Trump's Defense Seems To Be That He Is An Idiot

The following post is by Michael A. Cohen at MSNBC.com:

For those who have closely followed the political rise of Donald Trump, it’s rather obvious that the former president isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed. This is a man, after all, who once mused about spraying disinfectant or ultraviolet light inside the body to kill the Covid-19 virus, looked directly at the sun during a solar eclipse without protecting his eyes and said Hurricane Florence was “one of the wettest we’ve ever seen, from the standpoint of water.”

But in the wake of his third criminal indictment in four months, it appears that even Trump’s criminal defense team is essentially arguing that their client is an idiot.

Consider the comments of Trump’s lawyer John Lauro, who said Sunday that his client’s defense “is quite simple. Donald Trump … believed in his heart of hearts that he had won that election.”

I don’t doubt that Trump believed he won the 2020 election or that he repeated the lie so many times that it became his reality, but that’s not a defense — it’s a cry for help.

And in Trump’s case, arguing that he believed he won suggests that he also lives in a fantasy world. Last week’s federal indictment says Trump’s closest aides told him repeatedly that he lost the 2020 election. Every conspiracy theory whispered in this ear by Sidney Powell and the My Pillow guy proved hollow, and every legal challenge failed in court. There’s never been a shred of evidence backing up Trump’s “beliefs.”

More than 2½ years later, only the most deluded Americans believe in their heart of hearts that Trump won re-election, but Lauro's argument is it that that group includes the man most likely to be the GOP’s presidential standard-bearer in 2024. 

The only way this defense could work is if, like Trump, the judge and members of the jury are also two sandwiches shy of a picnic.

In his bizarre statements over the weekend, Lauro didn’t limit himself to positing what Trump believes in his heart. He also claimed that when Trump asked Vice President Mike Pence to refuse to certify Joe Biden as the winner of the 2020 election at the Jan. 6, 2021, joint session of Congress, he “asked him in an aspirational way.” Lauro said the same about Trump’s infamous phone call to Georgia’s secretary of state, Brad Raffensperger, whom he asked to “find 11,780 votes” that would allow him to be declared the winner of the state.

“That was an aspirational ask,” Lauro said.

In Lauro’s telling, Trump simply asked, “Will no one rid me of this turbulent election outcome?” and nothing more. 

But as the indictment alleges, Trump did far more than just “aspirationally” ask Pence. He and his co-conspirators are accused of concocting and attempting to implement a scheme to draft fake electors and, in the process, disenfranchise actual voters. And as Pence has said, the former president didn’t merely ask him to stop the certification — he pushed him to “reject votes outright” and “overturn the election.” 

Lauro’s argument is akin to defending an accused bank robber with the claim that “he only aspirationally asked the teller to give him money.” As a defense, it’s ludicrous and insulting to the intelligence of anyone it seeks to persuade.

Then again, Lauro said his client committed a “technical violation of the Constitution” but “not a violation of criminal law,” which suggests that maybe the lawyer representing Trump is a few law books short of being Clarence Darrow.

But Trump’s making nonsensical arguments follows a familiar pattern in his attempts to get out of trouble. Who can forget his allegedly “perfect” phone call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy, which led to his first impeachment? After his indictment in the Mar-a-Lago documents case, Trump claimed he had a right to possess certain government documents after having left office (he didn’t), that he had sole discretion in deciding which of his papers to turn over to the government (nope) and that Hillary Clinton and Biden did even worse things with classified documents than he did (they didn’t). 

Perhaps Trump’s most moronic and outlandish argument was that he had the right to declassify documents with his mind — a claim utterly ludicrous and yet amazingly debunked by an audio recording in which he acknowledged that he held on to classified documents that, “as president, I could have declassified,” but “now I can’t.”

To be fair, Lauro is in an impossible position. The evidence against his client appears to be overwhelming. Trump continues to imperil himself further by constantly commenting on the cases and attacking the special counsel and the judge. There is no good legal or moral defense for Trump’s alleged actions, and his only hope for a not guilty verdict may rest on the jury’s giving him a pass because they think his elevator peters out well short of the top floor. 

While it’s highly unlikely, one can’t completely dismiss the possibility that jurors will give him such a pass. After all, in 2020, after four years of Trump’s demonstrating that he is as sharp as a bowling ball, 74 million Americans thought he should spend another four years in the nation’s most powerful elected office.

