Adam Gopnik’s latest essay for The New Yorker explores how Adolf Hitler was able to rise to power in Nazi Germany—which happened largely because people believed they would be able to control him.
Gopnik tells The New Abnormal co-host Danielle Moodie that the same could be said for Donald Trump leading into the 2024 election.
“You had this character who was regarded as a chaotic clown by everyone around him. The conservative minister of defense called him a psychopath,” he said. “Yet all of those people, the media moguls, the respectable conservatives, ended up aiding and abetting him in every way in his search for power and they did it in a way that is, yes, disconcertingly familiar to us.”
“They all thought they could manage him. They all thought they could control him. They all thought that they could take advantage of his movement for their own ends. And that on the day when it all blew up, because it had to blow up because he was a psychopath and clearly not capable of exercising power, they would be there to inherit,” he said.
Gopnik says that those who propped up Hitler believed they could “control the beast” and that they would “end up the ultimate victors.” However, as history shows, that wasn’t the case.
“Those patterns are frightening to see emerging again and again throughout history.”
It’s rare for a federal judge to appear on a news program for any reason. But to appear on one for the purpose of criticizing a party in an active case was so extraordinary it rendered my colleague, Sarah Isgur, nearly speechless.
“This is a sitting federal judge commenting on a criminal defendant in a pending trial in his district,” she tweeted in reaction to the news. Not a word of that sentence is overtly critical, but it didn’t need to be. Merely describing what had happened conveyed the depth of her astonishment.
If it matters to you, Reggie Walton is a senior judge rather than an active judge, which means he hears cases on a reduced and irregular schedule for the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. He isn’t presiding over Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Washington for trying to overturn the 2020 election; Judge Tanya Chutkan is in charge of that. And if you watch the interview he did with Kaitlan Collins, you’ll find that he spoke mainly in generalities about threats to judges instead of focusing on Trump.
But so what?
The context for the CNN segment was Trump’s attempt to intimidate the judge overseeing his upcoming criminal trial over the Stormy Daniels hush-money payoff. Collins made that explicit on social media:
Judge Walton understood that context. He knew, of course, that Trump is a criminal defendant right now not only in his home district but in Florida, Georgia, and New York. He must have recognized that prospective jurors in each of those venues might see the interview and have their views of Trump’s guilt colored by a notable judge’s dim regard for his behavior.
As you may have heard, Trump is also the Republican nominee for president. Even if no jurors end up being influenced by Judge Walton’s interview, some voters very well might be. Federal judges aren’t supposed to be campaigning against candidates for office. So what was he doing on CNN?
Canon 2 of the Code of Conduct for United States Judges urges jurists to “act at all times in a manner that promotes public confidence in the integrity and impartiality of the judiciary.” Canon 5 warns them against engaging in “political activity.” Whether or not Judge Walton’s conduct ran afoul of either is above my pay grade, but the appearance of impropriety was glaring enough for numerous Trump boosters to complain loudly about it online.
How seriously should we take them?
One of my editors described Judge Walton’s appearance as the latest in a series of “broken clock” moments for Trump’s critics. A broken clock is right twice a day, the saying goes; insofar as Trump reflexively whines about corruption and unfairness after every setback he faces, most famously following the 2020 election, he’s a broken clock.
But sometimes, Trump’s antagonists overreach by making special exceptions to institutional norms just for him. When they do, the broken clock appears correct, leading many Americans to wonder whether it’s actually as broken as his critics say.
The reasons for that overreach vary.
Sometimes, the missteps are a matter of earnest gullibility driven by understandable suspicion, as happened when some media outlets published the Steele dossier without affirming the truth of its contents. A special exception from standard journalistic practices was made for Trump because his apologetics for Vladimir Putin are genuinely weird and because he appears amoral by nature to a degree that no U.S. president, Richard Nixon included, has ever been. If any commander-in-chief might plausibly be jungled up with the Kremlin, it’s him.
So a special exception was made. And when it didn’t pan out, the broken clock that’s forever complaining about the media being out to get him seemed correct.
Suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story by Twitter and Facebook in October 2020 falls into the same bucket. A special exception to platform rules was made because it seemed only too likely that Russia was once again trying to lend Trump a hand in the home stretch of an election. Liberals weren’t about to let that happen with victory within reach; the laptop story was suppressed on the assumption that it was enemy disinformation or, at the very least, the product of hacking.
It wasn’t. The broken clock was right.
Sometimes, it’s personal ambition that causes overreach. Prosecutors keen to make a political name for themselves have always eyed high-profile suspects hungrily, but Trump is a historically juicy target due to the animosity Democrats feel for him and the freakishly high political stakes of a conviction before November. Some of his antagonists have gotten sucked into that and dropped the pretense that they’re dispassionately applying the law, instead playing to the cheap seats. Witness Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis warning Trump that “the train is coming” for him, the sort of thing you might hear at a pro wrestling event. Or consider New York State Attorney General Letitia James doing the legal equivalent of end zone dancing by posting daily updates online of how much interest Trump owes in the civil judgment against him.
The broken clock says he’s being persecuted by corrupt, hyperpartisan Democratic lawyers for political gain. Sometimes he seems correct. The fact that Willis has gotten sidetracked by a garish ethical scandal of her own making only seems to drive the point home: Why should Donald Trump pay a legal price for his misconduct when those who sit in judgment of him are compromised themselves?
