Trump Brings a Cannon to a Knife Fight

With friends like these, who needs the DoJ?

The winds still aren’t letting up and the fires keep raging across the Los Angeles area. But not to worry, Marjorie Taylor Greene is on the case. “Why don’t they use geoengineering like cloud seeding to bring rain down on the wildfires in California?” the Georgia Republican pondered yesterday. “They know how to do it.” Happy Monday.

(Photos via Getty Images / Midjourney. Composite by Hannah Yoest.)

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Come Onnnn, Aileen

by William Kristol

Today was supposed to be the day Judge Aileen Cannon’s delaying tactics would run out, and Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report on Donald Trump’s responsibility for the events of January 6, 2021, would be cleared to see the light of day. On Thursday night, the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals denied Trump’s request to enjoin release of the report, leaving Judge Cannon’s decision in place for three days. Those three days expired today.

But not so fast! Early this morning, lawyers representing Trump employees Waltine Nauta and Carlos De Olivera in the classified documents case—about which the Justice Department has agreed not to release its report—filed a motion to further delay the release of the report in the January 6th case. Leave aside that legal experts have pointed out that it’s very questionable for Judge Cannon to be accepting any motions and issuing any orders in either of these cases, as they have gone up to the Eleventh Circuit and are no longer properly before her, the official docket of the district court shows the cases as closed.

No matter. Trump’s lawyers—for that’s what they are, though they nominally represent Trump’s employees—argued that release of the January 6th report could be prejudicial to their clients’ trial on the classified documents, even though the January 6th report is not about them. The Justice Department denies it would be prejudicial. And in any event, Nauta’s and De Olivera’s case is never coming to trial, as Trump’s Justice Department is sure to dismiss it next week.

But the Trump lawyers’ motion is now before Judge Cannon, giving her a chance for further delay. The Justice Department will do its best to persuade Cannon not to delay, or will go back to the appeals court to try to overrule her again if necessary. Judge Cannon may yield, or the Eleventh Circuit may have had enough. But Trump’s lawyers might still seek an emergency stay from the Supreme Court. That presumably would be quickly rejected.

Legal muckety-mucks with whom I’ve spoken still think the odds are we’ll see Smith’s January 6th report this week. But it’s not a sure thing.

You’ve got to give Trump world credit. They don’t give up easily, and are shameless in exploiting all nooks and crannies of the legal system to pursue their interests. It does help them that Judge Cannon is colluding in this effort. And I might add: It helps Trump world that, though the legal establishment is withering in its criticism of Judge Cannon in private, it’s still mostly polite in public. She’s a federal judge, after all. She’s can’t simply say she’s playing politics.

Except she is.

Meanwhile, the Justice Department is going by the book, pretending to take Trump’s lawyers’ arguments and Judge Cannon’s decisions seriously, and behaving in a way that bends over backwards to be respectful of the judicial system.

A filing yesterday by the Justice Department captures this duality nicely. The Department promises to provide certain additional documents that are actually outside the scope of what’s been requested by the defendants and the court, “in an abundance of caution.”

“An abundance of caution.” That kind of sums it up.

Now of course one wants the Justice Department to proceed respectfully of the system and with an abundance of caution.

But when one side is being cautious and scrupulous, and the other is being disingenuous and unscrupulous, it’s a problem. Especially when the unscrupulous side has an unscrupulous Trump-appointed judge helping out.

This is the one-sided fight we’ve seen between the legal system and Trumpism. Trump has avoided trial in the federal cases that posed the greatest risk to him. More broadly, he’s avoided accountability for the insurrection. Trump has won. The legal system, playing by Marquess of Queensbury rules, has lost.

That expression, by the way, comes from rules issued in 1867 under the name of the Ninth Marquess of Queensberry that replaced the bare-knuckle brawling of the mid-nineteenth century with modern boxing. The rules told fighters that “you must not fight simply to win; no holds barred is not the way; you must win by the rules.”

But of course we live in the age of the Ultimate Fighting Championship, not boxing with rules. In Trump’s America, it’s no-holds-barred in the pursuit of Trumpism, even while the old guard is still lacing up its gloves. And with Trump nominating and the Republican Senate confirming a couple of hundred Judge Cannons, and with Pam Bondi and Trump’s personal lawyers running the Justice Department, things will get worse.

Obviously, the rule of law in America has never been perfectly fair or consistently applied. We shouldn’t succumb to waves of nostalgia about the legal system of old. Still, on the whole, the rule of law was a real thing. We’ll miss it.

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Predicting the Unpredictable

by Andrew Egger

Donald Trump, Sen. James Lankford is pretty sure, isn’t actually going to try to seize Greenland by military force. “The United States is not going to invade another country,” the Oklahoma Republican said with a smile Sunday in an interview on Meet the Press yesterday. “That’s not who we are.”