Trump's Defenses Are Just More Lies/Revisionist History

The following post is by Samantha Putterman and Maria Ramirez Uribe at PolitiFact.com:

After a grand jury voted Aug. 1 to indict former President Donald Trump — his third indictment, this one related to efforts to overturn the 2020 election — he and his team shifted into defense mode. 

In a campaign statement, fundraising email and Truth Social posts, Trump downplayed his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot, compared the indictment with Nazi Germany and highlighted instances when Democrats objected to past elections. 

We fact-checked four of Trump’s claims, which include inaccuracies and revisionist history. 

"As you know, I did nothing wrong. It’s well-documented that I told Americans to act ‘PEACEFULLY’ and discouraged the use of any violence" on Jan. 6, 2021. — Aug. 1 Trump campaign fundraising email 

Trump’s words and actions before and during the Jan. 6 riot paint a different picture. 

In December, Trump repeatedly encouraged his supporters to fightthe election results and gather at the Capitol. At a Jan. 4 rally in Georgia, Trump repeated his grievances and told the crowd that Democrats weren’t going to take the White House and that "we’re going to fight like hell" and "take it back." 

On Jan. 6, Trump used his "Save America" rally to repeat inaccurate claims that he won the election. He continually urged the crowd to "fight" before inviting them to march to the Capitol. "Our country has had enough," Trump said. "We will not take it anymore and that’s what this is all about. To use a favorite term that all of you people really came up with, we will stop the steal." The crowd later chanted: "Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!"

He used the word "peacefully" once during the speech: "I know that everyone here will soon be marching over to the Capitol building to peacefully and patriotically make your voices heard."

By the time Trump finished speaking, crowds had already started gathering outside the Capitol. After the mob had shattered windows as they pushed inside the building, and evacuations of lawmakers had begun, Trump tweeted at 2:38 p.m., "Please support our Capitol Police and Law Enforcement. They are truly on the side of our Country. Stay peaceful!" 

Hours after rioters first breached the Capitol, Trump released a video statement that repeated his false claims about a fraudulent election and said, "We have to have peace. So, go home. We love you. You’re very special."

"The lawlessness of these persecutions of President Trump and his supporters is reminiscent of Nazi Germany in the 1930s, the former Soviet Union, and other authoritarian, dictatorial regimes." — Aug. 1 Trump campaign statement

This is inaccurate. In the 1930s, Nazi Germany orchestrated the systematic, state-sponsored persecution and murder of political dissenters and millions of European Jews. The Soviet Union instituted forced labor camp systems and executed dissidents.

By comparison, the Justice Department appointed a special counsel to oversee the investigation into Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 presidential election and block the transfer of power. The indictment cites evidence gathered from witness testimony, social media and phone records.

Leaders of other democratic governments have been prosecutedwhile in and out of office. These prosecutions are not exclusive to dictatorships or authoritarian nations.

Jeffrey Herf, a University of Maryland emeritus history professor who specializes in 20th century Germany, told us there is "no truth whatsoever" to Trump’s comparison.

The denunciation of the rule of law "was a core theme of the Soviet regime," Herf, who has authored several publications about Nazi Germany, wrote in an email. "So Trump's accusation is doubly absurd, dangerous, and is a sign of the historical ignorance of Trump and whoever wrote that claim."

Anti-Defamation League Director Jonathan Greenblatt on Aug. 1 posted on X, formerly known as Twitter, that Trump’s comparison to Nazi Germany was "factually incorrect, completely inappropriate and flat out offensive." 

"A Soros-backed state prosecutor first tried to break us when he indicted and arrested me earlier this spring despite having committed no crime at all." — Aug. 1 Trump campaign fundraising email

Trump is referring to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, who brought charges against the former president following a grand jury indictment in a case that involved a $130,000 hush money payment in 2016 to adult film actor Stormy Daniels. In April, Trump pleaded not guilty to 34 felony counts. 

Liberal billionaire George Soros did not donate directly to Bragg’s campaign. Soros donated $1 million in May 2021 to Color of Change, a progressive racial justice group that endorsed Bragg and pledged to spend more than $1 million supporting his campaign. Color of Change supported other progressive district attorney candidates, too.

