Sunday should be sending shivers through Team Trump.
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You could be forgiven for having begun to harbor, somewhere deep in your psyche, a suspicion that a second Trump presidency has been scripted somewhere out in the firmament where the Fates go about their business or God, if such is your belief, lays his plans.
Because the cosmic shoes were dropping, one after the other. And, isn’t it funny?. They were all Right shoes.
You might trace Donald Trump’s house-defying winning streak to October 7, 2023, when Hamas, with whose prompting or cooperation it remains unclear, launched its deliberately brutal and provocative attack on Israel, and in so doing — with the able assistance of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — shoved President Joe Biden into a corner, between a rock and a hard place, from which he was never able to emerge.
Or perhaps to June 9, 2023, when the Mar-a-Lago documents case was randomly assigned to Trump-appointed District Judge Aileen Cannon and thence to slow-walk oblivion.
Or, a strong case can be made, all the way back to February 13, 2021, when a majority of Senate Republicans — following the counsel of Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) that Trump’s high crimes and felonies could always be handled by the criminal justice system — voted for acquittal in the reluctantly departed president’s second impeachment trial.
Oooh, What a Lucky Man He Was!
This year, it seems, just about everything has come up roses for the former president — well, except for a conviction on a set of felony counts, now in serious jeopardy as a result of yet one more cosmic dispensation (see below). And, of course, he raised another fistful of money off that conviction, and it didn’t do him any more harm with voters than, say, shooting someone in the middle of Fifth Avenue..
The bottom line is that the legal net that once seemed to be closing around Trump is now in tatters and he is one election away from not just escaping all accountability but being in position to resume and escalate his criminal activities, drop the hammer of his “law” on his perceived foes and tormentors, and take the whole edifice of American democracy down to the studs.
To recount just a few of the breaks:
- The Supreme Court, last December, signals its commitment to Trump’s trial-delaying tactics when it refuses special counsel Jack Smith’s request to expedite consideration of Trump’s appeal of Judge Tanya Chutkan’s ruling that the former president couldn’t claim presidential immunity to shield him from prosecution for his January 6-related actions.
- In Florida, where the documents case was originally scheduled for a May trial, Cannon exhibits even more undisguised enthusiasm for Trump’s delay game by entertaining — and scheduling for hearings — motion after motion from Team Trump, most of which, by broad consensus of legal experts, were either outright frivolous or could have been disposed of expeditiously.
- In Georgia, the unforced error of District Attorney Fani Willis’s workplace romance puts the state trial of Trump’s conspiring to overturn the 2020 election results in limbo, as a Republican-dominated state Court of Appeals slow-walks the appeal of the trial judge’s decision to allow Willis to remain on the case.
- Biden’s June 27 debate disaster, with Trump’s dozens of lies all but ignored.
- SCOTUS’s July 1 decision, creating (out of thin constitutional air) broad presidential immunity, eliminating any prospect of the DC case going to trial before the election and potentially undermining all prosecutions of Trump, including the New York case in which he had been convicted on 34 felony counts.
- Assassination attempt at Pennsylvania rally on July 13 leaves Trump very slightly injured but facially bloodied, defiant, and miraculously saved — the heroic poster further burnishing his larger-than-life image as what Ross Douthat dubbed a “man of destiny,” and further boosting his popularity and polling.
- Cannon dismisses the document case on July 15 — ruling, against all precedent, that the appointment of Smith as special counsel was unconstitutional.
- Democrats effectively go to intraparty war over Biden’s candidacy and possible replacement options, leaving Trump’s opposition in complete disarray and paving the way for a potential Trump landslide and GOP sweep of the House and Senate in November.
A few things worth noting about that list:
- It is far from complete.
- It ramps up steeply over the last few weeks.
- Virtually none of those developments can be considered an achievement by Trump; that is, every one is something that happened to or for Trump — one or another variety of cosmic intervention on his behalf.
This uncanny crescendo of good luck, with overtones of destiny, culminated in a giddy Republican National Convention, which concluded with Trump’s selection of Sen. JD Vance (MAGA-OH) as his running mate and then Trump’s own acceptance speech Thursday night.
The beneficiary of break after break, the darling of the cosmos, Trump had his sword point an inch from the chest of the Democrats and two inches from the heart of democracy. He could have rammed it home and sealed the deal with a half-hour speech of unity, decency, sanity, and a little standard political bullshit. That was the promise and, presumably, the plan from Team Trump.