No wonder that Americans’ views of his criminal culpability have changed.
Insofar as Judge Walton’s CNN interview was another “broken clock” moment, though, neither ambition nor gullibility explains it. I think it’s a matter of sincere exasperation. And while that doesn’t excuse it, it does make it relatable.
On some level, this newsletter is a product of the same sentiment. The reality that half the country is comfortable enough with how Trump behaves that they’re willing to entrust the presidency to him again is so shattering and disillusioning that I often retreat into the belief that they simply mustn’t know how bad he is. I’d better tell them! (And tell them, and tell them, and tell them.) Those of us opposed to a second Trump term can rationalize the current polling by speculating that Americans haven’t paid any attention to what Trump has been up to since 2021 and that they’ll snap out of their stupor soon enough. Ignorance, not indifference, is to blame.
Maybe. But it may also be that they do have some sense of what he’s been up to yet have chosen to remain willfully ignorant about the particulars so as not to create any pangs of guilt before they go out and vote for him again. They know the clock is broken, but they don’t care—and don’t care to be reminded of it.
In their heart of hearts, some might even admit that it’s the brokenness that attracts them.
I can’t read Judge Walton’s mind, but I imagine him finding Trump’s intimidation tactics in the New York case—which now include mentioning the judge’s daughter by name—so far beyond the pale that he concluded some extraordinary measure needed to be taken to alert the public. Threats against judges and prosecutors have been commonplace during Trump’s legal travails, yet Republican voters handed him their party’s presidential nomination anyway almost by acclamation. How is that possible? Can it be that they hadn’t heard anything about them when they cast their ballots for him?
They simply mustn’t know how bad he is, Judge Walton might have figured. I’d better tell them—even if telling them, in this case, meant committing a breach of judicial ethics, proving the broken clock correct once again about American institutions ditching their usual rules to go after Trump.
This is all very conflicting for a Never Trumper.
J. Michael Luttig, a conservative and a former judge himself, commended Walton on Friday for speaking up to try to protect the judiciary from Trump’s goonish tactics “because no one whose responsibility it is to do so has had the courage and the will.”
Luttig went on to say that the United States Supreme Court and its counterparts at the state level should be taking the lead on this, but ultimately, he laid the blame where it belongs: “It is the responsibility of the entire nation to protect its courts and judges, its Constitution, its Rule of Law, and America’s Democracy from vicious attack, threat, undermine, and deliberate delegitimization at the hands of anyone so determined.”
That’s correct, but the nation—or half of it, anyway—has chosen to abdicate that responsibility. How far should institutional actors go in bending their own rules to try to pick up the slack and/or spur that wayward half into caring again?
Forced to choose, I prefer Sarah Isgur’s attitude to Luttig’s. If we must defeat Donald Trump in November to prevent him from smashing American norms, but the only way to defeat him is to smash those norms ourselves, then … what is the point, exactly?
What is classically liberal conservatism conserving in that case?
Underlying Luttig’s argument is the sense that democracy no longer works as well as it used to. American institutions could safely follow the ethical guidelines by which they’ve traditionally abided so long as the people themselves were virtuous enough not to reward a comically vulgar demagogue with power. That virtue has now been lost. And so some institutional actors—like courts, prosecutors, and Judge Walton—may feel an earnest duty to try to fill the vacuum by confronting the demagogue themselves, even if that means carving out ethical exceptions to do so.
I understand the impulse. Trust me, I do. But putting a thumb on the scale by ignoring traditional norms amounts to institutions admitting that they no longer trust the people whom they allegedly serve to defend the constitutional order themselves. The “pro-democracy” movement that opposes Trump is actually pretty anti-democratic in that respect.
If all of that doesn’t move you, consider how swing voters might be processing all of these examples of ethical rules being broken by Trump’s critics in law enforcement. The more correct the broken clock appears to be, the more tempted some of those voters will be to conclude that it isn’t really broken at all. In an election that may turn on Americans’ judgments of whether Trump or his political enemies are more incompetent and corrupt, every “broken clock” moment gets him a little closer to victory.
So, no, Judge Walton shouldn’t have done the interview.
But I can scold him only so much.
The vacuum of condemnation described by Luttig is real, after all, and predictably most pronounced on the American right. It’s an ineffable disgrace that Trump continues to try to intimidate law enforcement in the light of day, up to and including digs at their children, and endures scarcely a word of meaningful protest from anyone to the right of Liz Cheney.
That’s partly because many have been physically intimidated themselves. When former Trump White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci was asked recently why more Republicans weren’t speaking out against the former president, he answered bluntly: “They probably don’t like death threats.” Being threatened with harm by Trump’s rabid fans is now a fact of American political life and no one with a modicum of influence in the GOP has the nerve to object to it. So Judge Walton opted to fill the void.
It’s also hard to get indignant about his CNN appearance in light of the cynicism with which Trump apologists routinely yet falsely spin every bit of institutional resistance he encounters as a “broken clock” moment. Jonathan Chait had their number in a piece published Wednesday by New York magazine in which he identified disingenuous abuse of the term “lawfare” by figures across the American right:
The advantage of this catchall term is that it allows Trump’s defenders to ignore the specifics of Trump’s misconduct, or at least to analyze it in a highly selective way. There are indeed a couple instances in which Trump has faced legal challenges that are questionable (the attempt to disqualify him from the ballot based on the 14th Amendment) or downright weak (Alvin Bragg’s indictment over hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels). Conservatives tend to focus obsessively on these cases, and “lawfare” is a permission structure that allows them to use these cases to ignore or discredit the others, where Trump’s behavior is impossible to defend.