Democrats called Trump an illegitimate president and objected to presidential election results in the past. — Aug. 1, Truth Social 

Following the indictment, Trump posted a 10-minute video of Democrats "denying election results" through the years. 

The clips focused on what some Democrats said or did after four elections the party lost. The claims highlighted include:

• Democrats saying Trump’s 2016 victory was illegitimate due to Russia’s meddling in the election; 

• Democrats saying Vice President Al Gore would have won the 2000 presidential election if the Supreme Court hadn’t voted 5-4 to stop a vote recount in Florida;

• Objections by 31 Democrats in the House of Representatives to certify Ohio’s electoral votes in President George Bush’s 2004 defeat of Sen. John Kerry, D-Mass. 

• Stacey Abrams’ refusal to concede in the 2018 Georgia gubernatorial race against Gov. Brian Kemp over voter suppression claims. 

This comparison has come up before. It is true that some Democrats called Trump an illegitimate president and objected to the certification of electoral counts in previous elections. They did so following a lawful process, unlike Trump’s supporters who disrupted Congress’ certification of the 2020 election results. 

In Trump’s indictment, Special Counsel Jack Smith clarified that Trump was "entitled to formally challenge the results of the election through lawful and appropriate means." However, it was Trump’s alleged attempts to illegally subvert the election results that could amount to crimes.

In all of Trump’s examples except for Abrams, the losing Democratic candidate conceded the election. Trump did not. And none of the House Democrats’ electoral vote count objections were supported by the presidential candidates, Norman Eisen, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution told PolitiFact in September 2022. 

"Comparing ‘election results denial’ in 2016 and 2020 is not just comparing apples and oranges, it’s more like comparing a tricycle to an 18‐​wheeler," said Cathy Young, a fellow at the libertarian Cato Institute in a 2022 article.

Don't Spend More On Defense - Just Spend Smarter

 

The following post about defense spending is by the editorial board of The Washington Post. They Are right!

War and peace have one unlikely thing in common: It isn’t hard to write a defense budget for either. Governments at war turn the spigots on; those at peace tend to shut them off. More challenging is drafting a military blueprint in a grayer zone, when U.S. troops are not in combat but requests for military aid from allies are on the rise and threats of an even bigger crisis loom. Washington has provided more than $45 billion in military aid to Ukraine since just before Russia’s invasion; there is little sign of that conflict abating. China, meanwhile, continues to creep toward Taiwan.

But that does not mean the $842 billion President Biden suggested spending on defense next year — up more than one-third from $630 billion in 2015 — should march into law unquestioned. At a time when dollars for all needs are in short supply and the nation’s debt is rising unsustainably, the question cannot be by what percentage the Defense Department’s budget should automatically grow this year. It should be:How do we ensure our military is best prepared for whatever comes?

One obvious answer: by spending smarter.

However the current debt ceiling negotiations conclude, Congress should press the civilians who oversee our military to move more quickly from crewed to uncrewed systems, to speed the shift from surface to subsurface vessels and mine warfare; to hurry investment in cyberdefenses and secure communications; and direct the services to prioritize maintenance and spares over procurement of new systems, which often arrive without the funds for ordnance, upkeep and parts that make them reliably lethal. Significant savings could be realized over the next decade while making the military more nimble and more powerful.

Congress would help matters if it stopped piling on funds for weapons and programs the Pentagon doesn’t want. Each year, lawmakers add somewhere between $15 billion and $60 billion to military budgets the Pentagon did not ask for. The Space Force, for example, received $1.7 billion more in December’s continuing resolution than the Pentagon requested. Featherbedding is so fully entrenched in the annual budget games that 19 Pentagon agencies are required by statute to report to Congress on any “unfunded priorities” they could not get past the Office of Management and Budget on their way to Capitol Hill. Those reports are an invitation for lawmakers to fund them anyway. Over a decade, that unrequested spending could, by itself, top a quarter of a trillion dollars.

Submarines, both conventional and nuclear-armed, are among the country’s greatest technological advantages. The Navy is a generation ahead of other nations below the surface and needs to stay ahead. That means building the Columbia class of nuclear missile subs and doing so in such a way that a related sub deal with Australia can also move forward. But surface shipbuilding priorities, oddly, too often resemble putting cart before horse. The Navy, dreaming of a 355-ship fleet, remains focused on building new vessels instead of maintaining those it already has. The Pentagon is far behind on ship maintenance, in both private and public shipyards; it needs to boost the ability of those facilities to repair more ships and find (or train) workers with the skills to do so. Otherwise, the Navy will continue to cannibalize parts from one ship to keep others afloat, retire vessels before the end of their useful life spans and struggle to support missions overseas because of an inability to keep the ships it already has ready for action.

