The tangled, nearly 7-year saga of the Stormy Daniels hush money scandal and investigations that has resulted in Trump now being on the verge of indictment, explained

vox.com/policy-and-pol… THE PAYOFF: The month before the 2016 election, Stormy Daniels prepared to come forward alleging a consensual sexual encounter with Trump 10 years prior — but let it be known she'd accept payment for her silent.

Michael Cohen sent the payment, $130,000, on October 27, 2016.

Hunter Biden has filed a countersuit against the computer repair store owner who provided his emails and files to Trump allies.

It's interesting to look very closely at which claims Hunter explicitly denies and which he claims not to have knowledge sufficient to confirm or deny Hunter denies he was referred to the repair store.

Hunter says he lacks the knowledge to confirm or deny whether he asked the repairman to recover info from damaged computers and whether he himself returned to the shop the next day

This seems in very poor taste to me.

Its roots however go back much further than the Great Awokening!

The first version of this exercise I can find online is from the year 1998 (thread cont'd)

https://twitter.com/dougponder/status/1635704489406504961

Here we have the same exercise, "Whom to Leave Behind," but with different identities. Race is only explicitly mentioned for one person on the list. It's dated 1998 at the bottom.

home.snu.edu/~jsmith/librar…

Thoughtful @henrygrabar piece on how the city-dwellers worrying about a "crime" problem seem to actually be worrying about a "public disorder" problem.

slate.com/business/2023/… You can imagine a spectrum from “total anarchy” to “authoritarian clampdown."

Current debate is between those who think cities have gotten too disorderly and need more order, vs. those suspicious attempts to enforce more order will inevitably be discriminatory & authoritarian

I wrote about the most consistent throughline to Ron DeSantis's career — his enthusiastic self-reinventions toward whichever political cause is in vogue and whichever persona could help him achieve his next ambition.

He supports The Current Thing.

vox.com/politics/23622… This tendency of DeSantis’s was evident back in 2019 when @reihan pointed out that he had shifted from a spending-cutting Tea Partier to a Trump superfan to (early in his governorship) a surprisingly uncontroversial pragmatist. But he wouldn't stop there.

theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/…

Tucker Carlson and other right commentators play a game where they try to leave the impression that they agree the 2020 election was stolen, without ever quite saying that.

Instead they claim it was in some abstract sense rigged, unfair, or implausible

vox.com/politics/2023/… Per Carlson's revisionist history, the real story about January 6 is that Democrats and the media were mean to Trump supporters.

Not Trump's then-ongoing attempt to steal the election, not the ample violence that did take place, not the disruption to the transfer of power

My understanding is that the subsequent movement in the count made it pretty clear that the call was premature and they could not have reasonably known with near-certainty that Biden would win at that point

https://twitter.com/jbarro/status/1632164786724118528

It’s an interesting wrinkle to this whole situation. Makes for a more pleasing morality tale if the Fox AZ call was clearly correct. But (based on my conversations with other election callers, reading analyses, etc.) I think it really was too soon.

The discourse around the DC criminal code reform has been a bit maddening but seems to me it:
-Was indeed crafted to push down median sentences
-Probably wouldn’t affect crime rates, which are driven by other factors
-Is controversial for symbolic / signaling / "optics" reasons Generally, certainty of arrest and punishment is a much more effective deterrent than sentence length. People considering committing a violent crime don’t weigh “would my max sentence be 14 or 18 years,” they weigh “will I get away with it?”

This @mattyglesias has gotten a lot of praise from people who don't really like "wokeness" and who naturally are open to blaming wokeness for lots of tends they don't like, including kids' mental health struggles.

But beware of confirmation bias!

slowboring.com/p/why-are-youn… I think all of this is good and healthy advice on a personal level.

But how good is the evidence that wokeness is making teens depressed?

Liberal teens were already more depressed than conservative teens in pre-woke era. And both groups got more depressed in recent years

This is an interesting @mattyglesias post but I think the graph he riffs on really just supports the phone point, not the blame on 2010s progressive leaders.

-Liberals were already more depressed in aughts
-Conservatives also got more depressed in '10s

slowboring.com/p/why-are-youn… What the graph (about 12th graders) says to me is "Depression was already higher among liberals than conservatives, then something happened in '10s that sent depression up among all groups but especially female liberals"

Rupert Murdoch vowed to "make Trump a non person" after 1/6.

Fox did not do that, exactly. They did not take Trump down. But they did start really building someone else up: Ron DeSantis.

vox.com/politics/2023/… The relationship between Fox and its viewers is a two-step process.

1.) Fox tries to win their eyeballs and trust by pandering to their views and entertaining them.

2.) Fox tries to steer, redirect, and shape their viewers’ impulses in certain directions.