It is a similar rhetorical strategy to the way Republicans dismissed the entire Russia scandal as “Russiagate” (or, in Trump’s preferred phrasing, “Russia, Russia, Russia”). The Russia scandal consisted of innumerable strands and accusations, some of which (most famously the Steele dossier) did not pan out. But the sweeping frame allowed Trump’s defenders to ignore the voluminous evidence of guilt. No need to defend Trump pardoning the campaign manager who had a Russian intelligence agent as a partner when you can just denounce Russiagate as a hoax.
That’s correct, and it’s as true of anti-anti-Trump conservative partisans as it is of diehard MAGA populists. Devoting oneself to running political interference for the Republican Party, as both groups do, requires relentlessly muddying the waters between genuine examples of Trump’s enemies behaving irresponsibly and examples of them simply holding him to account for his own irresponsible behavior. It’s the same impulse that motivates bad-faith right-wing analogies between Trump’s 2020 coup attempt and the fact that certain random Democrats questioned the results when he won in 2016.
Ask yourself: How often do Trump apologists in right-wing media attempt to draw ethical distinctions between Fani Willis on the one hand and Special Counsel Jack Smith on the other? How commonly do they distinguish the dubious Stormy Daniels prosecution in Manhattan from the formidable case against him in Florida for concealing classified documents? Their goal in refusing to do so is to convince Republican voters to lump together all accusations of misconduct against Trump, no matter how well substantiated, and dismiss them out of hand en masse as part of the same meritless “witch hunt.” That goal has largely been achieved
Go figure that Judge Walton thought desperate measures were needed to try to puncture the information bubble by using CNN to reach more conciliatory Republican viewers about threats being made to judges and their families.
I understand his decision to appear on the network for another reason, though.
Trump gets to threaten people, to preemptively cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election, to tease violent unrest if he’s convicted of a crime, and to promise “retribution” for his enemies if he’s elected, all with political impunity. As a matter of moral and civic duty, Joe Biden and the leaders of his party must be better.
It’s the right thing to do. But emotionally, it is maddening to have to engage in asymmetrical political warfare with Trump and his most goonish, dishonest enablers.
Judges aren’t supposed to indulge their emotions in public discourse, which is why I’m Team Isgur more so than Team Luttig. But as a matter of common humanity, one can’t help but sympathize with Judge Walton emotionally for not remaining similarly passive as Trump stoops to thuggery toward the law that even a mafia don would eschew. When someone makes a habit of physically intimidating others, a rule-of-law stickler might understandably feel compelled to raise a very mild objection to it publicly rather than take it lying down.
That’s what Walton did. Consider it a matter of self-defense, a principle Republicans normally cherish and exalt. If the American right won’t defend the courts from Trump’s intimidation racket, shouldn’t the courts defend themselves?
They’ve been moved to defend their integrity from Trump’s attacks before, remember, although admittedly not in the thick of an election campaign when he was facing dozens of federal criminal charges.
The “broken clock” problem exemplified by Judge Walton’s interview recurs eternally in liberal societies confronted by illiberal threats because it feels foolish and self-defeating to follow norms designed to protect the rights of authoritarian cretins who wouldn’t extend the same courtesy if the roles were reversed. And when said cretins start crying crocodile tears about ethical rigor amid their usual hosannas to a man who doesn’t understand ethics as a concept except as something suckers believe in to justify their own weakness, it’s downright infuriating.
The illiberal faction will always cynically exploit ethical lapses by the liberal establishment they resent and hope to replace to draw a moral equivalence between that system and their own brand of “might makes right” politics. Having to indulge them while they play that game is, as I say, sincerely maddening—even for a federal judge.
But what’s the alternative? If the only way to stop Trump from becoming president and appointing partisan judges is to have judges quasi-campaign against him on CNN, the great war over normalizing Trumpism is already over. We lost.
I think we lost regardless, even if we resolve to slap Reggie Walton on the wrist. And I think he thinks so too: He wouldn’t have agreed to appear on CNN, I assume, if he didn’t think the hour was late in getting American voters to care about politicians using threats as a pressure tactic. The battle against Trump might be won in November, but Trump has never been the problem in all this. The real problem will remain.
Conservative Judges Sound Alarm: Trump Will Shred Our Justice System
Ellie Quinlan Houghtaling – March 29, 2024
Donald Trump’s attacks on the judges and court staff overseeing his criminal trials have much deeper legal implications than petty fines. Instead, the attacks—and the responding “passivity, acquiescence, and submissiveness by the nation”—are actively undermining the entire judicial system, prominent conservative judges are warning.
In a CNN interview Thursday evening, Republican-appointed federal District Judge Reggie B. Walton felt compelled to announce that Trump’s continued attacks could result in “tyranny.” Just hours later, former Appeals Court Judge J. Michael Luttig, also a conservative, issued his own warning cry, declaring that Trump is responsible for the “dismantling” of the nation’s “system of justice.”
“The Nation is witnessing the determined delegitimization of both its Federal and State judiciaries and the systematic dismantling of its system of justice and Rule of Law by a single man—the former President of the United States,” started Luttig in a multipart thread on X.
