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trump indictment
We Are All Paying the Price for Merrick Garland’s Abject Failure
Decades from now, historians will memorialize Garland not as a dedicated public servant but as the head of the Justice Department who brought a butter knife to an existential gunfight with Trump, quickening our collective descent into neo-fascism.
Jan 22, 2025
It’s hard to say who is the worst attorney general in American history. The candidates are many and comprise a veritable rogue’s gallery of sadists, reactionaries, and incompetents. They range from A. Mitchell Palmer, mastermind of the original Red Scare that decimated the left in the wake of the First World War, to Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III and William Pelham Barr, who sacrificed the rule of law in service to Donald Trump.
Merrick Garland may not share the malignancies of his fellow train wrecks, but he deserves to be in the discussion. Decades from now, historians will memorialize Garland not as a dedicated public servant and fair-minded federal judge whose nomination to the Supreme Court was torpedoed by Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans, but as the head of the Justice Department who brought a butter knife to an existential gunfight with Trump, quickening our collective descent into neo-fascism.
After his appointment to helm the DOJ, Garland had one overarching mission: to swiftly convene a grand jury to investigate Trump for his role in inciting the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the Capitol. This was a task a third-year law student could easily have accomplished. Garland failed, abjectly.
Garland will forever bear the principal stain of wimping out when courage and—to put it in the vernacular—balls were needed to stop Trump.
Probable cause for an early indictment was abundant and obvious. On January 6, millions of Americans watched Trump stand on the Ellipse at the south end of the White House and urge his supporters to march on the Capitol and “fight like hell.” Millions watched the actual assault that followed, blow by medieval blow. Even the corrupt McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump in his second impeachment trial in February 2021, declared on the Senate floor, “There’s no question, none, that President Trump is practically and morally responsible for provoking the events of the day [January 6].”
Instead of targeting Trump and his chief lieutenants immediately, Garland set out to arrest and try the foot soldiers of the uprising. And while he did a commendable job in that respect (eventually charging more than 1,500 with federal crimes), he dithered on Trump until November 2022, when he appointed Jack Smith as a special counsel to probe Trump for the insurrection and absconding from the White House with a trove of highly classified documents.
By then, it was too late.
Although Smith secured an indictment of Trump in Washington, D.C., for conspiracy, obstruction, and election subversion on August 1, 2023, the indictment was gutted by the Supreme Court (Trump v. United States) the following July in a decision that granted Trump sweeping and unprecedented immunity from criminal prosecution.
Written by Chief Justice John Roberts, a lifelong conservative activist with an undeserved reputation as a judicial institutionalist, the ruling is arguably the worst edict handed down by the high court since the Dred Scott case of 1857. “Trump v. United States is distinct as a deliberate attack on the core institutions and principles of the republic, preparing the way for a MAGA authoritarian regime much as Dred Scott tried to do for the slavocracy,” wrote Sean Wilenz in a scathing article for The New York Review of Books.
Smith also indicted Trump in Florida in the documents case, but that prosecution was subsequently scuttled by District Court Judge Aileen Mercedes Cannon, an inexperienced MAGA sycophant whom Trump installed on the federal bench in the runup to the 2020 election.
In addition to Garland, the Supreme Court, and Cannon, former President Joe Biden also shares responsibility for letting Trump off the hook. From Day 1, Biden should have used the bully pulpit to attack, isolate, and destroy Trump and his MAGA base. Instead, he pursued a politics of accommodation, preaching a return to the false neoliberal normalcy of bipartisanship. Most critically of all, Biden decided to seek a second term, when it was apparent to everyone with two eyes and ears that he was no longer fit, either physically or mentally, for another stint behind the Resolute Desk. With Biden’s approval rating plunging to 40%, former Vice President Kamala Harris had little to no chance of defeating Trump at the polls.
But standing atop the heap, Garland will forever bear the principal stain of wimping out when courage and—to put it in the vernacular—balls were needed to stop Trump before the forces of reaction had time to regroup and reorganize. They are now in control.
