Why Trump’s indictment is no ‘moment of choosing’
His former vice-president recently said that “history will hold him accountable.” This week, his biggest rival for the 2024 Republican nomination made a series of not-so-veiled digs at him, bringing up porn-star hush money and questioning his leadership and character.
In other words, as Donald Trump braces for a possible indictment and arrest, it’d be hard to describe the Republican Party as one big happy family. 2024 contenders seem more and more comfortable criticizing the former president. Congressional Republicans, who are at a retreat in Orlando this week, hardly seem enthusiastic about the prospect of playing defense for Trump yet again.
It is a messy landscape, with GOP factions falling spread along the full spectrum of Trump enthusiasm levels from ride-or-die MAGA to “Dear God, please, not again.” But, about one thing, Republicans are fairly united: the criminal indictment of a former president for the first time in US history by a member of the opposing party who campaigned on pursuing Trump — and all for a misdemeanor — is cause for concern. This isn’t that surprising. Political parties are generally wary about the politicization of the judicial system by their opponents. The idea that you could be anti-Trump and anti-Trump indictment shouldn’t be especially hard to understand. And yet some seem determined to miss the point.
The Associated Press describes the looming indictment — one which won’t come today as the grand jury is not meeting — as a “moment of choosing” for the GOP. The article quotes Sarah Longwell, the NeverTrump pollster and founder of the Republican Accountability Project: “This is another moment — not just this indictment, but the others likely to follow — where Republicans have the opportunity to break with Trump,” she says. “If they fail to do so, they’ll have no one to blame but themselves when Trump is the nominee again.”
The AP story notes that “after almost eight years of near-constant scandal, Republicans have ultimately rallied behind Trump over and over and over again,” suggesting that they are about to do so once more. The view here is black-and-white: for or against, Team Trump or Team anti-Trump, either you want Trump to be the next president or you want to see him behind bars.
Of course, most of us hope we get neither. Fulfilling his constitutional role as the spokesman for the big fat middle left out of so much of our politics, West Virginia’s Democratic senator Joe Manchin warned this week that “there’s many reasons why Donald Trump should not be president in the United States. But you should not allow the court system to be perceived as basically a political pawn.” It is a less overhyped version of the same argument being made by many leading Republicans. And it is an entirely sensible position — and one that the former president’s loudest supporters and angriest critics are determined to drown out.
Another Trump-obsessive who falls into the the same trap as Longwell and everyone else who thinks this indictment is a “moment of choosing” is, of course, Trump himself. Everything is a loyalty test for Trump, and the mirror image of the “time to take a stand” pleas of a certain kind of anti-Trumper is the former president’s mob-boss insistence that you’re either on the team or not.
On our radar
Vance’a VA welcome
Politico’s playbook reports that J.D. Vance has bought a home in Alexandria. One resident says that he was welcomed to the neighborhood with a “yarn bombing” and notes that the conservative senator now lives in an area “filled with Pride flags and Kindness posters.”
Tyson, Brees and the GOP
Cockburn found himself at the House GOP retreat in Orlando this week, where he bumped into Drew Brees and Mike Tyson. The former NFL quarterback was there to talk about teamwork. Tyson just happened to be at the same hotel, but had his say on the Trump indictment: “I don’t think he should go to jail. I don’t know. I’m not a politician.”
The Fed raises rates
In Monday’s Diary, I set the scene for Jerome Powell’s agonizing rates decision this week. In the end, the Fed did what the market expected, sticking to a 0.25 point increase. The market response to the decision this afternoon has been positive. Fed watchers note that the Federal Open Market Committee ditched its usual warning of “ongoing increases” that would be necessary to tackle inflation, instead saying that “some additional policing firming may be appropriate.”
Prior to the collapse of Silicon Valley Bank, the talk was of whether the Fed would raise rates by a quarter of half a point. After the recent financial turbulence, the question became whether they would raise rates at all.
–Oliver Wiseman
The other TikTok
Everyone has heard of TikTok, and its CEO is set to appear before a House committee tomorrow, but have you heard of CapCut, the ByteDance editing app that is skyrocketing in popularity? CapCut can be used to edit videos for most social media platforms — including TikTok — and has reached over 200 million active users per month. Like its overwhelmingly popular cousin, CapCut represents yet another threat to American national security, even if it has flown under the radar so far.
ByteDance, which also owns TikTok, is a Chinese technology company, meaning that any data that ByteDance collects is required to be available to the Chinese Communist Party, whether it is kept in the US or Beijing. The more sources of data available to the CCP, the better it can understand the workings of American life, its patterns, and its vulnerabilities. CapCut may not be as widely used as TikTok, but it is another source for the CCP’s collection strategy.
TikTok may lead the pack of Chinese platforms in terms of sheer size, but it is far from alone — consider Temu and Shein, for example. Congress and regulators will need to expand their focus as the Chinese app market expands.
–John Pietro
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Poll watch
President Biden job approval
Approve 43 percent | Disapprove 51.3 percent | Net Approval -8.3 (RCP average)
Is supporting Ukraine a vital US interest?
Among potential GOP primary voters
Yes: 37 percent
No: 46 percent
Among all voters:
Yes: 49 percent
No: 29 percent (Morning Consult)
Best of the rest
Harry Enten, CNN: Voters of color are a big reason Trump leads primary polls
Alexander Burns, Politico: Stop overthinking the Trump indictment
Jay Caspian Kang, New Yorker: Vance, DeSantis and the GOP’s diverging paths
Niall Ferguson and Moritz Schularick, Wall Street Journal: Life’s certainties, death, taxes and bailouts
Mark P. Mills, City Journal: The other things fueling inflation
George F. Will, Washington Post: How government casually violates the letter and spirit of the First Amendment
