Aileen Cannon and an Alternative Theory of MAGA
Guardrails are just people.
1. People Are People
Last week I wrote about Aileen Cannon and said that whatever her intentions were, the effect of her actions was to place Trump’s criminal case beyond the law. But intentions do matter. It is not entirely academic to wonder why Cannon has made her choices. Shortly after that Triad went out, David Lat published a fantastic piece of reporting about the internal workings of Cannon’s chambers that sheds light on Cannon’s state of mind and while this might sound obscure, I think there’s a wider application: The story of Aileen Cannon is a tale about how Constitutional guardrails react when they’re stress-tested. Because “Constitutional guardrails” are people.1
So let’s talk about why Aileen Cannon is acting this way, how normal people handle extraordinary situations, and what all of this tells us about how MAGA can win.