Fox News is not a journalistic enterprise. The fact they are allowed to exist in the same headspace as the Times or Post, CNN or even MSNBC is a joke, but not a very funny one.
I have a vague memory of Rupert Murdoch surviving a plane crash back in the '80s or '90s. Damned shame that that happened. There have always been cranks and lunatics on the Right. Birchers, Klansmen and neo-Nazis have all been at the margins, but now they have nightly shows on Fox.
Jon Chait takes a run at the similarities between McCarthyism and today's hysterical attacks from conservatives on anything to the left of Mitch McConnell as "socialism" and "communism."
His jumping off point is that there were actual communists in America during the McCarthy Era. He points to Klaus Fuchs and Alger Hiss. Fuchs were unquestionably a Soviet spy, but he was spying for them in Britain, so...I'm not sure what the point of this was. Fuchs was perhaps the most damaging spy for Moscow, but it doesn't really say much about McCarthyism. Alger Hiss remains a fascinating Rorschach test about the Cold War. There is no smoking gun either way, but a ton of hearsay and circumstantial evidence. Hiss was likely a "Communist" but might not have passed on anything of value.
Regardless, the argument that the McCarthy Era adds some illumination to Democrats current debate seems fairly forced. History has not been as kind to McCarthy as the contemporaneous press was, but that hardly matters if you're trying to hold on to control of Congress.
Chait's thesis - and it's difficult to differentiate this from his long running obsession with campus speech codes and illiberalism on the Left - is a muddled mess. On the one hand, he's right that Democrats shouldn't engage in unpopular positions like "Defund the Police" or "Open Borders." When "The Squad" does embarrassing shit like vote against seizing Russian oligarchs' assets, because of civil forfeiture laws...that's just a stupid own-goal. On the other, the GOP media machine doesn't really care. The other lesson from McCarthyism is how much was just made up. Reporters helped "punch up" his crazy accusations to get front page bylines.
"Democrats" is also a tricky category. He mentions "dubious DEI training," which certainly exists and is another hobby horse of his. But we also know that teaching students that America was founded as a slave-holding nation dedicated to the white supremacy of slavery and the ethnic cleansing of Indian Removal is considered "CRT" by the Right. They are currently fomenting the idea that Social Emotional Learning is secretly CRT to make Becky and Chad hate that they are White.
One thing Democrats absolutely should do is make a positive case for letting people alone. Same sex marriage didn't poll great. It was rebranded as marriage equality and that helped get people to support it. Anti-LGBTQ bigotry is very real and not very popular. Culture war vendettas against Disney are not very popular. Vaccines are popular.
Defending human dignity should absolutely be a priority of Democratic messaging. I agree that Democrats shouldn't step on their own dicks, but neither should they cave in to Republican falsehoods and bigotry.
Whispers are that Biden is going to move on easing or cancelling student debts.
I'm ambivalent.
On the one hand, the nature of student debt is that it is both large and falls on the young disproportionately. So you have people who are making less money than they eventually will - because they have degrees - who are leveraged.
It's also a clear demographic that Democrats need to win elections, but one that has a spotty history of actually turning up to vote. At this point, Biden and Democrats have trapped themselves because they've paused student debt payments. If they resume before the midterms, younger voters might stay home. So from a demographic stand point, you want to reward your voters.
On the other, they hired the money, didn't they? While student debt is a huge number for the population, it averages around $30,000 per person. So the individual benefits are going to be smaller than people think, but there's another problem. Inflation. A primary policy goal must be to corral inflation before it becomes a spiral. Stimulating the economy is the last thing we need to do right now. Inflation hurts everyone at the current rates, including those who will get debt relief.
There's at least some pushback from those who didn't take student loans and those who paid theirs off. Some of this is tied to just being selfish, which is a pre-existing condition for being a Republican anyway. Still, there could be a political cost to a student debt "jubilee."
Personally, I think Biden should cancel the interest on the debt with a promise to consider debt forgiveness once inflation is under control. The lack of interest will help, and get debtors out from compounding the principle. The promise for future debt relief might incentivize younger voters to get out and vote, unless they are being petulant little shits for not getting everything they want NOW.
As I said, I'm ambivalent. I think Biden has trapped himself by pausing debts. He can't un-pause them before the midterms, but forgiving them has a greater cost than people will admit - both politically and macroeconomically.
There are some absurd ideas on the Left and especially Far Left. I concede that.