“In the months ahead, the former president can only be expected to ramp up his unprecedented efforts to delegitimize the courts of the United States, the nation’s state courts, and America’s system of justice, through his vicious, disgraceful, and unforgivable attacks and threats on the Federal and State Judiciaries and the individual Judges of these courts.”
“Never in American history has any person, let alone a President of the United States, leveled such threatening attacks against the federal and state courts and federal and state judicial officers of the kind the former president has leveled continually now for years.”
Luttig also warned that Trump isn’t accomplishing the task alone. It’s the complicit Supreme Court—and the American people—that are letting Trump get away with it.
“It is the responsibility of the Supreme Court of the United States in the first instance to protect the federal courts, the federal judges, and all participants in the justice system from the reprehensible spectacle of the former president’s inexcusable, threatening attacks, just as it is the responsibility of the respective State Supreme Courts in the first instance to protect their courts and their state judges from the same,” he added. “Ultimately, however, it is the responsibility of the entire nation to protect its courts and judges, its Constitution, its Rule of Law, and America’s Democracy from vicious attack, threat, undermine, and deliberate delegitimization at the hands of anyone so determined.”
Here was Walton’s own dire warning:
Senior Judge Reggie Walton: “We do these jobs because we’re committed to the rule of law & we believe in the rule of law & the rule of law can only function effectively when we have judges who are prepared to carry out their duties without the threat of potential physical harm.” pic.twitter.com/V1GC7LVD2g
Georgia Republican official and outspoken election denier caught voting illegally 9 times
Josh Meyer, USA TODAY – March 28, 2024
A judge has found Georgia Republican Party official Brian Pritchard guilty of illegally voting nine times over several years. Pritchard has falsely asserted Democrats had stolen the 2020 election through fraud.
Administrative Law Judge Lisa Boggs wrote in her Wednesday decision that Pritchard, the Georgia GOP’s first vice chairman, violated state election laws by voting while on probation for forgery and other felonies, and that his explanations were neither “credible or convincing.”
Pritchard must pay a $5,000 fine and $375.14 in investigative costs incurred by the court. Boggs also ordered that Pritchard “be publicly reprimanded for his conduct” by the State Election Board, which sought the sanctions against him.
On Thursday, Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene called on Pritchard to “resign immediately or be removed” from his Georgia GOP position because he “voted ILLEGALLY nine times while serving out his probation for FELONY check forgery.”
“The Republican Party is the party of election integrity,” Greene said on X, formerly Twitter, and “our state party should be the leading voice on securing our elections.”
Forged checks, and claims of a stolen election
Pritchard, a conservative talk show host, has claimed on his FetchYourNews.com show that the 2020 presidential election was fraudulent, echoing claims by former President Donald Trump, who lost in the Peach State and nationwide to Democrat Joe Biden. Trump and 14 co-defendants are currently facing charges of illegally conspiring to overturn the result in Georgia, while four co-defendants have pleaded guilty.
Republican presidential candidate, former U.S. President Donald Trump, gestures while speaking during the 2024 NRB International Christian Media Convention Presidential Forum on February 22, 2024 in Nashville, Tennessee.
Investigations consistently have found no evidence of mass fraud in 2020. But in her 25-page ruling, Boggs found that Pritchard committed voter fraud himself.
Boggs cited certified records from an Allegheny County, Pennsylvania court, which showed Pritchard pleaded guilty in 1996 to felony fraud and theft involving $38,000 in forged checks relating to a construction project and that he was ordered to pay that same amount in restitution. Felons in Georgia lose their right to vote until they complete probation or parole.
Evidence presented in court by two senior officials of the state attorney general’s office indicated Pritchard’s probation had been extended until 2011, but he registered to vote in 2008 and voted in nine elections between then and 2010.
Pritchard testified at an evidentiary hearing in February that he didn’t knowingly commit fraud and that he believed his status as a felon who is ineligible to vote had ended more than two decades ago. He also said he believed his criminal sentence had been converted to a civil judgment, according to a copy of Boggs’ decision.
In an earlier proceeding before the State Election Board, which referred Pritchard’s case to the Georgia attorney general’s office for investigation, his attorney said Pritchard was unaware he was considered a felon when he registered and voted in Georgia.
‘He should have known’
The judge found Pritchard’s explanations to be lacking in credibility, noting that “to accept that the Respondent’s grasp of legal proceedings was so unsophisticated that he did not understand the basic terms of his probation in 1996 … this Court would need to disregard (Pritchard’s) self-described experience as a businessman handling complex projects as well as million-dollar contracts and budgets.”
“Based on the above, and upon careful consideration of the evidence in its totality the Court does not find the explanations credible or convincing,” Boggs wrote. “At the very least, even if the Court accepts he did not know about his felony sentences, the record before this Court demonstrates that he should have known.”
Pritchard’s fine includes $500 for each of the nine times he voted illegally and another $500 for illegally registering to vote in 2008. He can appeal the decision.
Neither Pritchard nor his lawyer, George Weaver Jr. could be reached for immediate comment.
‘I’ve not done anything wrong here’
Pritchard was defiant about his voting record back in December 2022 when he qualified to run in a special election for the state House seat previously held by Speaker David Ralston, who had died the previous month.
“I’ve not done anything wrong here,” Pritchard said at the time, asserting that his sentence had ended long ago and his rights had been restored, the Atlanta Journal Constitution reported. “I guess if you’re apprehending public enemy No. 1, here I am.”
