …”
Two and a half years later, obviously, Trump was at the very center of American politics, and the Trump University suits were not only still active but getting closer and closer to going to trial. And Trump was railing away not on TV talk shows but at packed rallies as the would-be Republican nominee. At a rally in Arkansas in late February of 2016, he attacked one of the class-action plaintiffs, mispronouncing her name and calling her a “horrible witness.” He attacked the attorney general for “doing a terrible job.” And he attacked one of the judges, whom he called “very hostile,” referring, too, to his Hispanic heritage in a plain, race-baiting dig.
Copies of “How To Build Wealth,” a series of nine audio business courses created by Trump University, lie on display at a Barnes & Noble store in New York City in 2005. | Scott Gries/Getty Images
“But I believe I can turn it around,” Trump told the crowd, “just to show you how dishonest these people are.” And the crowd cheered. And then Trump won on Super Tuesday, and then the party’s nomination, and then the November election. And then the president-elect settled with the attorney general and the class-action plaintiffs, agreeing to pay an aggregate $25 million.
That Trump would win the White House on a populist platform while preying on poor people — it’s a paradox that confounds his critics. “He has these people that are drawn to him because of his charisma and this image that he projects, and then the people that loved him the most, he actually hurt the most,” Tristan Snell, the lead prosecutor in the attorney general’s case, told me. “That’s the thing that people don’t get about this — still to this day — and it’s been replicated with the people who support him politically now.”
Snell has a book due out later this month. It’s called Taking Down Trump.
“There is still understandably a great deal of mixed feeling, of cautious optimism and bitter pessimism, on the question of whether justice will one day come for Donald Trump — or whether justice in America still exists all. It is perhaps the most important question,” Snell writes. “The answer to that question may well determine much of our collective fate.
“If the greatest malefactors are, in effect, untouchable, beyond the reach of the law, subject to a different set of rules — or no rules at all,” he continues, “then we will likely slip into a spiral from which we may never recover.”
A vendor moves his cart, which includes a flag that reads “THE RULES HAVE CHANGED,” outside a Trump rally on Dec. 19, 2023, in Waterloo, Iowa | Charlie Neibergall/AP
‘He’s pushing the system to the breaking point’
“Waterloo,” said Donald Trump.
“We cover all corners of your great state. You know that,” he said at the start of his rally late last month in this small city in eastern Iowa. “And they said, ‘What about Waterloo?’ I said, ‘We gotta get to Waterloo.’”
In spite of the potentially inauspicious name of the site of this event, Iowa, it seems, will not be Trump’s end. He enters Monday as maybe the biggest Republican favorite in the history of the state’s caucuses. At Trump’s rallies these days the most notable addition to the standard red MAGA hats and the vulgar Biden signs and the “Macho Man” soundtrack are the mug-shot shirts — with Trump’s glowering face on the front coupled with his message of “NEVER SURRENDER.”
At this particular convention center, I met a 55-year-old “semi-retired” independent contractor from Evansville, Indiana, who was attending his 86th Trump rally. “I’ll still vote for him if he’s in a prison cell,” Mike Boatman told me. “They can bring the Oval Office desk right inside of the prison cell.” I met a 27-year-old Muslim from the suburbs of Chicago who is training to be a police officer and was wearing a red hat. He asked that I not name him because his immigrant father detests Trump and didn’t know he was here. “My faith in the justice system, because of the indictments,” he said, “is at an all-time low.” I met a couple from nearby Charles City. Trust the justice system? “Why the fuck would I?” said Jeannie Waddingham, 53. But Trump? “I do,” she said.
“This is the lawfare by the Democrats to take him out, and people see that as unjust,” said Mike Davis of the Trump-supporting Article III Project. “No way” Trump would be looking like the runaway nominee, Davis told me, if not for the indictments.