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We Will Need Each Other to Confront King Trump
We are seeing in real time how autocracy happens, by creating hopelessness and despair among the mass of people who once might have fought back.
Nov 08, 2024
It took only hours after a majority of Americans chose to return Donald Trump as a strongman-style president for the first billionaire supplicant to come forward on bended knee. Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the third-richest person on the planet, had already made his intentions clear in the waning days of the 2024 campaign when the influential newspaper he owns, The Washington Post, spiked a long-planned endorsement of rival Kamala Harris at his instruction.
In a rare tweet Wednesday, Bezos—beneficiary of massive federal contracts—laid it on thick. “Big congratulations to our 45th and now 47th President on an extraordinary political comeback and decisive victory,” Bezos posted on X, which is owned by the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk. “No nation has bigger opportunities. Wishing @realDonaldTrump all success in leading and uniting the America we all love.”
It almost goes without saying that Bezos said nothing Wednesday about the fact that, as owner of the Post, he is also the keeper of a remarkable legacy of watchdog journalism, which defied the White House in 1971 in publishing the secret Pentagon Papers and then produced the investigative reporting that helped bring down Richard Nixon in Watergate. There was no Bezos pep talk to his journalists that such heroism for democracy would be acted out now. Less than 48 hours after Trump’s election as the 47th president, this kind of silence has been deafening.
From the obsequious Bezos to the end of resistance from everyday folk, we are seeing the once unthinkable: the start of American autocracy.
Although it feels almost normal to flip on CNN and watch talking heads speculate on whom the president-elect is picking for his cabinet, there is nothing normal about the Trump transition, even with a president who’s been elected before. So much has changed since the tumultuous autumn of 2016. This time, America is rolling out a red carpet for a king—one who will, in the ultimate irony, preside over the 250th anniversary of that time when we overthrew a monarchy.
I know that sounds like hyperbole, or what The 51% calls “Trump derangement syndrome.” But the nation already on Wednesday received its first major bit of news—and there are going to be many, many more to come—making it clear that Trump is returning to the White House with stunning absolute powers that none of his 44 predecessors (Grover Cleveland, and now Trump, twice) either possessed or were willing to exercise over the American people.
It came in the form of a revelation from the U.S. Justice Department that special counsel Jack Smith—who aggressively, if too belatedly, brought federal indictments against Trump for the 2020 efforts to overturn the last presidential election that culminated in the January 6, 2021 insurrection, and for Trump taking highly classified documents—is planning steps that would have the likely impact of ending his cases before Trump takes the oath of office.
Multiple news outlets quoted sources within the Justice Department that Smith is now is active talks about how to “wind down” the two cases against Trump—with the one about classified documents already on life support after a zealously pro-Trump, Trump-appointed lower court judge dismissed the charges for now—before he becomes president again on January 20. It’s not yet clear whether Smith is planning to permanently dismiss the charges or—more likely—put them on some type of hold that would nonetheless make justice nearly impossible, since Trump would be 82 if he leaves office as scheduled in 2029, and there would be questions about the statute of limitations.
Such maneuvers would be in line with the controversial and legally debated Justice Department decision from the Nixon era that sitting presidents cannot be prosecuted, which already gave any POTUS a unique standing above the law. But remember that Trump was on track to stand trial in the January 6 case this year, if not for the U.S. Supreme Court’s stunning 6-3 ruling earlier this year giving presidents sweeping legal immunity for broadly defined “official acts.”
When Smith does appear before U.S. District Court Judge Tanya Chutkan to end the case, it will be a triple exclamation point on how a once revolutionary nation turned a president into a king.
Some legal experts are arguing that Smith is playing the horrendous hand that he’s been dealt here, perhaps scrambling to issue an in-depth report about Trump’s alleged wrongdoing before the new president’s MAGA appointees can fire him. I get that, but my nonlawyer gut tells me that Smith should make Trump and his lackeys dismiss the case themselves, as one more reminder that Trump is trashing every last democratic norm we have.