Pritchard has said on his show that the 2020 presidential election was “stolen,” the Atlanta newspaper wrote. It said he also had criticized Republican Gov. Brian Kemp and Republican Attorney General Chris Carr for being “complicit” in Biden’s victory in Georgia.
“I do not believe that 81 million people voted for this guy,” Pritchard said on his show.
Jason Shepherd, a former vice chairman of the Georgia Republican Party, told USA TODAY that the judge’s decision is ironic given Pritchard’s constant claims of election fraud.
Pritchard, he said, “has rapidly risen in the ranks of the Georgia Republican Party and has built a media empire of literally tens of dozens of followers by spouting conspiracy theories about stolen elections and rampant voter fraud from thousands of illegal voters, despite being investigated himself for illegally voting.”
Shephard, who writes the Peach Pundit political column, said the accusations of Pritchard’s voter fraud “have been well known long before he became the second highest officer in the Georgia Republican Party.”
“He should have never been elected and he has now needs to go…and sooner rather than later,” Shephard said. “If (Georgia GOP) Chairman Josh McKoon doesn’t have a resignation by the end of the day, I don’t see how anyone can take the Georgia Republican Party seriously.”
It’s Time to Give Up the Lie We Keep Telling Ourselves About Donald Trump
Susan Matthews – March 28, 2024
If you’re an American news consumer, it’s hard to escape feeling like you’ve been suspended in a state of limbo over the course of the past year or so. The election—it’s coming, but it’s not here yet; well, not quite. Much of America isn’t really paying attention right now, avoiding at all costs the feeling of impending doom inherent to the election rematch no one wants—and I don’t blame them. We all know Trump is coming back to dominate our news feeds again, just as we know that he never really went away, he just finally became possible to turn off for a while. I understand the desire to tune it out, for now, for as long as we can, for just a little bit longer.
But the problem is that Donald Trump, presumptive Republican nominee for president of the United States, is coming back. Just as he battles as hard as he can on every front possible to evade the justice system (though it’s approaching at a rapid clip), and as the Republican Party’s base remains at his beck and call, he is coming back to terrorize America again, which means the Trump show is coming back on, to every television screen near you, no matter what channel you want to tune in to.
The problem is that Season 2—or whatever season we are in at this point—is going to be much worse in so many key ways compared to the last one. The last one had the element of surprise, which kept things shocking for a while in a way that was honestly a bit distracting and roller coaster-y, like when a detective show gives you the cliffhanger just before it streams right through to the next episode. So we all watched and watched because it was ever-present and just a little bit titillating.
But it’s not just that it’s boring this time—even though it is so boring. It is going to be worse this time in the sense that the stakes are higher, the violence is more flagrant, and the way out is harder and harder to see. Nothing—not all of the plaintive and ongoing pleas from us members of the press to remember how awful Trump is and snap out of it—makes this as clear as the documentary Stormy does.
Ahead of Trump’s first criminal trial, now set for April 15 in Manhattan, Stormy happens to be the perfect memory refresher, and not just about all of the horrific things that have happened to Stormy Daniels since she became national news. Watching this documentary brought me right back into hours and hours spent watching White House press conferences, the whole tone immediately recalling the feeling of the chaotic first years of Trump’s presidency, when “the resistance” was only slightly embarrassing as a concept and there was still real solidarity in opposing the president. Oh my god, right, I thought, watching Michael Avenatti’s rise to fame. We were just desperately looking for someone—literally anyone—to save us. For a while, sure, it felt convincing that a brash lawyer who loved the spotlight as much as Donald Trump does might be that person. Oops, it turns out he was embezzling from literally all of his clients. What a twist!
There is a deeper message in Stormy, though, and one that makes it even more understandable why we’ve all wanted to tune out, while simultaneously underscoring the reason why we have to tune back in. As much as the first two-thirds of the documentary are a romp through the hilarity found in a “Make America Horny Again” tour, the documentary takes a turn after showing a few videos from Jan. 6, 2021. It cuts to the more recent past, to the indictment, to Daniels reading through tweets, something she does a lot during the documentary. These later tweets are … a lot worse than what she reads early on. I don’t know exactly what percentage of that can be attributed to how much worse Twitter, aka X, has gotten after Elon Musk’s takeover (certainly some). But the brazenness of the violence is several degrees higher than it was before.
Part of that increase in the violence—and the ho-hum response we’ve all been giving it—feels like it stems from the fact that their guy isn’t in office anymore; it’s much easier to laugh things off from a position of power. And, on the flip side, there’s so much more reckless desperation from the brink of irrelevance, where Trump’s supporters surely found themselves as their hero was indicted again and again. But Jan. 6 also opened doors that legitimately changed what was thought of as normal speech—we’ve spent years since then watching Republicans downplay and minimize what happened, calling the violence freedom, and its perpetrators “political prisoners.” The message stuck. The thugs think they are righteous. That was always Trump’s goal.
The worse reminder in Stormy is of the misogyny that living through Trump being the main event of all of our lives brings with it. This is a chance to rewatch the infamous Access Hollywood tape for the first time in a while. This is a chance to see what it means to be Stormy Daniels, a woman who seems to own her sexuality—and who also is constantly surrounded by men, most of whom seem to be fucking her or fucking her over. This is a woman who insists that what happened between her and Donald Trump wasn’t rape—and then admits later on that the way she felt when Trump cornered her in her hotel room is the way she felt when she was 9 years old being molested by her neighbor, and oh yeah, that trauma probably does have something to do with how she got into porn, if she thinks about it.