And that’s because people don’t trust the system. They trust Trump. And that’s because Trump’s told them to — for 50 years. He started doing this in the ’70s, teaming with Cohn and accusing the government of “Gestapo-like” tactics and “smears.” He kept doing it in the ’80s, always playing the victim of Central Park South, claiming people were out to get him and using the courts to do it. “Trump,” Trump told the Times, “is not going to be harassed.” He did it in Palm Beach, and he did it when he sued O’Brien, and he did it with Trump U., and he only escalated the efforts once he came down the escalator in Trump Tower in 2015 and especially after he lost to Biden in 2020. He sends to supporters email after email every day asking for money for his campaign by attacking “Crooked Joe” and “the Radical Democrats” and “villainous forces” and “crooks” and “thugs” and “fools” and “their phony charges” and “this vicious witch hunt” and their “SHAM TRIALS.” Nothing is on the level, and the institutions can’t be trusted, and the system can’t be trusted, he has insidiously hammered home, and so he is free, he suggests, to go after the people he says have gone after him. It is, as George Conway said at the opening gathering of the Society for the Rule of Law in early November in Washington, “an infectious disease that is affecting the entire body politic.”
“He has made himself the arbiter of fairness,” Hank Sheinkopf, the longtime New York Democratic strategist who has watched Trump work for decades, told me, “for those who feel that they have been unfairly put upon.”
“He is wearing our institutions down to their nubs,” lawyer and legal analyst Danielle McLauglin told me, “and the judicial system, the system of justice, I think, is particularly vulnerable to him.”
“He’s pushing the system to the breaking point,” Ian Bassin told me.
“He’s poisoned the well,” Brian Klaas told me.
“It’s of surpassing importance what happens,” Judge Luttig told me, “but that still doesn’t change the fact that he’s already laid waste to our democracy and to our elections and to the rule of law.”
At Trump’s December rally in Waterloo, the most notable addition to the standard merch were the mug-shot shirts — with Trump’s glowering face on the front coupled with his message of “NEVER SURRENDER.” | Scott Olson/Getty Images
“That’s really the greatest danger he poses to our democracy,” Zirin told me. “Not that there would be a Muslim ban, not that he would give tremendous tax breaks to the rich who support him, not any of the Republican plans that he associated with, and not even that he would disengage us from foreign alliances,” he said. “The greatest danger is his undermining of the rule of law.
“Trump,” as Swalwell put it to me, “is a legal terrorist.”
“We’re about to go through a great trial in this country. … We’re going to be testing the proposition that the rule of law applies to everyone and no one’s above the law,” California congressman and Senate candidate Adam Schiff told me. “It will be particularly wrenching because Trump will continue to make the false claim that he’s being politically persecuted,” said Schiff, a former federal prosecutor and an impeachment manager in Trump’s first impeachment, “and it will also give Trump the continuing opportunity to tear down the system.”
And now here in Waterloo I heard Trump say immigrants “coming from all over the world” were “destroying the blood of our country.” I heard him say he will “begin the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” I heard him say “slum areas will be demolished.” I heard him say he “will rout the ‘fake news’ media.” I heard him say he’d never even read Hitler’s Mein Kampf. I heard him call the 2020 election “rigged.” I heard him call Biden “truly the worst, most incompetent and most corrupt president in the history of our country.” I heard him call Biden “crooked” — 12 times. I heard him say, “They say, ‘I’m a threat to democracy.’ No, Joe Biden is a threat to democracy.” I heard him call the FBI “the Biden FBI” and the Department of Justice “the department of injustice.” I heard him say he “will direct a completely overhauled DOJ to investigate every radical, out-of-control prosecutor.” I heard him call special counsel Jack Smith “deranged.” I heard him call the documents case a “hoax.” I heard him say he “can’t get a fair trial in Washington.” I heard him say “Biden and the far-left lunatics” were “willing to violate the U.S. constitution.” I heard him say they were “weaponizing law enforcement.” I heard him call the indictments against him “a great badge of honor.” And I heard him say he had good news. “The good news is people get it. That’s why my poll numbers are so high,” he said. “I think we’d be winning by a lot, but now we’re winning by numbers that nobody can believe.” I heard the crowd roar. “This is the single biggest election in the history of our country,” Trump said. “This is going to determine whether or not we even have a country.”
And when the rally was over, I watched the people walk out into the cold, dark night, past the mug-shot merch, past the bumper stickers saying RIGGED, past the flags saying THE RULES HAVE CHANGED.
It’s a trap! Small towns across US use traffic tickets to collect big money from drivers.
Matthew Prensky and Rob Johnson – December 26, 2023
Towns across America are once again relying on an old scheme to generate revenue: Turn their police forces into collection agencies to squeeze money out of the citizens they are sworn to protect.