However, the sheer firehose of insanity coming out of the Right these days is mindblowing.
Let's take freshman representative Madison Cawthorn. Jon Chait has catalogued the many scandals that this whackaloon has already managed to blithely stumble into in his brief time in Congress. In the past, these levels of scandal would sink any politician. Trump managed to inject a stunning disregard for normally career-ending scandals when he bull his way past the many scandals in 2016, like the Access Hollywood tape. You have Democrats who - rightly - asked Al Franken to resign, and the GOP who refuses to condemn people like Cawthorn, Marjorie Traitor Green or Paul Gosar.
Even the so-called intellectuals of the Right are prone to just moronic statements. Here is Dan McLaughlin arguing against public education from a facile and ahistorical viewpoint. As respondents note, New England had tax supported public schools in the early 17th century, and the Northwest Ordinance of 1785 actually set aside the sale of public lands in what is now the Midwest to fund schools. The Lincoln administration passed the Morrill Land Grant act that also set aside funds for public universities.
There is a plausible argument that the Reagan (and Nixon) Revolution of the 1980s was founded on certain ideas. A lot of those ideas were wrong (the Laffer Curve and Supply Side economics) or odious (racism masquerading as "states rights"). But they were ideas. There was a compelling argument that America in 1979 had too much burdensome regulation and that taxes were too high to allow for investment in new businesses. There is an equally compelling argument against those positions, but that's what politics should be.
The facts of Reagan's tax cuts created unsustainable deficit spending, and so George H. W. Bush raised taxes. He and Bill Clinton re-introduced some fiscal sanity to government and the economy truly exploded. Those are facts. Another fact is that Bush's decision to bend to facts in 1991 when he raised taxes helped lead to his defeat in 1992. Another fact is that you cannot get a single Republican to agree to raise taxes (unless you're Rick Scott), even if it would be economically healthy.
The Republican Party is now deeply enthrall to people who believe China hacked "Venezuelan" voting machines to throw the election to Joe Biden, and these are not at the margins.
Here is my knee-quaking fear: We are about to start the January 6th hearings. We are going to discover that many, many high ranking Republicans were in on the chaos of that day or in the fever dreams that led up to it. This will range from people like Green actively helping the coup attempt to people like McConnell tacitly humoring these falsehoods and giving them oxygen to survive. We will have documented evidence of treasonous activities by Trump, the members of his staff and administration and large numbers of the GOP caucus.
And it won't make a damned bit of difference, because the average American voter can't understand that they are paying $4.00 a gallon for gasoline, because Putin invaded Ukraine. Nor can they admit that one of our two parties has gone insane.
John Judis is an aging left of center pundit-type who finds a way to be wrong about just about everything. His latest is calling for a negotiated peace in Ukraine, that will be a product of US policy. His jumping off point is that US Secretary of Defense, Lloyd Austin has called for a war to weaken Russia. Austin's point, no doubt, was that Russia cannot simply call an armistice, regroup and attack again in 5-10 years. Russia must be weakened to the point where it can no longer threaten the peace of Eurasia.
Judis tends to come at things from a '60s leftist point of view, where America is usually the bad actor. So we have statements like this:
Such a statement portrays the war as being between the United States and Russia, it will make Russian President Vladimir Putin even more intransigent and even more willing to escalate, and it will make it impossible for the United States to play a constructive role in promoting negotiations to end the war.
The catch here is that the US is largely peripheral to any negotiated settlement. We are clearly not a neutral party here. And we shouldn't be. Peace in Ukraine is largely a product of Russia's designs. Ukraine's goals are pretty clear: preserve Ukrainian sovereignty and hopefully force Russia out of as many territories that they occupied in 2014.
Judis continues:
There are Washington foreign policy experts who believe that Ukraine can win this war with Russia. Anders Aslund from the Atlantic Council, who was once a senior advisor to Boris Yeltsin, wrote on twitter, “My guess is that Russia will have to give up all its territories in Ukraine and face total defeat.” I have no inside information on the war’s progress, but I doubt Ukraine can win outright
Translation: I do not know anything about the actual conduct of the war, but I disagree with those who do. His later point is that the war will grind on and kill "several million" which seems unlikely. Hundreds of thousands, yes, but that is why war is awful and Russia must be chastised enough to not pull this shit again. No more Georgias or Chechnyas or Syrias.
But wait, it goes on:
It may be that Putin will prove unwilling to negotiate. There have been reports that he has ruled out negotiations. But what seems unlikely today can become possible tomorrow, and the United States should do whatever it can to encourage, rather than discourage, negotiations between Ukraine and Russia.