Paul Ryan (a Fox board member) urged the Murdochs on 12/6/20 that it was time for "solid pushback (including editorial)" of Trump's "baseless calls for overturning electors."

Called it "the right thing and the smart business thing to do" Rupert Murdoch, two days after Jan 6, 2021, said Fox was now "pivoting," adding, "We want to make Trump a non person."

On 1/11/21, Murdoch said they were "pivoting as fast as possible"... but... "We have to lead our viewers which is not as easy as it might seem"

Many fear that too many Republican candidates running will split the vote and let Trump win again like 2016, but I think that misstates both what happened in 2016 and the state of the current race:

vox.com/2023/2/19/2359… In 2014-2015, before Trump's rise, the GOP field was remarkably fractured. No one could consistently manage to poll above 17 percent or so.

The 2024 polling already looks totally different with Trump typically in the 40s, DeSantis in the 30s, and everyone else far back

In the weeks following election 2020, an intense culture of “political correctness” took hold at Fox News — in which challenging Trump and Powell’s claims could only happen with utmost care and sensitivity, for fear of offending viewers' tender feelings

vox.com/2023/2/18/2360… Much commentary on the Dominion legal filing has focused hypocrisy — Fox knew Trump was lying, & misled their audience.

Per the full filing, Fox leaders were terrified of alienating pro-Trump viewers, panicked about lost audience “trust,” and anxious about Newsmax competition

The overreaching of some Trump/Russia coverage has commonalities to overreaching in Clinton scandal coverage, and in the right's Durham investigation coverage — it's inherent to the way the media covers big political scandals in the post-Watergate era.

vox.com/policy-and-pol… Some commonalities:
-The treatment of any allegation, no matter how wacky, as legitimate & worthy of investigation
-The assumption of guilt
-The implicit "drip drip drip" in which it is assumed that more and more misconduct will be revealed until the politician is brought down

New: My own retrospective on the media’s Trump-Russia coverage — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

I found Jeff Gerth’s review in CJR to make some good points, but to be selective and one-sided overall. Here’s my own attempt to grapple with what happened

vox.com/policy-and-pol… In an effort to argue the scandal was fraudulent from the start, the revisionist Trump-Russia narrative focuses on the shenanigans of Christopher Steele and the Clinton campaign in 2016 — downplaying the Russian hacks themselves and the shenanigans from Trump's team.

In arguing Russiagate destroyed trust in the mainstream media, Jeff Gerth said a majority of Americans trusted it in 2016 but only 26% do now.

David Weakliem points out he's conflating two stats and the actual change was far smaller (4 or 6 points)

justthesocialfacts.blogspot.com/2023/02/trust-… Of course the media's trust numbers are still quite bad. But Gerth wanted to argue that they fell off a cliff since 2016 and that that was because of Russia coverage.

In reality the numbers have been in long-term decline and got a bit worse while Trump was in office.

I don't think the federal investigations into Trump have been politicized attempts to "get" him, but the Manhattan DA probe is another story... before even getting to the case itself they'll have to argue how he's exempt from the statute of limitations

slate.com/news-and-polit… After clearing away statute of limitations, then they need a way to argue that Trump's conduct is a felony (the path there is "steep").

And if he gets convicted of this, it might not entail prison, so gotta make a broader case

I agree with parts of this and disagree with others, but the choice of having Jeff Gerth write about reporters hyping scandals that turn out to be overblown, when he's long been criticized for doing just that with Whitewater and Wen Ho Lee, is interesting

cjr.org/special_report… Gerth's Trump/Russia arguments should rise and fall on their merits.

But he's not just a "NYT Pulitzer winner." His reporting has long been controversial for some of the exact features he's now criticizing

Whitewater: pbs.org/wgbh/pages/fro…

Wen Ho Lee slate.com/news-and-polit…

Durham and Barr searched everywhere for the deep state plot against Trump, but ended up getting a tip accusing *Trump* of crimes that even they decided "was too serious and credible to ignore."

Barr had Durham investigate it, unclear what became of it

nytimes.com/2023/01/26/us/… Amazingly, per NYT, this is why the Durham investigation became a criminal investigation — to investigate a new allegation *against Trump.* (Everyone assumed it was to investigate officials.)

Barr "chose in this instance not to clarify what was really happening." Wow.

There's such a policy hole at the heart of the culture war-obsessed GOP that the House holdouts managed to effectively seize power and force McCarthy to pay homage to their unpopular, unworkable agenda for the time being.

nationalreview.com/2023/01/the-ho… It is really striking, as @petespiliakos writes, that after the whole past decade of turmoil and realignment in the GOP we're just doing 2011-2012 again in Congress this year because a rump of the party wants to.