From Texas to Ohio, municipalities are using law enforcement to counteract declining tax bases through the aggressive enforcement of fineable offenses such as speeding. A 2019 report estimated that nearly 600 jurisdictions nationwide generate at least 10% of their general fund revenue through fines and forfeitures.
Yet, the current initiatives erode community trust, harm public safety and violate Americans’ constitutional rights. And the scale, of both the number of tickets written and the amount of money collected, is astounding.
In Peninsula, Ohio, police used handheld speed cameras to issue 8,900 speeding tickets in only five months this year, generating at least $1.3 million in fines. That’s more than 16 tickets per resident in the community of 536 people.
The village, with an annual budget of about $1 million, collected $400,000 in fines. The private company that supplies the cameras, Targeting and Solutions Ltd., received more than $250,000 in fines issued to motorists.
Worse, Peninsula requires individuals to pay a $100 fee to contest a citation in municipal court. Those who can’t afford the fee are stripped of their constitutional right to due process. Even those who can afford the fee risk nearly doubling the cost of their ticket if the fine is upheld. Even if you believe you’re innocent, the rational thing to do is just to pay.
Other municipalities have enacted their own policing-for-profit programs. In Brookside, Alabama, the town of about 1,200 residents saw its revenue increase more than 640% in only two years, according to AL.com, after police began an aggressive traffic stop and ticket-writing campaign. Fines and forfeitures made up almost half of the town’s budget.
In Texas, Coffee City, with a population of about 250 people, hired 50 full-time and reserve police officers, who wrote more than 5,000 citations last year. The town collected more than $1 million in fines.
Moreover, these programs often violate other constitutional rights like protections against unreasonable searches and seizures, or the prohibition against the issuance of excessive fines.
Beyond these constitutional problems, a 2019 study performed by the Institute for Justice showed that a heavy reliance on fines or fees can reduce a community’s trust and cooperation with its police department. An unrelated 2018 study found cities that rely on fines solve violent and property crimes at significantly lower rates.
Nothing about these schemes has anything to do with helping the public. If it did, municipalities wouldn’t need to engineer bogus reasons to pull someone over or impose fees designed to dissuade individuals from appealing their tickets.
If Peninsula’s program was meant to promote public safety, as officials claim, the village would’ve done more to warn the 12,000 visitors who pass through town while visiting Cuyahoga Valley National Park. Instead, Peninsula warned its residents that the tickets would be coming, but provided no such alert to visitors.
Government shouldn’t treat citizens like a piggy bank
No government should be allowed to treat citizens like ATMs. The Constitution is meant to safeguard the American people from government abuses like this.
The Institute for Justice has sued dozens of local governments for infringing on citizens’ rights by collecting unreasonable fees through procedures that violate individuals’ rights to due process. In Peninsula, the institute warned village officials that they needed to bring their speed enforcement program into compliance with the Constitution or face a lawsuit.
These revenue-generating initiatives are a nuisance to communities across America. They abuse people’s civil liberties, destroy community trust and harm public safety. Luckily, the liberties enshrined in the Constitution can help Americans stand up to towns like Peninsula and force them to stop treating citizens like walking piggy banks.
Matthew Prensky is a writer and Rob Johnson is a senior attorney at the Institute for Justice.
Why a 100-year supply? How Arizona got its famous, yet arbitrarily numbered groundwater rule
Ray Stern, Arizona Republic – December 26, 2023
Arizona’s 100-year water supply requirement came into sharp focus this year when Gov. Katie Hobbs announced news of a potential shortfall.
It came up again recently when state Senate President Warren Petersen publicly discussed why the requirement is 100 years and not some other number.
Petersen, R-Gilbert, said the number is arbitrary during a meeting about the state’s financial health in November. Petersen denied he’s planning, or has heard of plans, for new legislation next year to change the number.
The longtime politician hailing from a family of homebuilders said in the aftermath of Hobbs’ announcement he wants the public to know Arizona has “plenty of water” to continue building homes. He stood by the position in a Dec. 13 interview on azcentral.com’s Gaggle podcast.
“Why is it 100 years?” he said on the podcast. “Why isn’t it 105 years — why isn’t it 95 years? California’s (rule) is 25 years … You don’t go to the gas station and buy 100 years of gas.”
What is the 100-year requirement?