So, Putin is 100% responsible for this awful war. He shows no signs of negotiating. But on the very slim chance that he might want to negotiate, America should, what, downplay our assistance to Ukraine? We cannot simultaneously stand up for the freedom of Ukraine and be a neutral umpire in peace talks. Let India take the lead there. Maybe China.
He concludes with this:
One final point: I think there is also a problem with the administration portraying the war in Ukraine as part of a global conflict between democracies and autocracies....There would have been good reason to defend Ukraine against Russia even if Zelensky were a monarch rather than Ukraine’s elected president.
I'm sorry, what? In many ways it is precisely because Zelenskyy is the elected president that Putin invaded in the first place. When Viktor Yanukovych ran Ukraine as a vassal state of Russia, Putin was fine. Euromaidan forced him from power and Putin immediately invaded Crimea and the Donbass. That's not complicated causation. Putin is invading precisely because Ukraine is consolidating its democracy and moving away from Moscow and towards Brussels.
Judis seems to fall for a frame in which everything is America's responsibility - a kind of international Murc's Law. Putin initiated this war, because he wants to crush democracy in Ukraine; he has threatened democracies in the Baltics and Poland; he has interfered in Brexit and US presidential elections. Putin is an active menace to the idea of liberal democracy in ways that Xi Xinping, for instance, is not.
Judis erases Putin's singular agency in this entire matter and chastises American rhetoric instead.
UPDATE: Chait takes on some more egregious examples of this nonsense.
Mark Penn is a terrible political adviser, precisely because he tends to see in his poll results exactly what he wanted to see before he asked the questions. In his piece for the Times today, he measures some very real things, but his causation is all messed up.
A few examples.
- He says that inflation and fuel prices are upsetting Americans. This is true, but then he says Biden should greenlight the Keystone Pipeline. Keystone will not help fuel prices in any meaningful way by November, probably not even November 2024. Also "continuing to let gas prices surge" is a weird way to put things. Gas prices are largely beyond the ability of a president to control, as it's a global market.
- Balancing the budget is a sound bite, not a legitimate policy prescription. Ideally, yes, Biden could balance the budget. As it is, he's reduced the budget deficit by hundreds of billions of dollars. If you're a voter who believes in a balanced budget, the last thing you should do is vote for Republicans. The general perception is that Republicans are budget hawks, but the reality is that they are absolutely terrible with budget discipline.
- He must "beat Putin," but I guess while also bringing down fuel prices? And no figure on the international stage aside from Zelenskyy has done more to hurt Russia in Ukraine than Biden.
- Crime. There's a perception that crime is out of control. It's not exactly, but that's the perception. It is rising, but we don't know whether or not that's a byproduct of the pandemic or not.
- Ah, yes. The pandemic. Oddly, this really doesn't appear anywhere in Penn's piece. The pandemic is at the root of inflation, general unease, worries about schools and energy costs. It may be that "ending" the pandemic now will let things get back to a more normal status by November, but the perception might not have cemented itself among voters in time.
- Immigration is a bit of a tricky issue, but only because it's so easy for Republicans to demagogue it.
Finally, there is no way to measure exactly how much the batshit insanity of the current GOP will weigh on the electorate, especially in Senate races. The baked-in partisanship could really mess with the usual dynamics of the midterms. We shall see.
Democrats absolutely need to start campaigning better. But Penn is selling doom and that's not helpful either.
Emmanuel Macron won re-election over Putin loyalist Marine Le Pen. The margin was large, but smaller than it was four years ago. Given the economic dislocations of the past three years, this was about as good as Le Pen could hope to do, although her naked embrace of Putin probably didn't help her.
This is the brilliance and the flaw in French elections. In round one, all candidates are on the ballot. Every voice in France is allowed a chance to be heard. If no candidate gets 50% - which is always - it goes to a second round with the top two vote getters. This guarantees the president gets a majority of the vote.
Imagine if, in 2016, Clinton and Trump had gone instead into a runoff, as neither got 50% of the vote. (First, of course, we would get rid of that stupid anachronism, the Electoral College.) In this scenario, all of those Jill Stein voters or Gary Johnson voters who just couldn't stomach Trump would likely migrate to Clinton - reluctantly, as many voters cast reluctant votes for Macron today.
