Holding Patterns🌻 🌻 🌻

Imminent?  Once upon a time imminent meant impending, as in about to happen; now it seems to mean someday, maybe if ever.  So, another week has passed and still no Trump indictment which probably shouldn’t be all that surprising because it was Trump who claimed the indictment was coming this week.  Naturally, Trump has raised more than one million dollars from his ardent followers with the warning that he was about to be handcuffed and perp walked out of Mar a Lago.  He has also further raised his diehard fans’ outrage levels, directing hate at Manhattan District Attorney who he is now calling a “Soros backed animal,” efficiently encapsulating racism and anti-Semitism into a mere three words. Also, because with Trump words, even inflammatory ones, are never enough, he also “truthed” an image of himself dangerously wielding a bat next to Bragg’s head just to make sure his motivated followers know how he wants them to react. Threatening a DA is a crime in NY not that Trump worries about the consequences of his crimes because so far there really haven’t been any.  Just a reminder George Soros is a Hungarian born Holocaust survivor whose continued existence infuriates the right largely because he is a very wealthy and generous contributor to the left leaning causes that they hate so much.  To be clear, they don’t mind rich people giving money to their causes, but rich people leaning left, that outrages them. It’s not just Trump who used racist tropes to insult Bragg, others Republican leaders did too, including, among others, Jim Jordan, Elise Stefanik and presidential hopeful Ron DeSantis who all seem to think that pulling the Soros card is totally fine.  As to that maybe impending NY indictment, no one outside of Bragg’s office really knows why it didn’t happen this week though there’s been lots of speculation with Trump supporters suggesting that Bragg’s case was lethally damaged by the testimony provided by Giuliani compatriot, Robert Costello and others saying that Bragg either needed more time to call another witness to rebut Costello’s assertions or that he never planned to ask the grand jury to indict Trump this week anyway. None of that matters to the loathsome trio of Justice Committee Chair Gym Jordan, Administration Committee Chair Bryan Steil and House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer who, likely because Trump told them to do so, sent Bragg a letter demanding that he testify before Congress about the inner workings of his “Soros” inspired investigation as well as the deliberations of the grand jury.  Bragg responded to that request with a big NO, schooling the three complicit nitwits on the Constitution pointing out that a Congressional committee may not inquire into matters which are reserved to the states, while also pointing out that in NYS grand jury deliberations are secret. With all the attention focused on Bragg and the timing of the “hush money” indictment, which is less about silencing a porn star and more about violating campaign finance law and illegal accounting practices, it would have been easy to miss that Special Counsel Jack Smith notched a few wins in the Federal courts this week.  He appears to have quickly convinced more than one judge that Trump lawyer Evan Corcoran be required to hand over transcripts of and testify about his conversations with Trump in the Mar a Lago purloined documents case because helping your client lie, even if you didn’t know he was lying, is one of those things that allows prosecutors to pierce the veil otherwise protected by attorney client privilege. Curiously enough, while Corcoran is expected to testify today about Trump asking him to lie, he’s still representing Trump in his battle to prevent Mike Pence from testifying about their pre-January 6^th conversations.

Republican Fisticuffs: Trump is off to Waco Texas this weekend for one of his campaign rallies because who doesn’t rally at the site where Robert Koresh and his Branch Davidians had a 51-day violent standoff against Federal agents.  In the 20^th anniversary month of that standoff no less?  That’s the standoff that resulted in 80 deaths.  Trump hasn’t just been gearing up for his rally, he’s also been engaging in a social and verbal battle with Florida’s Ron DeSantis, who still hasn’t formally declared his run for the presidency.  Their exchanges are entertaining in a bizzarro world way and would be even more fun to watch if we could get a guarantee that neither would make it to the Oval Office.  DeSantis, who kind of walked back his earlier description of Ukraine’s fight for survival as a mere regional squabble by agreeing that Putin is an evil villain in a soft pedal interview with Fox’s Piers Morgan called out Trump’s chaotic approach to “presidenting” and his moral failures while saying that with him you’d get all of the awful policies and a whole lot of culture war “successes” without any of that chaos.  Trump responded to those swipes first by suggesting that DeSantis had engaged in dalliances with underage girls and maybe even some boys back in the day and then by detailing how despite his skill at spinning the success of his governorship, that DeSantis’s has really been rather crummy at his job.  The accusations about DeSantis’s moral failings have been around for a while, they’re unproven and ugly but right up Trump’s alley.  However, yesterday’s social media posting about DeSantis’ track record as governor which was clearly drafted by someone else appears to be largely accurate.  In it, Trump details how DeSantis embraced vaccines before he didn’t, how he embraced lock downs before he criticized them, that COVID deaths in Florida are among the highest in the country, that Florida’s crime statistics are among the worst in the country pointing out that the state ranks third in murder, aggravated assault, and rape.  He goes on to note that Florida ranks 30^th in education and childcare and 50^th in affordability and that DeSantis is all in on cutting Medicare and Social Security.  Trump has been gaining in the polls, a twisted side effect of those maybe never impending indictments, but in the event that he falters and loses the nomination to DeSantis, he has just handed Biden’s team some very potent talking points.  Points that don’t even mention DeSantis expanding the “don’t say gay” law that was supposed to just “protect” the youngest students through to 12^th graders, or the 6-week limit on abortions, or the fact that a Florida school just fired a principal for, horror of horrors, including a picture of Michelangelo’s “unclad” David statue in her Renaissance curriculum.       

Tick Tock Tik Tok: The debt ceiling still looms, Mitch McConnell has still not emerged from rehab, nor has John Fetterman or Diane Feinstein returned to the Senate. Tik Tok is skating on thin ice. And, my favorite story of the day, a portrait painted by a South American artist, one of those presidential gifts that Trump was supposed to leave with the National Archives but didn’t, has been located, discovered by a nosy hotel guest who was noticed it collecting dust in a Doral hotel yoga room.