The Indigenous Hohokam, forefathers of the Pima, Maricopa and other Native American tribes, thrived for centuries in what are now called the Phoenix and Pinal Active Management Areas.
These parts of the state are flush with surface water in certain areas, augmented by the Central Arizona Project canal that moves water from Colorado River reservoirs to communities including Tucson.
They also contain untold acre-feet of groundwater, which experts say is still being pumped out at unsustainable rates. An acre-foot of water is roughly enough to serve two to three households for a year.
The amount pumped from the Active Management Areas is regulated because of the Groundwater Management Act. The law, passed in 1980 by the Arizona Legislature and former Democratic Gov. Bruce Babbitt, is still praised as one of the most forward-thinking water laws in the country.
It requires developers of housing subdivisions in the Active Management Areas to prove a 100-year water supply actually exists on the land before they fire up the bulldozers.
One of its goals was to steer the state’s fast-growing development into the Active Management Areas that have more water than other parts of Arizona. It also helped ensure the CAP canal would receive help from federal officials, who required a check on groundwater pumping.
The requirement has two major provisions. The first is that metro Phoenix developers must either obtain an agreement to build homes from a city or another “designated assured water supply,” which includes some water companies. These water-distributing entities use surface water to replenish the groundwater they use.
Developers outside of major city areas, but still in Active Management Areas, must obtain a certificate from the state Department of Water Resources showing that a property has a 100-year water supply.
The act doesn’t affect rural Arizona or parts outside of the management areas. It also doesn’t generally affect industrial, agricultural or commercial sites that weren’t built as part of subdivided lands.
Is 100 years the right number?
Fraudulent land sales in Arizona led the state to pass a law in 1973 forcing developers to disclose if there’s an “adequate” water supply on land they sell. Arizona officials determined a few years later that “adequate” meant water “continuously available” for at least 100 years.
Critics at the time argued for 30 to 50 years, saying that would be more in line with the 30-year mortgage typically used in borrowing money to buy a home. A former land commissioner called the 100-year requirement “unrealistic, arbitrary and capricious.”
State officials ignored their concerns and stuck with 100 years. The number was soon codified in the 1980 Groundwater Management Act, which banned development in the Active Management Areas where at least a century’s worth of water could not be proven.
Kathy Ferris, a lawyer and one of the architects of the 1980 law, said that she and the late Jack DeBolske, former executive director of the League of Arizona Cities and Towns, pushed for the “adequate water supply” rule of “at least 100 years” to be included in their sweeping new law.
“We really didn’t discuss the number of years,” said Ferris, now a senior researcher for the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute.
Water expert Sarah Porter, executive director for the Kyl Center for Water Policy at Arizona State University’s Morrison Institute, agrees with Petersen that the number “100” isn’t validated scientifically. But she doesn’t think it should be lowered.
“In the minds of greatest water planners and industry leaders, 100 years was the right time frame,” Porter said. “New water-supply projects have very long timelines because of the vulnerability of cities and how devastating it could be for a city to have a serious water shortage.”
Considering the growth in Maricopa County over the past 40 years, “I’m very thankful it’s a 100-year timeline.”
If it were only 40 years, for example, it might be tougher to convince people that buying a home in metro Phoenix would still be a good investment decades from now, she said.
Arizona’s water supply is well-managed
Porter pointed out that in most Phoenix-area cities, the 100-year rule gets extended every 15 years.
For now, scientific modeling shows the system can go on almost indefinitely in these better-watered areas. Yet outlying parts of metro Phoenix that require a 100-year certificate for development don’t provide the same assurance.
In Petersen’s view, the 4% deficit means that some areas “only have a 96-year supply.”
If Arizona’s rule required only a 95-year supply, or 25-year supply like in California, “nobody would be talking about how Arizona is out of water,” Petersen said on the podcast.
Yet the problem is that “some areas would be hit harder than others, especially in Buckeye,” Ferris said. She added she believes Petersen is “in denial” about the water supply.
“We have a problem in some places. California has a problem in many places. There is not plenty of water for everyone to do just do as they please,” she said.
With climate change, drought and fights over dwindling levels of Colorado River water available for all of the states that use it, water researchers want to see more regulation, not less.
“In 1980, 100 years was a big lift,” Ferris said. “Now I definitely think it’s not long enough.”