And that's the down side. If the runner-up is Le Pen, you really don't have much choice but to vote against her. The first round: tremendous choice. The second round: the lesser of two evils.
That Evangelical God Botherer Madison Cawthorn was caught out with pictures of him engaging in behavior that would have dominated Fox News for a fortnight if a Democrat had done it is one of the least surprising stories of the year so far. Mr. Cocaine Orgies was always going to have a weird party side - the story of his ex-wife is fishy as hell - because hypocrisy is only surpassed by cruelty as the creed of the contemporary GOP.
Scott Lemieux is right. Cawthorn is perfectly free to engage in cross-dress play and get drunk (as long as he isn't endangering others). He is free to do so because of an emerging, let's call it, social liberalism that says, "You have the freedom to be you, as long as it doesn't cause safety problems for others." You can navigate ideas of gender fluidity, but you maybe shouldn't have weapons of war in your arsenal is kind of where modern progressivism is.
So much of modern "conservatism" is a combination of Evangelical and Patrimonial Authoritarianism. Obviously, Evangelism is interested in preserving or returning to a patriarchal society, but Patrimonialism is primarily a form of elite corruption that corrupts the state into a means to preference a few oligarchic leaders. That's why evangelical Christians (White ones anyway) lined up behind the comically immoral Donald Trump - a textbook Patrimonial strongman wannabe.
Cawthorn is an exemplar of dipshit "Christians" for whom the faith is really a cudgel to beat down people they don't like, all the while sinning in their own hypocritical ways.
Ron DeSantis' war on schools is really worth paying attention to. There has been some coverage of how Florida is rejecting math textbooks because of CRT. What's really happening is that they are banning them based on the inclusion of Social Emotional Learning. SEL is a framework that has been around for decades to teach elementary school students to be kind, collaborative and how to work through their frustrations with school and other problems. That's it. In my local batshit insane Facebook group, I've already seen the shift from decrying CRT to attacking SEL, which they call CRT in disguise.
I have no idea why they moved on from CRT, unless it was the constant drumbeat of how CRT wasn't actually being taught in schools, but that seems out of character. When have objective facts made a difference? So there seems to be two reasons why they are attacking SEL.
First is that they generally don't want kids to be kind, empathetic and collaborative, because those are hallmarks of "the Left" in America. If much of left-of-center culture wars can be boiled down to "don't be a complete shit to other people, especially the people who have historically been at the margins, then right-of-center can be boiled down to Adam Serwer's famous phrase "The cruelty is the point." People like DeSantis are playing the long game to create a future generation of selfish assholes who will shit on those who are beneath them in social hierarchies. Since Millennials and Gen Z are moving hard away from that sort of selfishness, Republicans want to create a new cohort of selfish assholes in Gen A.
I dunno. That seems like a very doubtful move for a group that has typically never been focused on anything beyond it's immediate next move.
Second is that Republicans are trying to discredit the very idea of public school education. This has long been an article of faith among both the Christianists and the Extreme Anti-government cohort.
For Christianists, ever since Schempp and Vitale removed religion from public schools we have seen the collapse of morality in America. Kids with their blue hair and gender fluidity are a direct result of not having Jesus forced into them at young ages. Homeschooling produces two things. People who grow up bitter that they were homeschooled and morons like Madison Cawthorn. Delegitimizing the entire public school project is their mission.
For the anti-government set, public schools are a stronghold of the teacher's unions and therefore Democratic voters. Additionally, people tend to like their public schools. It's a tangible example of a governmental service that is free at the point of delivery and which people see real benefits to having. If you can convince people that public schools are full of pedophiles and people teaching little Becky and Chad to hate themselves because they are White, then you can get people to want to privatize the public schools, so they can have more control over who teaches what.
This seems more plausible, as a motivation for attacking teachers and schools.
So what now?
One problem is the journalist practice of neutrality in place of objectivity. It will be very hard for the press to accurately depict conservative efforts to destroy public schools, because it seems, on the surface, insane. We saw some of this with Louis DeJoy's efforts to destroy the Postal Service. That was active sabotage - not only to screw with the 2020 election but - to destroy the Post Office so that it could be replaced with UPS and FedEx. The press couldn't quite bring themselves to accurately describe what was going on. There is little effort to do the same now with the GOP's war on public education.
Another problem is that it's not enough to decry this within Democratic circles.