But how 2017-ish of me to even think that. The decision has already been made in all our former watchdog institutions to obey the new authoritarianism in advance. You can hear it in the quiet of an unseasonably warm November breeze.
The dogs of 2016 and 2017 are not barking. There are no people in the streets chanting, “We! Reject! The president-elect!” or carrying “Not My President” signs like eight years ago. Kids aren’t walking out of high school, and college presidents—reflecting the catastrophic erosions of free speech in America that go well beyond Trumpism—are not issuing statements.
New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg wrote Thursday about the Russian lifestyle of “internal emigration”—turning away from politics to emphasize family or books or gardening or anything else besides the seeming hopelessness of opposing autocracy.
This is exactly what I’m hearing from so many friends and even family here in Greater Philadelphia and on social media. People are leaving Musk’s X in droves, partly to protest the billionaire, but mostly to disengage from politics, at least for now. One boomer woman who threw herself into the so-called Trump Resistance in 2016 wrote me Thursday to say she is done. Protesting Trump, she wrote, “was an utter failure. I’m tired, demoralized, and bitter.”
I don’t blame her, nor would I think of criticizing the many people emphasizing their own mental health over politics at a moment when it’s not even clear what to do next. We are seeing in real time how autocracy happens, by creating hopelessness and despair among the mass of people who once might have fought back. From the obsequious Bezos to the end of resistance from everyday folk, we are seeing the once unthinkable: the start of American autocracy.
I was fortunate Thursday morning to connect with one of the nation’s top experts on authoritarian regimes, the Yale University historian Timothy Snyder, whose words—especially, “do not obey in advance”—from his essential On Tyranny are frequently quoted here. I wanted to ask him the question on so many people’s minds since Tuesday: What has history taught us about how to live now?
Snyder told me the most important thing for the moment is to avoid isolation and be around other people. “They want you to be alone,” the historian said of autocratic governments because isolation feeds the sense of powerlessness that allows the regime to do its dirty work unimpeded. “Nobody is going to fix this alone,” Snyder said. “That’s not how this works.”
Second, he suggested: “This is a good time to figure out what you’re good at. Define some little human-sized zone, whether it’s your library or your garden or your trade union. Take something positive that you know and do it.” He also noted that the political feeling of despair in opposing Trump and his MAGA movement doesn’t mean you can’t work for change on the state and local level, where one can still hash out issues with forward-minded politicians.
Snyder then suggested, with a laugh, what he called “a dumb little idea”—except that it wasn’t.
“Take a moment and write down a letter about the things you care about, that you’re willing to take a stand about. Write that down, put it in an envelope, and take it out of your desk as we’re going through these things”—like when Trump takes office in January, or early in his term.
Those of us who opposed Trump, and who were devastated to learn how many of our fellow citizens want to live under his strongman rule, need time to mourn this week’s news. But it’s well worth listening to Snyder’s words about not just living under tyranny, but someday soon finding reasonable ways to confront it. We are going to need each other, whether it’s in the streets or just at the dog park. And you—we—are not alone.
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Hey Trump, Who’s the Real Garbage?
On a telephone call-in to Fox & Friends, Trump said Vice President Kamala Harris was “real garbage.” It is now fair game for her to take it up and use it against him.
Jul 28, 2024
Former U.S. President Donald Trump just gave Vice President Kamala Harris what might prove to be the most effective line of attack for the entire presidential election campaign.
On a telephone call-in to Fox & Friends, Trump said Harris was “real garbage.” It was typical of Trump’s ad hominem attacks against all of his opponents.
But such attacks have never really been effectively parried, so he’s gotten away with them. They’ve worked. Everybody remembers “Crooked Hillary,” “Little Marco,” and other epithets.
But since it was Trump who uttered the line, it is now fair game for Harris to take it up and use it against him. It will be utterly devastating, throwing back into his face the truth about who he is.
