Trump’s post-conviction incoherent rant

The day after his conviction on 34 criminal counts, serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) gave a typically rambling and incoherent press conference at which he recycled the usual litany of grievances and falsehoods. He left without taking any questions, showing how nervous he is about the implications of the verdict.

Jimmy Kimmel gave a pretty good rundown of the day’s events.

One point that Kimmel made bears emphasizing. When politicians are in deep trouble, a common ploy is to have a press conference with their partner by their side to show their loyalty. This is especially the case if there is sexual infidelity involved. And yet, Melania Trump has maintained total silence before, throughout, and after the trial and never showed up even once during the proceedings. What does it say that she cannot be bothered to put out even a pro forma statement of support?

This cartoon illustrates how far we have entered uncharted waters with a person who not only is openly contemptuous of truth and the rule of law but has managed to get so many leaders of his party to be complicit in his actions.

Whatever happens is good for Trump – according to his supporters

It has become drearily predictable. Whatever happens, however objectively bad it may be, serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) will say it is good for his election campaign, and the process is playing out once again in the aftermath of the 34 felony convictions that he just received from a jury.

Let’s be clear. It strains credulity to argue that being convicted of a single felony, let alone 34, is good for you and SSACFT and his acolytes must know it. Sure, it might make your supporters angry and fired up but it is unlikely to win over anyone who is not already strongly committed to you. And yet they are pretending that this is the best news ever. What would they have said if he had been acquitted?

It is clear that the outrage machine had been prepared in advance of the verdict. The ratcheting up of calls for violence has produced increasingly violent rhetoric, including calls for ‘war’.

Ever since the trial began, pro-Trump commentators—and Trump himself—have been priming MAGA online ecosystems to claim foul play if the jury found him guilty. The response to his felony conviction was predictably swift, with many characterizing it as a declaration of “war” from the “deep state.” Incendiary rhetoric about how the guilty verdict was a sign of America’s collapse reverberated from the mainstream right all the way to the fringes.

“As of today, with this fake guilty verdict against Trump, America is no longer the United States,” wrote Joey Marianno, a pro-Trump political commentator, to his 466,000 followers on X. “We are a third-world shithole heading for a Civil War. I have no desire to see this country to unify. There’s no country to unite. We are long past that.”
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Ali Alexander, a far-right conspiracy theorist, did not mince words either. “Today is Jan. 6th for the entire nation,” he wrote on Telegram to his 12,000 subscribers. “This is worse than the Civil War. Respectfully.”

That kind of rhetoric even made it to the airwaves. “We have been calling it lawfare,” said Fox News’ Jeanine Pirro.“I think lawfare is far too soft, it’s far too benign. This is warfare.”

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Trump’s obsessions may have sunk his defense

This article describes the dramatic moments during the last moments of the trial of serial sex abuser and convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT).

I had thought that getting a unanimous guilty verdict would be difficult, that there might be at least one juror who might hold out, causing a mistrial, which the MAGA crowd would see as a vindication of their hero.

Despite his bluster about the process itself, former President — and now convicted felon —Donald Trump secretly confided to advisors that one juror in his Manhattan criminal trial would come to his rescue.

After he was found guilty on all 34 felony counts, Rolling Stone reported Thursday that Trump’s hopes of a man on the jury he reportedly referred to as “my juror” were evidently dashed. Reporters Adam Rawnsley and Asawin Suebsaeng wrote that Trump had his eye on one male juror in particular whose body language he interpreted as friendlier than the rest.
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It wasn’t immediately clear which juror the Trump team was paying attention to. It could have been juror #2, an investment banker who said during the voir dire process that his primary source of news was Truth Social — the ex-president’s far-right social media platform. It could have also been juror #8, who is a retired wealth manager from the Upper East Side, and is originally from Long Island (traditionally more conservative than the rest of the New York City metro area).
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An acquittal on all 34 counts would have been unlikely, given that Trump has never prevailed in any civil — and now criminal — court proceeding in New York. But the defense was hopeful that they could at least have one or more jurors refuse to sign onto a guilty verdict, thus hanging the jury and effectively ensuring the former president wouldn’t get a new trial until after the election, if ever.

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Understanding the verdict

As I said in my initial reaction to the verdict, I was surprised that serial sex abuser and now convicted felon Donald Trump (SSACFT) was found guilty on all charges. I had heard many legal experts opine before that of all the cases that were brought against him, this was the weakest as it hinged on a combination of fairly esoteric offenses and that the key witness against SSACFT Michael Cohen was himself someone who was an admitted liar. Since a conviction requires a unanimous verdict that is beyond reasonable doubt, all it required was for one juror to hold out for there to be a mistrial, which would be trumpeted by the Maganuts as an acquittal.