Everyone is agreeing that the midterm landscape is bad for Democrats at the moment. In many ways the Senate races in PA, GA, OH, WI, NC, AZ and NV are going to be incredibly important, as Mitch McConnell has already said he basically won't approve ANY of Biden's judicial appointments if he has a majority. Losing the House but preserving the Senate is critical and a lot of these races are going to come down to the suburbs and motivating urban voters. Democratic gains in the Philly, Atlanta, Phoenix suburbs and the Research Triangle are tenuous. Those voters don't like inflation.
But they like their schools. That's why they moved to the suburbs.
Nationalizing DeSantis' war on schools won't be hard. Even if it's not 100% accurate for every race, who cares? If it gets 3 Pinocchios from a fact checker, who cares.
Glenn Youngkin won for some idiosyncratic reasons, including misleading attacks on CRT. But nationalizing the Far Right's attack on schools should absolutely be a message that should Democrats should start to hammer now. Josh Marshall has noted that we are a storytelling animal. Start telling the stories now.
Josh Marshall makes a good point about how Democrats seem unwilling to engage with, for lack of a better word, storytelling. The GOP is hopelessly corrupt and married to autocrats around the world. That's a story. Republicans have been telling a story for years about how the Democratic Party is in the thrall of coastal elites, so that story is now simply understood to be true by a large swath of America.
Democrats need to hammer the story about the authoritarian, anti-woman, corrupt GOP every minute of every day from now until the midterms. They aren't, and that's political malpractice.
Yglesias does another one of his "dog with a bone" things. He has a few overweening ideas that he crams everything into. One idea is that Democrats have a bunch of terrible, unpopular ideas and that this is why they don't win as many votes as they would if they just did things that he, Matthew Yglesias, thinks they should.
Now, there are certain issues where he's right. Defund the Police and Open Borders are awful political messaging. Of course, Biden has explicitly called for increased funding for police and we are aggressively detaining people at the border. One of the infuriating trends is that the large number of detentions at the border are seized on by Republicans as examples of Biden not...enforcing the border? How does that work?
The idea that Biden isn't enforcing the border because of all the people we are detaining at the border is misinformation. It's not understanding the cause and effect cycle. You could argue that migrants believe that Trump being out of office would allow them to cross the border with ease, but Biden is actively enforcing the border, so it's their error, not one that Biden is making.
Yglesias is conflating misinformation - mistaken assumptions based on faulty reasoning or incomplete information with disinformation - the willful manipulation of truth and falsehoods.
Paul Campos is one of many to look at a new study that suggests that watching Fox News is not misinformation but active disinformation. The piece he's looking at notes the effect of presenting facts to someone but the cognitive dissonance is so great that they retreat further into their delusions, in this case the idea that the election was stolen from Trump.
However, removing Fox News from someone's viewing diet and making them watch CNN can actually change their positions. Actively saying that migrant caravans are full of MS13 gang members is disinformation. It's being aggressively pushed to make the geriatric Fox News addict clutch their pearls and worry about the CRT that's being fed into their grandkids' veins like heroin. In fact, all that CRT shit is active disinformation.
Put another way, when you read a story about a car theft ring in your neighborhood and conclude that crime is at an all time high, you are engaged with misinformation. Crime is up, but not at an all time high. It feels like crime is exploding, but it's really just a marginal increase. Your perspective skews your view of the facts. When someone says that the Biden Administration is the most corrupt in history because of Hunter Biden's laptop, that is active disinformation. It's provably false - Hunter Biden is not a governmental official - and pushed for a partisan advantage: to negate the very real corruption of the Trump years.
Finally, there is the very real axis of disinformation between Fox, Russia and the Patrimonial League. We know that Russia spread disinformation in both the 2016 Brexit votes and American elections. Disinformation is part of their intelligence operations since forever. As George Kennan noted in 1946, "(Russian) propaganda is inherently negative." It exploits divisions in their opponents and seeks to exacerbate them. A divided enemy is a weak enemy.
What is new is that "conservatives" have embraced this disinformation environment. Trump lied about basically everything and paid no political price for it. Why shouldn't they follow that example? In fact the entire anti-vax movement is built upon active disinformation coupled with popular misinformation. Tell me what Ron DeSantis is doing that is based on a reasoned understanding of objective reality.
When Obama talks about disinformation and Yglesias says this is him just "coping" with why Democrats aren't more popular, he's unwittingly giving an example of exactly what the difference is between being misinformed and disinformed.
At last!
Since the early days of the pandemic, I've used Covid Act Now as my primary resource on the state of the pandemic. It used to trace new cases, hospitalizations and deaths. It would have immunization levels, ratio of new cases per 100,000 people and so on.
