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Unless you are driving around Philly today (and navigating around a collapsed section of I-95, or dealing with the heady aftermath of winning a Tony, or are mourning the death of Silvio Berlusconi, you are likely spending your news bandwidth on this Monday getting ready for the Trump-related events on Tuesday.
The former president’s court appearance comes after the Bragg indictment occurred just over two months ago (a/k/a two million years ago), but that was the undercard; tomorrow is the heavyweight bout with heavyweight consequences.
Spideysense says Tuesday is going to be more “expect the expected” than “expect the unexpected,” but here are some of the known uknowns:
1. LAWYERS
Is a millionaire defendant with a lot on the line in a complex case going to stand pat with his legal defense team or have some new eagles lined up?
2. PROTESTS
Will the scene around the Miami courthouse be more pacific or more antic – or something even more fraught?
3. PROCEDURE
Will a judge or magistrate preside? Not guilty plea entered or done at a later arraignment? Handcuffed, fingerprinted, and photographed for a mug shot or not? (The New York Times helpfully explores some of these questions.)
4. FRAMING
What does Trump say (pure grievance or talks about the future), what is his tone, which networks carry it live, who is in the audience, how do his GOP rivals react?
5. POLLS
Will the additional surveys on the way match this “Trump was not hurt in the short term” poll from CBS?
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Hard to know if Alan Dershowitz was being nostalgic or cute/clever when he wrote this in his Wall Street Journal op-ed piece about the case against Trump:
When an incumbent administration prosecutes the leading candidate against the president, it should have a case that is so compelling that it attracts the kind of bipartisan support that forced Nixon to resign.
That “kind of bipartisan support” is not likely to happen in the current era, at least when it comes to any discussion on the national town square, in which the loudest voices are going to be those of MAGA and those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome.
However, here’s one way the Dominant Media could help us all out: Don’t pretend that there is NO basis for concern (and maybe even outrage) on the part of Trump defenders regarding the claims of unequal justice.
To be clear: Trump’s case should be judged in the courtroom and in the court of public opinion on the merits.
To be clear: The attempts by Trump defenders to claim apples-to-apples on the Joe Biden document case, the Hillary Clinton document case, and the Hunter Biden investigation are strained and meant to rally the base around Trump.
However, however, however: The cause of journalism and the cause of trying to get to something like Professor Dersh’s paradigmatic “bipartisan support” are set back when the Dominant Media acts like there are ZERO “equal justice under the law” concerns about the those three separate Democratic cases.
By overstating the apples-to-oranges arguments, the press, ironically and inadvertently, helps Trump by enraging the Reds and rallying them.
To simplify down to the most basic:
A. As Andrew McCarthy points out in a New York Post op-ed piece, there are a lot of open questions in the Joe Biden document case, the answers to some of which could (could) make the matter both more egregious and more like certain aspects of what Trump did.
B. Any fair-minded person has to wonder why the investigation of Joe Biden’s son by Joe Biden’s Justice Department has taken this long to reach a resolution (especially when blown whistles have suggested a suspicious fact pattern in the probe’s conduct). Imagine the nonstop press howls if, say, the George H.W. Bush administration was taking this long to investigate Bush 43….
C. If you read the Associated Press and Washington Post write ups purporting to explain how Hillary Clinton’s case was different, you will get reporter prose and expert quotes along these lines:
“I really don’t think there’s any plausible comparison between the Trump case and the Hillary Clinton case,” said Robert Kelner, a veteran D.C. attorney. “The key difference is that in the Hillary Clinton case, as we learned from the Department of Justice inspector general report, there was no evidence that Hillary Clinton sought to obstruct justice. … The focus of the Trump indictment is on his rather stark effort to obstruct justice. That’s the fundamental difference.”
Kelner is critical of how the FBI handled aspects of the Clinton case, arguing that at times, the agency pulled punches when it came to investigating the conduct of some of those around her. But he said those criticisms do not change the fact that Trump appears to have repeatedly tried to keep documents he could not legally have, while Clinton did not.
Now, Clinton might not have obstructed justice, but she asked America to trust her that the thousands of emails she permanently deleted from her private server were all about yoga and wedding stuff. Would the media trust Donald Trump if he gave such an account?
What Trump did in this document case – what he did, let alone what he is accused of – is egregious and worthy of accountability. Let the facts and the law play out, media, but don’t inexplicably wave the cape in front of the charging Red bull by continuing to play down the three Democratic cases.
The fact that over the weekend and going forward Trump-defending Republicans habitually and cynically overstate the comparisons should be aggressively pointed out by journalists, but that is not the only way these matters should be covered.
Sometimes an orange is just an orange. But sometimes it is a significant apple-orange hybrid.
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I continue to believe that the key to determining if Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. will simply be a gadfly thorn in the side of Joe Biden or be a real threat to his political health is how consistently and clearly he drives the aspects of his message that are appealing to tens of millions of Democrats, independents, and Republicans.
Over the last three weeks, in his public appearances (mostly media interviews), RFK has objectively been a muddled mess.
If you want to see and hear the message that political pros know could threaten the incumbent, watch this Kennedy campaign video:
The TV producer in me has about fifty-eight edits I would have made on this thing, but ignore that: Every time you see or hear an interview with Kennedy, pay attention to how much he hits the messages in the video. Then you will know.
There is zero doubt that the incumbent has some exploitable vulnerabilities:
75%??!!!
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ESSENTIAL READING
* This Politico story on Emily’s List’s announcement they will spend millions on a PR campaign for Vice President Harris is amazing. There’s never been a Veep like this Veep and there’s never been an effort like this – and every reporter covering the reelect should be tracking the effectiveness of this campaign-within-a-campaign.
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Correction: In some of Sunday’s editions of the Wide Word of News, the formatting suggested that the following words were written by Gary Abernathy, when, in fact, they were written by me:
Of course you are free to disagree with his point of view. But you need to understand that what he writes animates Trump’s potential to win back the Oval Office every bit as much, now, as the enduring disdain for Hillary Clinton does.
Don’t hide from the truth in these words about how about half the country feels – it isn’t just Abernathy and Paul Gigot who think:
I regret the error, but I bet Mr. Abernathy regrets it more.
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JONI, JONI, JONI
*Greg Mitchell’s Substack has some great videos from Ms. Mitchell’s weekend concert return.
* For those who need an unrelated vintage refresher, here is a classic clip featuring Tom Jones and Janis Joplin singing “Raise Your Hand” on the “This is Tom Jones” TV show.