In addition, SSACFT is a former president and though that should not be a factor in their consideration, jurors are human and I thought that it was unlikely that jurors would convict him unless they thought that the case was a slam dunk. The fact that the unanimous verdict came in on all counts in the relatively short time after about 10 hours of deliberations seem to indicate that they indeed thought it was a fairly easy decision.
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Are the rich good for anything at all?

It used to be considered that the wealthy had some use because they would benefit society via philanthropy by supporting the arts, funding libraries, cultural centers, charities, and so on. It was a kind of trickle down mentality, that they would use some of their surplus wealth to benefit the broader community, if not out of a sense of altruism, at least to head off potential resentment and anger.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells writes in a review of a book by Italian historian Guido Alfani that the new billionaire class does not have the social function that they were once considered to have .and are now increasingly becoming seen as a menace as inequality increases.

In the past generation, the ranks of the super-rich have grown dramatically. Between 1990 and 2020, the number of billionaires in the U.S. increased ninefold. In China, the growth of the super-wealthy has been more explosive still: in a single year, between 2020 and 2021, that country’s billionaire count grew by sixty per cent. Private fortunes of this scale are fundamentally transnational and less moored to individual nations that might make demands of them.
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The courtroom sketch artists at the Trump trial

The trial of serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) in New York does not allow live TV coverage of the proceedings and photographers have only been allowed to take photographs before the day’s proceedings begin. There have been complaints by the media that the public has a right to know what is going on in high-profile cases like this and that a live video feed should be allowed in the public interest.

While there would undoubtedly have been considerable interest (even though much of court proceedings are routine and boring), I am not convinced that allowing TV cameras and photographers is a good idea. A trial is not an event aimed at the general public. The only audience that matters are the jurors and the goal should be to give them the best experience of the case. When TV cameras are present, it might subtly distort that behavior of all the participants, and photographers vying for the best shot could also be distracting.
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Sunak’s puzzling election gamble

Many observers were taken by surprise at UK prime minister Rishi Sunak’s decision to dissolve parliament and hold general elections on July 4th. Elections were not due until January and he himself had repeatedly said that he wanted to wait until later in the year, which observers had interpreted as October or November. So why move things up suddenly?

The reason to hold elections early is either because things are looking very good for you right now or because you think things will get worse as time goes by. The former seems unlikely to be the reason since both the Conservative party and Sunak personally are polling badly, with the party over 20 points behind that of Labour. So it must mean that he felt things might get even worse. But it is not clear why he thought that. Furthermore, by calling for an early dissolution, he has shut the door to getting things passed in parliament that he had promised to do when taking up the position, giving him even fewer accomplishments to run on.
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The schisms in the Michigan GOP

In Sri Lankan politics, one of the tendencies was for parties to splinter and become increasingly fragmented. On the right end of the spectrum, the parties tended to split due to factions centered around individuals while on the left they tended to split along ideological lines, as factions argued that the party had failed some purity test on one or more issues. Once started on this road, further splintering occurred along new ideological fault lines, until there were many tiny leftwing parties that no longer had much influence on politics but engaged in squabbles among themselves. That left an opening for more extreme parties to fill the vacuum.

I was reminded of the latter when reading Andy Kroll’s deep dive for ProPublica into what is going on in Michigan, one of the key states that both Biden and serial sex abuser Donald Trump (SSAT) seek to win. It is a fascinating read for those who like to see how Republican politics plays out at the local level, with splintering occurring repeatedly. It is also worth following closely considering how important a role that state plays.
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Rishi Sunak’s election campaign gets off to a soggy start

The British prime minister announced that parliament will be dissolved next week and elections for a new parliament will be held on July 4th. This came as a bit of a surprise since it had been expected that he would hold off until later this year because his party is polling poorly at the moment and it was felt that more time was needed for things to improve.

As is the practice in the UK when the prime minister makes a major announcement like this, a small podium was placed outside his residence in Downing Street for him to speak. This is a quaint custom but risky in a country notorious for its rainy weather and while he was speaking there was a heavy downpour that soaked him and everyone present who did not have an umbrella. Added to that was the loud presence of perennial troller Stephen Bray who blasted out loud music from his portable device. When Boris Johnson announced his resignation, Bray blasted out Yakety Sax. Such things tend to take away from the gravitas of the situation.

Conservatives have been in power for 14 consecutive years and no doubt Labour is hoping to sweep them out, and even the Liberal Democrats are hoping to make gains at their expense.

The nice thing about UK election campaigns is that they are short, unlike in the US where they are pretty much a permanent feature of the political landscape.