“Who’s the real garbage,” curated to an epigram in the culture, can become the four-word death knell for Trump’s re-election bid, exposing in his own words, and illustrated by his own actions, just how unfit he is to be president.
First, let’s remember who Kamala Harris is.
She has a law degree from the University of California Hastings School of Law. In 2003, she was elected district attorney of San Francisco. From there, she was elected attorney general for the state of California. In 2016, she was elected to the U.S. Senate, the second African-American woman to serve in the Senate and the first Asian-American woman to serve.
In 2020, she was elected vice president of the United States, receiving over 81 million votes on the ticket with Joe Biden. That is almost 8 million more votes than were cast for Donald Trump. She is the first woman ever to hold that office, the highest elective office in the U.S. ever filled by a woman.
She has performed those duties for a president, Joe Biden, who is already ranked as the 14th best president in American history by 154 presidential scholars. In that same survey, Trump was voted the worst president in history.
This is the profile of one of the highest achieving women in the history of the country, and a double-minority one, to boot. In no world is it even close to “garbage.”
But since Trump offered the opening, Harris should make it a standard part of every appearance she makes—from rallies to debates—asking, “Who’s the real garbage?” And then, marching through the astonishing litany of Donald Trump’s character as revealed by his own actions.
For example…
Donald Trump has accused me of being “real garbage.” I’m serious! Let’s take a look at who’s the real garbage.
I’m not a convicted criminal. He is. Thirty-four times over! So, who’s the real garbage?
I never had an affair with a porn star and tried to hide it by buying her off to keep her quiet. He did. So, who’s the real garbage?
I don’t owe more than half a billion dollars(!) in legal judgements for things like tax evasion and defamation, but he does. So, who’s the real garbage?
The Washington Post says—and I’m quoting here—“Trump Was Found to Have Raped E. Jean Carroll.” Let me say that again. This is the headline. Quote: “Trump Was Found to Have Raped E. Jean Carroll.” RAPE! So, who’s the real garbage?
My boss wasn’t ranked the worst president in American history by a group of 154 presidential scholars. HE was. The worst president in American history. Look it up. So, who’s the real garbage?
I didn’t try to overturn a presidential election and steal the votes of 81 MILLION people who voted for Joe Biden and me. He did. So, who’s the real garbage?
And, I haven’t been lying about it for four years because I couldn’t admit that I was a loser. But he has. He’s not just a loser. He’s a sore loser, which everybody hates. So, who’s the real garbage?
I didn’t inherit $413 million from my daddy, and then pretend for decades that I was a self-made man. But, he did. So, who’s the real garbage?
I didn’t go bankrupt six times while stiffing thousands of workers of their rightful pay. All the while claiming to be a business genius. He did. So, who’s the real garbage?
I’m not a pathological liar, telling more than 30,000 DOCUMENTED lies during four years in office. THIRTY THOUSAND! But he did. So, who’s the real garbage?
Very quickly, the refrain will be taken up by everybody in the audience, in a question-response manner that will become a signature statement of the campaign. It will carry from rally to rally, through the convention, naming the lowlife for what he is, in a way that he will never be able to escape.
This is so important. We can already see that Trump is going to wage a vicious, scurrilous campaign. Harris cannot let him control the narrative, nor define her in his terms, as he’s trying to do with “real garbage.” Trump’s prior opponents have mistakenly allowed him to do that.
“Who’s the real garbage?” needs to become the “Lock her up” of Harris’ campaign. That is, the repeated, raucous, reflexive recitation of contempt for Trump that becomes embedded into the culture and, therefore, larger than life.
“Who’s the real garbage,” curated to an epigram in the culture, can become the four-word death knell for Trump’s re-election bid, exposing in his own words, and illustrated by his own actions, just how unfit he is to be president. Every American will know it.
The deliciousness of it comes from the fact that it’s all true, and that somebody, for the first time, is truly nailing Trump for who he is. It will make him the central figure in the campaign, as he’s always so desperate to be. He deserves no less. Nor do we.
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