No ruling by the courts, not even one by the U.S. Supreme Court, will change the fact that Los Angeles’ housing costs are out of reach for most people. Many of us are one missed paycheck, illness or mistake away from ending up in a tent on the sidewalk, and an anti-camping ordinance won’t stop people from doing what they must to survive.
We are all frustrated by the street conditions, but instead of brutal sweeps that shuffle people like trash from one corner to the next, our leaders should focus on affordable housing and protecting tenants from eviction.
Rae Huang, Los Angeles
The writer is senior organizer with the group Housing Now.
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To the editor: Those of us who grew up in the 1950s never saw our cities’ sidewalks or parks overrun with tents pitched by the unhoused.
Yes, we had seen homeless encampments elsewhere. They typically were located on the outskirts of towns, along railroad tracks and on stream beds.
Back then, vagrancy laws barred people from camping within city limits. Furthermore, the number of unhoused people was kept low by two factors: Jobs were abundant, and state mental hospitals housed thousands of people who would have otherwise lived on the street.
Within a few decades momentous changes steadily accelerated homelessness. Courts struck down vagrancy laws. Psychiatric hospitals were emptied. Automation, computerization and job outsourcing to foreign countries diminished employment opportunities.
Evidently the foreseeable downsides of those changes escaped our leaders’ notice — that, or there was no political upside to addressing these downsides. It’s time to pay the homelessness piper.
Betty Turner, Sherman Oaks
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To the editor: Unfortunately, homeless encampments eventually become public health hazards. How do we balance the rights of unhoused individuals against the rights of the communities affected by encampments?
Despite all the good intentions and funds that have been directed toward alleviating the problem, nothing seems to have long-term impact.
There are deeper systemic issues at play here that have to do with the income inequalities that exist in our society and need to be solved at the federal level. Until that happens (and I’m not holding my breath), local efforts will continue to have limited effect.
John Beckman, Chino Hills
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To the editor: Cities can’t remove encampments unless there is a place for unhoused residents to go.
A few months ago, The Times reported on a study that found there were more than 100 vacant, government-owned parcels in L.A. that could be used for housing. These properties could provide toilets, water, electricity and even a physical address where one could get mail.
Thousands join migrant caravan in Mexico ahead of Secretary of State Blinken’s visit to the capital
Edgar H. Clemente – December 24, 2023
Migrants depart from Tapachula, Mexico, Sunday, Dec. 24, 2023. The caravan started the trek north through Mexico just days before U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Mexico City to discuss new agreements to control the surge of migrants seeking entry into the United States. (AP Photo/Edgar Hernandez Clemente)
TAPACHULA, Mexico (AP) — A sprawling caravan of migrants from Central America, Venezuela, Cuba and other countries trekked through Mexico on Sunday, heading toward the U.S. border. The procession came just days before Secretary of State Antony Blinken arrives in Mexico City to hammer out new agreements to control the surge of migrants seeking entry into the United States.
The caravan, estimated at around 6,000 people, many of them families with young children, is the largest in more than a year, a clear indication that joint efforts by the Biden administration and President Andrés Manuel López Obrador’s government to deter migration are falling short.
The Christmas Eve caravan departed from the city of Tapachula, near the country’s southern border with Guatemala. Security forces looked on in what appeared to be a repeat of past tactics when authorities waited for the marchers to tire out and then offered them a form of temporary legal status that is used by many to continue their journey northward.
“We’ve been waiting here for three or four months without an answer,” said Cristian Rivera, traveling alone, having left his wife and child in his native Honduras. “Hopefully with this march there will be a change and we can get the permission we need to head north.”
López Obrador in May agreed to take in migrants from countries such as Venezuela, Nicaragua and Cuba turned away by the U.S. for not following rules that provided new legal pathways to asylum and other forms of migration.
But that deal, aimed at curbing a post-pandemic jump in migration, appears to be insufficient as the number of migrants once again surges, disrupting bilateral trade and stoking anti-migrant sentiment among conservative voters in the U.S.
This month, as many as 10,000 migrants were arrested per day at the U.S. southwest border. Meanwhile, U.S. Customs and Border Protection had to suspend cross-border rail traffic in the Texas cities of Eagle Pass and El Paso as migrants were riding atop freight trains.
Arrests for illegal crossing topped 2 million in each of the U.S. government’s last two fiscal years, reflecting technological changes that have made it easier for migrants to leave home to escape poverty, natural disasters, political repression and organized crime.