As the pandemic changed, the website remained very conservative in its evaluation of the pandemic. That led to a lot of states being "Orange" or even "Red" because of a single metric being high. If your state had a really good testing regimen in place, it would have more positive tests, but fewer hospitalizations, which made it look worse than it really was.
The new metrics are tied to the fact that this is no longer a "novel" coronavirus. Either via vaccination or infection, a great many Americans have had their immune systems primed to fight off Covid in the future.
The new metrics are all per 100,000 people and look at overall cases, hospital visits, and hospital admissions.
As someone who has been extremely pissed at the cavalier attitude that many have had towards a virus that has killed more than a million Americans and continues to kill thousands every couple of weeks, I also understand that we have simply moved on from Covid restrictions. I no longer mask up, and I don't feel especially vulnerable. (I also don't act like a turd if someone else is wearing a mask.)
As long as no new variants show up, it's time to back off and monitor.
Josh Marshall looks at the extraordinary and out in the open graft of Jared Kushner. As I've said before, the worst legacy of Trumpistan is that we now seem to simply accept a level of corruption by public officials that would have caused Nixon to blush.
The outlines of what Marshall relates are this. Kushner is your archetypical failson - like his father and brothers in law - who made terrible investments of the family's money while his father was in jail. Trump famously put Kushner in charge of all sorts of shit, despite the fact that US intelligence agencies would not issue him a security clearance.
Now that he's out of the White House, Kushner got a $2 billion investment in the hedge fund he's starting from Mohammad bin Salman, the de facto ruler of Saudi Arabia. Kushner had undermined the US investigation into Jamal Kashoggi's murder and - if reports are to be believed - may have given sensitive US intelligence to Saudi Arabia.
Marshall also says that Kushner may have tipped off MBS to a plot by his relative Mohammad bin Nayef to sideline MBS. bin Nayef was arrested a couple of years ago and hasn't been seen since.
Marshall also notes that - unusually - Saudi Arabia has refused to boost oil production to compensate for the effective reduction in Russian oil. This benefits Saudi Arabia a little bit in higher oil prices, but it really has the effect of screwing up Biden and Democrats' hopes for the midterms.
Kushner has no business getting a $2B investment. It's absurd and corrupt. And what's more, it's a stark example of the new sides in the 21st century cold war. We have corrupt patrimonial kleptocracies on the one hand - Russia, Saudi Arabia, several Gulf States - and their enablers in the West - Trump, Le Pen, Boris Johnson/Nigel Farage - against a general sense of global order.
Three countries that hold the balance of power in this new cold war are China, India and Iran. China wants a stable international order. Russia undermines that, but China is also basically becoming one of those patrimonial states. India seems to be largely retreating into ethnic nationalism under Modhri and could also collapse into patrimonial corruption. Iran is also corrupt as hell, but their system isn't conducive to patrimonialism, at least.
Iran is... terrible in so many ways. But increasingly it's better than Saudi Arabia. Right now, the US and Iran are negotiating America's return to the JCPOA (nuclear deal). The sticking point is our labelling the Revolutionary Guard a state sponsor of terror. We really need to get that deal done so we can get Iranian oil and natural gas to market.
We also need to start planning for a post-Khamenei Iran. He's 83 years old and in poor health. When he dies, Iran could go in a different direction, only if it sees hope of a better relationship with Europe and America.
Fundamentally, we need to do two things: prosecute Jared Kushner for the brazen corruption and end our reflexive alliance with Riyadh. It's not 1979 or 2003 anymore. Saudi Arabia are part of the problem, not the solution.
Paul Campos runs down some reasons here.
I think there's another pretty compelling reason not to charge Trump with criminal charges.
A) How do you find an impartial jury?
B) How do you secure a unanimous verdict from a hypothetical jury?
C) If he's acquitted via a hung jury - most likely outcome - this will be treated as exoneration by Trumpists and therefore a political witch hunt by Hunter Biden's Laptop against our Lord and Savior Donald J. Trump.
As Jeremy Stahl notes in the original piece Campos links to, the threat of prosecution might be enough to keep him from running.
The problem with that is that Trumpism has extended beyond Trump. Greg Abbott spent a few weeks just brazenly breaking the law and nothing will happen to him. Ron DeSantis is violating civil rights and liberties on a daily basis.
Time for the DOJ to do their fucking job.