Nor does it seem wise, in the era of cheap drones and relatively inexpensive missiles, to keep building large surface ships that require crews of thousands of men and women. Instead of buying a fifth Ford-class nuclear-powered carrier, it would be wiser to redirect some of those funds into renovating the undercapitalized shipyards that can keep the 293 ships that Congress has already bought combat-ready. Meanwhile, the service is woefully underinvested in both minesweeping and mine warfare at a time when these uncrewed devices can move, detect, identify and increasingly attack enemy ships on their own — with far less risk to sailors.

The Editorial Board supports an Air Force proposal, made in the interest of speeding weapons into warfighters’ hands, that would allow the Pentagon to reprogram up to $300 million per year without congressional approval. Given that Congress can take a year to approve a Pentagon budget, military planners need the flexibility to buy many items — particularly software — more quickly. But the Air Force has fairly come under questioning (even from some Senate Republicans) for spending so much on short-range fighters at the expense of longer-range strike, tanker and cargo programs. The F-35 Lightning might someday prove that it is worth the $412 billion taxpayers will spend just to build it, but it is not clear what sustaining role the fighter can play over the Taiwan Strait if pilots lack “depth of magazine” — i.e., ample munitions — they’ll need to fight. As one former Pentagon planner put it: We can send 500 fighters to Asia in a few days, but they will run out of ordnance a few days later. The Air Force needs to shift dollars out of expensive airframes and engines and into missiles — and the industrial base that can produce them.

As for the Army, it is enjoying something of a renaissance, as a number of its legacy weapons systems — from armor to artillery to a host of smart and dumb munitions — have taken center stage in Ukraine’s war with Russia. The Reagan-era Patriot missile defense system, for example, has outperformed in the theater, but the battle for control of the skies in Ukraine is a reminder that a more concerted effort by Army planners around air defense — a somewhat neglected mission inside the service — would help our allies in both Europe and Asia. At the same time, command focus on recruiting — and making the work of recruiting an important career move — would bolster the case for having more than 450,000 troops on active duty when a hefty portion of service personnel will never deploy. In general, the services all have too many people in uniform doing jobs that civilians could do. Fixing that mismatch could save nearly $20 billion over 10 years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates.

The Pentagon is launching an overhaul of the nuclear triad — expected to cost a half-trillion dollars or more — that should not be undertaken without fuller consideration of alternative approaches. The Air Force hopes to buy 100 B21 Raider bombers to replace the B2 and B1s; the service should revive plans to pilot some of the new bombers remotely. The Air Force also wants to modernize the Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile system, spread in silos across North Dakota, Montana and Wyoming. That upgrade could be delayed for a decade with little threat to the nation’s ability to deter or win a nuclear conflict. Some have argued that it would be more pragmatic to convert sub-based Trident missiles for land-based silos than replace the Minuteman with a new generation of Sentinel ICBMs.

Other needs get lost in the push for big-ticket platforms. There is a shortage of predictive analytics that would help commanders anticipate attacks before they occur. The services should prioritize artificial-intelligence-driven systems to create false targets that can confuse enemies into seeing 100 planes, ships or tanks where perhaps only a dozen exist. Soldiers and sailors need more in the way of redundant communication networks and self-healing cyberdefenses to stop the enemy from disrupting command and control. And then there’s the easy stuff: Lawmakers, widely outspoken in their worry about China, have yet to fully fund the Philippine base-sharing arrangement that the Biden administration negotiated with the government of Ferdinand Marcos Jr. Such a move would send a strong signal of joint resolve to Beijing, especially after years of harsh words between Manila and Washington.

For much of the past eight years, Congress has not asked the Pentagon to spend more smartly. It has mostly just asked the Pentagon to spend more. It is time for a more hardheaded approach.

The Republican Defense Of Trump Makes No Sense

(Cartoon image is by Bob Englehart at Cagle.com.)

The House Republicans have released their report in defense of Donald Trump. It is nonsense. It ignores some facts and contains Russian propaganda, but mainly tries to make the argument that Trump was just trying to fight Ukrainian corruption (and not dig up dirt on Joe Biden).