He just couldn’t do it.
We got a strange pre-med lecture on the propensity of ears to bleed profusely, an ap-prop-riation of the deceased rallygoer’s firefighter’s helmet for kissing purposes, and some perfunctory blather about unity. That, I suppose, would have worked OK — just tack on a 10-minute forward-looking rah-rah wrap-up, over and out. Instead we got a bonus hour of meandering “rally Trump,” divisive as ever, with plenty of word salad and, for the more carnivorous in the crowd, the inevitable dinner with Hannibal Lecter.
It was weird; it was long (at 92 minutes, it broke his own dubious record) and boring; it was, to put it gently, spectacularly ineffective. Far from sealing the deal, it told the nation that Trump is not only no unifier but can’t even play one on TV. And — along with Trump’s it’s-in-the-bag choice of very-white, very-male, very-Right, very-MAGA convert-lickspittle Vance for VP — it gave the Democrats a ray of hope.
If the Democrats, bless their democratic little hearts, could only get their own bombed-out house in order.
A Whole New Game?
This past weekend, Biden — taking that first, crucial step — painfully and patriotically stepped aside. Trump, with a characteristic display of grace, left some flowers on the president’s political grave. Biden, Trump the Unifier said projectively, was “not fit to run,” “wasn’t capable of being President,” and was “the Worst President, by far, in the History of our Nation,” who “just quit the race in COMPLETE DISGRACE!” Lovely.
But Biden is now more of a decoy than a high-value target, as Democrats rally behind Biden-endorsed Vice President Kamala Harris. The coastal former prosecutor certainly has her own baggage and polling issues, but is not 81 years old, frail, addled, or carrying Gaza on her back. The new Harris campaign raised $81 million in mostly small donations in its first 24 hours and reportedly secured an additional $150 million from major donors, via the Future Forward super PAC. Party leaders, potential opponents, and DNC delegates are falling in line; Harris has reportedly secured pledges from the majority of delegates needed to win nomination.
A fresh start. A burst of pent-up enthusiasm and genuine hope. A renewed flow of money. It’s becoming less likely by the hour that any other viable candidate steps up, or is trotted out, to challenge Harris. And the Democrats have wisely opted for bottom-up optics, with Nancy Pelosi waiting to endorse until the groundswell had moved through the ranks.
The Trump campaign and all its surrogates have, of course, already launched a fierce attack on everything from Harris’s record to her role in the alleged “cover-up” of Biden’s infirmities. They will claim she is somehow responsible for the Secret Service’s denial of extra protection for the former president. Having deliberately killed, at Trump’s command, remarkable bipartisan immigration reform legislation in Congress, they will blame Harris for what’s left of the border crisis and for every crime committed by an undocumented immigrant or refugee.
They will challenge Biden’s withdrawal, along with Harris’s access to state ballots and to the Biden/Harris $96 million campaign chest. They may even — rather stupidly — pursue the 25th Amendment on the ludicrous grounds that Biden, by withdrawing as a candidate for reelection, is not fit to complete his current term. They will avail themselves of every opportunity to act, in the words of GOP strategist Scott Jennings, as “chaos agents” to disrupt the Harris campaign. Such behavior does not suggest the kind of confidence that permeated the RNC just a few days ago.
The Democrats, for their part, know what’s coming and the gauntlet they have to run. They have decided to run it for one principal reason: Unlike Biden, whose political ceiling seemed to be — for all kinds of unfair but apparently immutable reasons — about a half inch (or point) over his head, Harris is deemed to have real electoral room to grow. And she’s considered more than capable of prosecuting a strong political case against Trump — who is now the old, not entirely compos, man in the race.
A fresh start. A burst of pent-up enthusiasm and genuine hope. A renewed flow of money. It’s becoming less likely by the hour that any other viable candidate steps up, or is trotted out, to challenge Harris. And the Democrats have wisely opted for bottom-up optics, with Nancy Pelosi and other top leaders waiting to endorse until the groundswell had moved through the ranks.
Much will depend on Harris’s choice of running mate and how the whole script, political or cosmic, plays out from here. There’s still a dance to be danced.
But Sunday should be sending shivers through Team Trump and MAGAworld. Because, finally, one Left shoe dropped — and it was a size-13 combat boot.
