Happy Donald Trump Arraignment Day and other thoughts ...
For the first time in the nation’s history, a former U.S. president was this afternoon taken into custody, fingerprinted and booked on multiple corruption charges, including felony counts.
A few moments ago, the indictment was released and the former president was charged with 34 counts — apparently all low-level felonies — of falsifying business records in the first degree. He pleaded not guilty to all charges. The text of the indictment is available in the just-posted tweet below from Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg. Evidently, some of the charges are related to the hush money allegedly paid to porn star Stormy Daniels.
But clearly, this is far more serious than mere appropriation of campaign funds to buy Daniels’ silence on her relationship with Trump. I have many friends and colleagues who have been hoping for this day. They have a visceral dislike (which I share) of the defendant and want to see him led away in cuffs.
I find myself saddened by the whole spectacle. In a perfect world, someone would be stage managing this whole process, with the charges from the Manhattan DA taking a back seat. It appears that other ongoing investigations are more serious. Special Counsel Jack Smith of the U.S. Department of Justice is investigating Trump’s possession of classified documents and possible obstruction of justice, while law enforcement officials in Fulton County, Georgia, are considering charges against Trump for making that now infamous “find me 11,780 votes” case in which he attempted to strong-arm the Georgia secretary of state into changing the results of the 2020 presidential election in that state.
Pick of the Week:
Progressive commentator Ezra Klein has an eye-opening piece, The Problem With Everything-Bagel Liberalism (free link), in Sunday’s New York Times highlighting that, while government generally has good intentions, it often gets in the way of solving the very problems it sets out to remedy.
Klein’s case in point is an affordable housing complex — “supportive housing for the chronically homeless” — in San Francisco where costs for such projects typically run from $600,000 to $700,000 per unit and take six years or longer to complete.
But “Tahanan,” as the 145-studio-apartment complex is known, went up in three years, for less than $400,000 per unit. How did the city manage to do that?
The answer, for liberals, is a bit depressing: It got around the government ... Tahanan succeeded because it had the support of city and state officials who streamlined zoning and cut deals to make it possible. But it needed gobs of private money to avoid triggering an avalanche of well-meaning rules and standards that slow public projects in San Francisco — and nationally.
So the upshot is that progressives are at cross purposes with themselves on this matter and they need to reconsider their approach. Oh, and not to pick nits, but I’m not sure the “everything bagel” metaphor works, in part because, contrary to what Klein says, Everything bagels are not “the best bagels.”
Marge’s 60 Minutes of Fame:
Sunday’s 60 Minutes interview with the loathsome Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Green has spawned enough pearl-clutching for an entire generation. In case you missed it, it’s up on YouTube:
I’m know I’m going to be in the minority here (though former GOP congressman Joe Walsh agrees with me) but I don’t see anything wrong with interviewing this “empty-headed animal, food-trough wiper,” to borrow a barb from the feisty Frenchman who hurled insults at Sir Galahad from the top of the castle in Monty Python and the Holy Grail.
Greene is a member of a new generation of performative politicians who don’t give a rip about policy. They want instead to be social media influencers. They want to be seen on television “owning the libs.” Then they embed the resulting clip into an email to their fans and fundraise off of it. Rinse and repeat.
There are some politicians on the left who do this as well, but the problem has reached epic proportions in the Republican Party. MTG is also one of the most influential GOP members of Congress. As has been well documented, Kevin McCarthy practically owes his speakership to her because she stuck by him when other members of the crazy wing would not.
So I saw this interview as an opportunity to get inside the mind of a character who provokes intense passions on both sides and is a perfect example of how so many voters prize political theater over actual accomplishments. The interview, therefore, was defensible journalistically, though that’s not what Mary Trump and many others think.
The more important question for me is how Leslie Stahl performed. Stahl, a veteran journalist and experienced interviewer, brought to light aspects of MTG’s biography that I was not aware of. I did not know that she and her family were in the construction business, or that she was into extreme workouts, for example.
But Stahl was not very aggressive. Somewhere, the ghost of Mike Wallace is asking why he couldn’t have lived long enough to do this interview. To her credit, Stahl did confront the QAnon conspiracy theorist with her more outrageous statements, such as the scurrilous assertion that the Democrats are “the party of pedophiles.” Even the New York Post was horrified:
“They support grooming children,” Taylor Greene, 48, said without providing evidence.
“Democrats support — even Joe Biden the president himself — support children being sexualized and having transgender surgeries. Sexualizing children is what pedophiles do to children.”
I think the veteran CBS journalist, now 81, was a little soft on Marge, opting not to press her very often. She simply rolled her eyes, said “Wow” and “Okay” and moved on. It would have been worth pointing out that pedophiles not only “groom children,” but that they actually have sex with them, inflicting untold trauma and lifelong damage on kids who had previously trusted the abusers. Is that what Marge thinks? Democrats endorse raping little children? We’ll never find out because Stahl did not press Marge on her ugly slander.
For those who despise CBS for airing the interview, you can take some comfort in the fact that it was a ratings loser, seen by just short of 7 million viewers, down 33% from last week. I’m sure that millions of others, like me, simply caught the replay on YouTube or Paramount+.
Very good article, Terry.; I agree! Just as an aside, I was in college with Leslie Stahl in the early 60s at Wheaton College in Norton, MA and always enjoy her interviews. I also would note that almost any interview could perhaps be “more complete” with the benefit of the after-interview time for reflection!