The past eight years of being a woman in this country has been to ride the roller coaster from Access Hollywood to #MeToo through the Kavanaugh hearings and eventually into losing Roe. It’s amazing that in the midst of all that, having a president who calls one of his former sexual partners “horseface” still ranks as something to be mad about. But Donald Trump is coming back—and when he does, he will give us something to be mad about every stupid day. And we won’t be able to turn it off, because once again, he’ll be the star of the show.
Just three weapons will turn the Ukraine war back around. And the USA is back in the fight
David Axe – March 27, 2024
A Ukrainian artillery piece fires on Russian positions. Artillery, and supplies of artillery shells, have been crucial factors in the Ukrainian fighting – Bulent Kilic/AFP via Getty
Six months after blocking US president Joe Biden’s proposal to spend another $61 billion on aid to Ukraine, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson – who alone can schedule votes in the narrowly Republican-controlled legislative body – seems to have reversed his opposition to Ukraine’s war effort.
With retirements and special elections having reduced his majority to just two votes out of 438, and with a small contingent of far-right Republican extremists refusing to vote on any bill that has bipartisan support, Johnson increasingly relies on Democrats to enact budgets and other legislation.
And that means he answers more to the Democratic agenda than the Republican one. And strong support for Ukraine is a Democratic priority. The US House is on vacation until the first week of April. But once it reconvenes, Johnson will call a vote on fresh aid to Ukraine, according to some of his House colleagues.
With tens of billions of dollars in fresh funding, the US Defence Department could send a lot of weapons to Ukraine – and soon. Some could come straight from existing US stocks, with the new funding paying for newly-built weapons to replenish these stocks. Others could come from new commercial contracts brokered by the Pentagon.
It’s obvious what the priorities should be.
First and foremost, Ukraine needs artillery shells. For the first 18 months of Russia’s wider war on Ukraine, the United States was the main supplier of artillery ammo to Ukrainian batteries. In total, the Americans donated around two million shells. Half came straight from American magazine stockpiles. The other half, America quietly bought from South Korea.
These shells, along with additional ammo from other sources, kept Ukrainian guns blasting away at a rate of around 10,000 rounds a day for much of the war’s first year and a half. That was enough to match Russian batteries once the Russians burned through much of their ammo stockpile in the wider war’s first few weeks.
The Republican funding blockade, and the subsequent run down of US supplied munitions through the end of last year, cut by two-thirds the Ukrainians’ daily allotment of shells. In some of the darkest days of the war in February, as a pair of Russian field armies closed in on the Ukrainian stronghold in the eastern city of Avdiivka, Russian guns were firing five times as many rounds as Ukrainian guns were – and demolishing Ukrainian defence s without fear of return fire.
The US Army has been building a new shell factory in Texas to complement its existing factory in Pennsylvania. Soon, the Army should be capable of producing around 70,000 shells a month – a sixfold increase over its 2022 production rate.
There’s no reason most of the shells can’t go to Ukraine, once there’s funding to pay for each $5,000 round. Combined with shells from the European Union as well as a separate Czech initiative, urgent shipments of shells from the United States could give Ukraine an enduring artillery advantage for the first time in the wider war.
Once the shells are shipping, the Americans can address Ukraine’s second-greatest need: Patriot air-defence batteries and missiles for these batteries. The US-made Patriot is Ukraine’s best air-defence system. Its 90-mile-range missiles can reliably shoot down all but the fastest Russian missiles – and swat down Russian warplanes like flies.
When the Ukrainian air force shot down 13 Russian fighter-bombers in 13 days last month, it was apparently a mobile Patriot battery that did most of the shooting.
But Ukraine has just three Patriot batteries with around three dozen launchers – and lost a pair of those launchers in a devastating rocket ambush in early March. The batteries are spread thin. One normally protects Kyiv. Another protects Odesa, Ukraine’s strategic port on the Black Sea. The third battery apparently travels the front line in order to engage Russian jets.
Ideally, Ukraine would place a $1-billion Patriot battery in each of its half-dozen biggest cities and also assign one each to the eastern and southern fronts. And these batteries should be free to fire away at their fastest rate – meaning they’ll need a steady supply of missiles, each of which costs around $3 million.
Doubling or tripling Ukraine’s Patriot force could help the Ukrainians wrest back control of the air over the front line – and also reverse the disturbing trend toward bigger and bloodier Russian missile-strikes on Ukrainian cities.
Having replenished Ukraine’s artillery and air-defences, the United States should rescue one of the Ukrainian army’s best brigades. The 47th Mechanized Brigade is the main operator of American-made armoured vehicles, including M-1 Abrams tanks and M-2 Bradley fighting vehicles.
The 69-ton M-1 and 42-ton M-2 – thickly armoured and armed with a 120-millimetre cannon and a 25-millimetre autocannon, respectively – are some of the best armoured vehicles in the world, and the 47th Brigade has put them to good use. Counterattacking Russian assault groups west of Avdiivka, the M-1 and M-2s have blunted Russia’s winter offensive – and minimized Ukraine’s territorial losses as its artillery supplies bottomed out.