Rather, Lankford added soothingly, Trump’s bellicose rhetoric toward Greenland was just another one of Trump’s patented maximalist imagine-the-possibilities negotiating techniques. “The president speaks very boldly on a lot of things. We’ve seen this over how he’s done negotiations, whether it be for real estate or how he served as a great president just four years ago. He makes a bold statement, he gets everyone to the table, you sit down and be able to talk it out.”

Now, I don’t mean to pick on Lankford, who remains the same quiet conservative workhorse he’s been since he got to Congress fifteen years ago.¹ And of course he’s likely correct, too: America seizing Greenland by force remains a remote fever dream.

But I still want to drill down on the pretty remarkable doublethink on display here—a sort that’s endemic among Republican voters and politicians alike.

Because of course the two statements Lankford is making here are completely incompatible. If it were true that Trump’s wild boasts and threats were only ever negotiating bombast, then they wouldn’t do him much good in a negotiation. His bluff would get called every time.

In reality, Trump’s great strength as a dealmaker comes from the way he takes a sledgehammer to the walls of the possible. Denmark might not want to give him Greenland, but they’re a lot likelier to engage on the issue if they’re worried Trump might truly go berserk and try to force them to hand it over by economic coercion or military force.

But in that case Lankford’s reassurances that “that’s not who we are” ring hollow. When has being afraid of transgressing “who we are” stopped Trump from doing anything? Trump is not a fan of “who we are.” To him, “who we are” is a bunch of losers and goody-two-shoes, too highminded or stupid to throw America’s power around to get what we want.

It’s perfectly possible Trump will have forgotten his latest push for Greenland within a month. It’s also perfectly possible that he’ll zero in on it as a central mission of his presidency. He may see it as a useful distraction from the slow, laborious grind of actual legislation, or solving the war in Ukraine (no longer a Day One guarantee), or lowering the price of groceries (now acknowledged as a bit harder than promised). How do you predict the behavior of a man who both has no interior guiding principles and spurns the constraints of laws, norms, morals, or allegiances?

This erratic unpredictability plays to Trump’s advantage. When there’s no rational way to predict how he’ll bounce at any given moment, you can only go two directions: Fret about all the ways things could end in disaster, or assume that things will basically turn out alright.

Republicans like Lankford have lots of practice opting for the latter option. After all, think of all the times Trump didn’t follow through on a crazy pronouncement! Think of how silly the fretters looked then, who worried that he might! But the unthinkable is only unthinkable until Trump actually tries it. Then we’ve got to get used to thinking it pretty quick.

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Quick Hits

MEETING OF MINDS: Who was that walking out of a chummy sit-down with Donald Trump at Mar-a-Lago this weekend? It’s Pennsylvania Democrat John Fetterman!

Fetterman earned the honor of becoming the first sitting Democratic senator to pay a visit to Trump’s court, and Trump sure was appreciative: “It was a totally fascinating meeting,” he gushed to the Washington Examiner. “He’s a fascinating man, and his wife is lovely. They were both up, and I couldn’t be more impressed.”

“He’s not liberal or conservative,” Trump went on. “He’s just a commonsense person, which is beautiful.”

We’ve come a long way from the days when Trump accused Fetterman of taking “heroin, cocaine, crystal meth, and ultra lethal fentanyl.” That’s politics, baby!

Fetterman, who since the election has quickly developed a Trump-facing persona that boils down to “you worrywarts all need to chill out,” spent the days ahead of the meeting preemptively rolling his eyes at expected criticism, joking that he was going to ask Trump to appoint him “pope of Greenland” and arguing that “I think it’s pretty reasonable that if the president would like to have a conversation—or invite someone to have a conversation—to have it. And no one is my gatekeeper.”

No word on whether Fetterman wore his signature hoodie-and-shorts schlubwear. It would have been against Mar-a-Lago’s dress code, but it’s against the Senate’s too, which hasn’t stopped him in the past.

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MOVING THE GOALPOSTS: Now this will shock you: After Trump spent the campaign cockily predicting he would bring an end to the war in Ukraine in one day if reelected, his team is now quietly admitting it will take significantly longer than that.

“I think they’re gonna come to a solvable solution in the near term,” retired Gen. Keith Kellogg, Trump’s appointed envoy for negotiating an end to the conflict, told Fox News yesterday. “When I say by the near term, you know, I would like to set a goa.l . . . I would say let’s set it at 100 days and move all the way back.”

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Cheap Shots

1. It was Lankford, recall, who last year managed to negotiate a reasonably tough border-security package that could still get buy-in from President Joe Biden and Senate Democrats—one that fell apart instantly after Donald Trump made it clear to Hill Republicans that he preferred to leave the border crisis unsolved until he got back into office.