On Friday, López Obrador said he was willing to work again with the U.S. to address concerns about migration. But he also urged the Biden administration to ease sanctions on leftist governments in Cuba and Venezuela — where about 20% of 617,865 migrants encountered nationwide in October and November hail from — and send more aid to developing countries in Latin America and beyond.
“That is what we are going to discuss, it is not just contention,” López Obrador said at a press briefing Friday following a phone conversation the day before with President Joe Biden to pave the way for the high level U.S. delegation.
The U.S. delegation, which will meet the Mexican president on Wednesday, will also include Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas and White House homeland security adviser Liz Sherwood-Randall.
Mexico’s ability to assist the U.S. may be limited, however. In December, the government halted a program to repatriate and transfer migrants inside Mexico due to a lack of funds. So far this year, Mexico has detected more than 680,000 migrants living illegally in the country, while the number of foreigners seeking asylum in the country has reached a record 137,000.
Sunday’s caravan was the largest since June 2022, when a similarly sized group departed as Biden hosted leaders in Los Angeles for the Summit of the Americas. Another march departed Mexico in October, coinciding with a summit organized by López Obrador to discuss the migration crisis with regional leaders. A month later, 3,000 migrants blocked for more than 30 hours the main border crossing with Guatemala.
Associated Press writers Joshua Goodman in Miami and Maria Verza in Mexico City contributed to this report.
STORY: Mexican authorities on Friday sent a planeload of migrants from Piedras Negras, near the US border, to southern Mexico to be returned to their countries of origin.
The move came just hours after Mexican President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador announced that his government will reinforce measures to contain migration.
As the United States copes with record numbers of people trying to reach the U.S. border, Mexico is looking to help.
“We will boost as much as we can to help maintain an orderly flow,” said Lopez Obrador, adding “Recently, there was an abnormal surge.”
Lopez Obrador’s comments came a day after he spoke with U.S. President Joe Biden.
Both agreed that more enforcement was needed at their shared frontier, as record numbers of migrants disrupt border trade.
This year, the number of migrants crossing the perilous Darien Gap straddling Colombia and Central America topped half a million – double that of last year’s record.
News of Lopez Obrador’s comments reached migrants as they made their way through Mexico to the U.S. border.
Honduran migrant Kerlin Silva said the new rules might mean he won’t be able to, (quote) “fulfill the American dream.”
According to the United Nations, migrants are heading through Mexico to the U.S. to escape violence, economic distress, and the negative impacts of climate change.
Lopez Obrador said Mexico would also step up containment efforts on its southern border with Guatemala as his government seeks agreements with other countries to manage the northbound migrant flows.
Top U.S. officials are set to visit Mexico next week to follow up on the call between Lopez Obrador and Biden.
A Record Number of Billion-Dollar Weather Disasters Hit the U.S. in 2023
Yale Environment 360 – December 20, 2023
Billion-dollar weather disasters in the U.S. by year. Climate Central
In 2023, the U.S. experienced a record 25 billion-dollar weather and climate disasters — three more than the previous record, set in 2020.
As greenhouse gases continue to accumulate in the atmosphere, extreme events — hurricanes, severe storms, heavy rainfall, flooding, wildfires, extreme heat, and drought — are becoming ever more frequent, intense, and dangerous. Between 1980 and 2022, the U.S averaged eight billion-dollar weather disasters each year, according to NOAA. Between 2018 and 2022, it recorded 18 such disasters on average. This year saw an unprecedented 25 billion-dollar disasters.
Not surprisingly, the average time between billion-dollar disasters has dramatically shrunk. In the 1980s, according to an analysis of government data by Climate Central, there was an average of 82 days between such disasters. Between 2018 and 2022, with more carbon in the atmosphere and more people and property in harm’s way, the lull between billion-dollar disasters dropped to an average of just 18 days. In the first eleven months of 2023, that lull was just 10 days.
Average number of days between billion-dollar disasters in the U.S. Climate Central
Today’s climate impacts reflect around 1.1 degrees C of global warming, said Climate Central, noting that impacts worsen with every bit of additional warming. But “if we commit to rapid and sustained cuts in carbon pollution, it could set younger generations on a path toward a far safer future with less warming and fewer risky extreme events.”