But the Americans shipped just 31 M-1s and around 200 M-2s before Republicans cut off aid. Four of the M-1s and more than 30 of the M-2s have been destroyed and others damaged. The 47th Brigade is running out of vehicles.
The US Army has thousands of older M-1s and M-2s in storage. They’d need overhaul before going to war in Ukraine, but a billion dollars should be enough to pay for the work as well as expedited shipping.
Once Speaker of the House Johnson bends to Americans’ overwhelming support for a free Ukraine and finally brings aid to a vote, the Pentagon could speed hundreds of tanks and fighting vehicles to the Ukrainian army.
Trump earlier in the day released a video of himself holding the $60 “God Bless The USA Bible” as he insisted that the Bible is his favorite book and that he has “many” in his home.
“Many? Many? Many?” Klepper repeated in disbelief. “How does that thing not burst into flames immediately?”
Trump’s version of the book, done with country singer Lee Greenwood, contains the lyrics to Greenwood’s hit song “God Bless The USA” ― which is played at Trump rallies ― as well as the texts of the Pledge of Allegiance, the Bill of Rights, the U.S. Constitution and the Declaration of Independence.
“Trump is mashing together the Bible and the Constitution like it’s a Pizza Hut-Taco Bell,” Klepper cracked. “I know people will say that you’re not supposed to mix the Bible and the Constitution, but what you have to understand is Trump has never read either of them.”
Klepper also predicted where this would lead.
“Trump getting into business with God can only mean one thing: God is gonna end up bankrupt and serving a three-month prison sentence for lying under oath,” he said.
See more in his Tuesday night “Daily Show” monologue:
Here’s who could be responsible for paying for the Baltimore bridge disaster
Erin Snodgrass – March 26, 2024
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The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed after a container ship collided with it.
Several entities will likely be on the hook to foot the bill in the aftermath of the disaster.
The maritime insurance industry will be saddled with the highest costs.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore collapsed on Tuesday after a large container ship ran into it, leading to six presumed deaths and millions of dollars in possible damage.
It’s still too early to estimate the total economic impact of the disaster, but between the cost of rebuilding the decades-old bridge, compensating the victims’ families, and paying out damages for disruptions to the supply chain, the eventual cost of the disaster is expected to be significant.
Who will pay to rebuild the bridge?
President Joe Biden said on Tuesday the federal government should be responsible for paying to reconstruct the damaged Francis Scott Key Bridge.
“It is my intention that the federal government will pay for the entire cost of reconstructing that bridge, and I expect Congress to support my effort,” Biden said.
The bridge was built in the 1970s for about $60 million, but the cost of rebuilding it could be 10 times its original price tag, an engineering expert told Sky News.
The Francis Scott Key Bridge, named for Francis Scott Key, the author of the Star Spangled Banner.WilliamSherman via Getty Images
Baltimore is among the busiest ports in the nation, seeing more than a million shipping containers pass through each year. The collapse — which closed the port to all maritime and most road traffic until further notice — is already beginning to wreak havoc on the supply chain.
The cost of building the bridge back fast enough to offset diversions as much as possible could saddle the government with a more than $600 million bill, David MacKenzie, chair of engineering and architecture consultancy COWIfonden, told Sky News.
Who will pay for damages to the ship and its cargo?
The container ship, the Dali, is owned by a Singapore-based firm. The ship’s charterer, Maersk, confirmed to Business Insider that vessel company Synergy Group operates the ship.
However, the companies with cargo aboard the Dali will ultimately be responsible for the ship’s damages and cargo costs.
The Dali was carrying 330 containers, which now must be re-routed, according to Ryan Petersen, CEO of supply chain logistics company Flexport, which had two containers on the ship.
An ancient maritime law known as “general average” dictates that companies with even a single container aboard a ship have to split the damages pro rata based on the number of containers, ensuring all the stakeholders benefiting from the voyage are splitting the risk, Petersen said.
Drone footage shows aftermath of the Dali container ship’s collision into the Francis Scott Key Bridge in Baltimore, Maryland, on March 26, 2024.Anadolu Agency via Reuters
The principle dates back hundreds of years and was originally meant to ensure sailors on board a ship weren’t worried about specific cargo if a disaster required them to start throwing containers overboard, according to Petersen.
Who will pay for everything else?
The majority of the financial fallout is likely to lay primarily with the insurance industry, according to media reports.
Industry experts told FT that insurers could pay out losses for bridge damage, port disruption, and any loss of life.
The collapse could drive “one of the largest claims ever to hit the marine (re)insurance market,” John Miklus, president of the American Institute of Marine Underwriters, told Insurance Business.
He told the outlet that the loss of revenue from tolls while the bridge is being rebuilt will be expensive, as will any liability claims from deaths or injuries.
The Dali is covered by the Britannia Steam Ship Insurance Association Ltd., known as Britannia P&I Club, according to S&P Global Market Intelligence.
Britannia did not immediately respond to a request for comment from Business Insider but told FT it was “working closely with the ship manager and relevant authorities to establish the facts and to help ensure that this situation is dealt with quickly and professionally.”
Britannia is one of 12 mutual insurers included in the International Group of P&I Clubs, which maintains more than $3 billion of reinsurance cover, sources familiar with the matter told Insurance Business.
Britannia itself is liable for the first $10 million in damages, both FT and Insurance Business reported. Whatever remains is dealt with by the wider mutual insurance group and Lloyd’s of London, a reinsurance market in the UK, according to FT.
Mumbai becomes Asian capital with most billionaires, bumping Shanghai: Report
Filip Timotija – March 27, 2024
The city of Mumbai has officially surpassed Shanghai as Asia’s capital with the most billionaires, according to a new Hurun Global Rich List 2024 report.
Mumbai, India’s financial powerhouse, now has 92 billionaires, closely edging out Beijing’s 91 and Shanghai with 87.
This year’s list marked Mumbai’s first time in the world’s top three, according to the report.
Globally, the Big Apple still leads the way. New York City has the most billionaires with 119. London was second with 97. Beijing, which was ranked first last year, dropped to fourth place.
China has the most billionaires out of any country with 814, although it lost 155 of them. The U.S. was second with 800 billionaires. India was third with 271.
“Wealth creation in China has gone through deep changes these last few years, with the wealth of billionaires from real estate and renewables down,” the research firm said in the report.
“Whilst as many as 40% of the Hurun Global Rich List from the high water mark two years ago have lost their billionaires status, China has added a 120 new faces to the list. Despite the large drop in the number of billionaires, China still has more known billionaires than the US.”
Zhong Shanshan, chair of bottled water giant Nongfu Spring, kept his spot as the richest person in China.
Globally, the number of billionaires increased — now at 3,279 billionaires, up 167 from last year, according to the report.
The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) has helped generate new ultra-wealthy individuals.
“AI has been the major driver for wealth growth, generating over half of all the new wealth this year,” the research firm said. “The billionaires behind Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Oracle and Meta have seen significant surges in their wealth as investors bet on the value generated by AI.”
India’s Income Inequality Is Now Worse Than Under British Rule, New Report Says
Astha Rajvanshi – March 27, 2024
A fisherman colony alongside commercial buildings in the Indian city of Mumbai, now Asia’s billionaire capital. Credit – Dhiraj Singh—Bloomberg/Getty Images
A new study from the World Inequality Lab finds that the present-day golden era of Indian billionaires has produced soaring income inequality in India—now among the highest in the world and starker than in the U.S., Brazil, and South Africa. The gap between India’s rich and poor is now so wide that by some measures, the distribution of income in India was more equitable under British colonial rule than it is now, according to the group of economists who co-authored the study, including the renowned French economist Thomas Piketty.
The current total number of billionaires in India is peaking at 271, with 94 new billionaires added in 2023 alone, according to Hurun Research Institute’s 2024 global rich list published Tuesday. That’s more new billionaires than in any country other than the U.S., with a collective wealth that amounts to nearly $1 trillion—or 7% of the world’s total wealth. A handful of Indian tycoons, such as Mukesh Ambani, Gautam Adani, and Sajjan Jindal, are now mingling in the same circles as Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk, some of the world’s richest people.
“The Billionaire Raj headed by India’s modern bourgeoisie is now more unequal than the British Raj headed by the colonialist forces,” the authors write.
The observation is particularly stark when considering India is now hailed as an 8% GDP growth economy, according to Barclays Research, with some projecting that India is poised to surpass Japan and Germany to become the world’s third-largest economy by 2027.
But the authors of the World Inequality Lab study reached this conclusion by tracking how much of India’s total income, as well as wealth, is held by the country’s top 1%. While income refers to the sum of earnings, interest on savings, investments and other sources, wealth (or net worth) is the total value of assets owned by an individual or group. The authors combined national income accounts, wealth aggregates, tax tabulations, rich lists, and surveys on income, consumption, and wealth to present the study’s findings.
For income, the economists looked at annual tax tabulations released by both the British and Indian governments since 1922. They found that even during the highest recorded period of inequality in India, which occurred during the inter-war colonial period from the 1930s until India’s independence in 1947, the top 1% held around 20 to 21% of the country’s national income. Today, the 1% holds 22.6% of the country’s income.
Similarly, the economists also tracked the dynamics of wealth inequality, beginning in 1961, when the Indian government first began conducting large-scale household surveys on wealth, debt and assets. By combining this research with information from the Forbes Billionaire Index, the authors found that India’s top 1% had access to a staggering 40.1% of national wealth.
Because the number of Indian billionaires shot up from one in 1991 to 162 in 2022, the total net wealth of these individuals over this period as a share of India’s net national income “boomed from under 1% in 1991 to a whopping 25% in 2022,” the authors said.
The report also found that the rise in inequality had been particularly pronounced since the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party first came to power in 2014. Over the last decade, major political and economic reforms have led to “an authoritarian government with centralization of decision-making power, coupled with a growing nexus between big business and government,” the report states. This, they say, was likely to “facilitate disproportionate influence” on society and government.
They added that average Indians, and not just the Indian elite, could still stand to gain from globalization if the government made more public investments in health, education, and nutrition. Moreover, a “super tax” of 2% on the net wealth of the 167 wealthiest Indian families in 2022-23 would result in 0.5% of national income in revenues, and “create valuable fiscal space to facilitate such investments,” the authors argued.
Until the government makes such investments, however, the authors caution against the possibility of India’s slide toward plutocracy. The country was once a role model among post-colonial nations for upholding the integrity of various key institutions, the authors say, and they point out that even the standard of economic data in India to study inequality has declined recently.
“If only for this reason, income and wealth inequality in India must be closely tracked and challenged,” the authors say.
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