Their report would be laughable if this wasn't such a serious matter.

Washington Post columnist Jennifer Rubin (pictured) gives us 12 reasons why the GOP report makes no sense. She writes:

The Republicans’ 123-page report asserts that Trump “has a deep-seated, genuine, and reasonable skepticism of Ukraine due to its history of pervasive corruption” and aversion to foreign aid, and that public criticism by Ukrainian officials justified his suspicion. The defense is ludicrous for a batch of reasons.

First, for a guy so concerned about corruption, he never mentioned it. Constitutional scholar Laurence Tribe observes, “Trump never raised a concern with corruption as such on any call with [Ukrainian President Volodymyr] Zelensky or anyone else.” The Obama administration was interested in fighting corruption and deployed Biden to, for example, pressure Ukraine to oust a corrupt prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Trump thought this was awful and wanted to investigate Biden for doing this.

Second, what Trump did raise in his call with Zelensky was the “Bidens” and the ludicrous CrowdStrike conspiracy. “The other thing. There’s a lot of talk about Biden’s son, that Biden stopped the prosecution and a lot of people want to find out about that so whatever you can do with the Attorney General would be great,” Trump said on the July 25 call. “Biden went around bragging that he stopped the prosecution so if you can look into it … It sounds horrible to me.” Trump infamously told Zelensky, “I would like you to do us a favor though because our country has been through a lot and Ukraine knows a lot about it. I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it.” None of this has to do with rooting out corruption.

Third, if Trump was so concerned about corruption, why release aid in September when the plot was uncovered? One would think his deep-seated concern about Ukrainian corruption would not have been alleviated with no additional intervening action on anti-corruption measures.

Fourth, if anti-corruption was his obsession, why did Trump want a public announcement specifically mentioning the Bidens? Trump wanted the PR value of headlines blaring “Ukraine investigating Biden,” but he showed no interest in doing any actual investigation. He never, for example, tasked the attorney general with investigating the matter.

Fifth, as attorney Maya Wiley noted, Trump never bothered to correct or contradict Giuliani in May when he publicly promised to goad Ukraine into conducting probes “very, very helpful” to Trump.

Sixth, if Trump was conducting a serious investigation of corruption, why deny there was a “quid pro quo” — that is, investigations in exchange for release of aid. Instead, he should have declared, “Darn right I’m not giving those people a penny!”

Seventh, the role of Giuliani makes no sense if this was about fighting corruption. He had a skilled anti-corruption fighter in Ambassador Marie Yovanovitch, whom Trump fired at the behest of Giuliani and his cronies. Former prosecutor Harry Litman tweeted that there was “no possible reason to have Rudy running the show of course, much less fire Yovanovitch. The normal career and political officials can and do fight corruption just fine--that’s their main lookout in fact and they all made clear Trump subverted it.” 

Eighth, as my colleague Aaron Blake points out, the excuse that Trump was seeking a “thoughtful review” of corruption before meeting with Zelensky is inane. “There already was a ‘thoughtful review’ of Ukraine’s anti-corruption measures, and Ukraine passed it. It came from the Defense Department, which concluded in May that Ukraine had made sufficient progress on corruption to merit the aid.”

Ninth, for a guy so interested in fighting corruption, he’s made a practice of cavorting with some of the most corrupt authoritarians on the planet — Recep Tayyip Erdogan of Turkey and Russian President Vladimir Putin. As Tribe puts it, Trump, “to tell the truth, has never evidenced any such concern in his entire life — whether with Ukraine or with any other government — apart from his manifestly phony comments about ‘draining the swamp’ that he has done more than anybody else to fill.”

Tenth, if the explanation for all of this is entirely innocent, why would former national security adviser John Bolton have characterized the Giuliani-Mick Mulvaney activities as a “drug deal” and told his subordinates to inform the lawyers, and why would the lawyers not have explained to those raising concerns — such as Lt. Col. Alexander Vindman — that the holdup was entirely appropriate (rather than instructing him to tell no one about it)?

Eleventh, there is no reason to withhold documents or to prevent witnesses such as acting chief of staff Mulvaney or Secretary of State Mike Pompeo from testifying if the explanation, supported by documents, shows Trump’s determination to fight corruption. Surely there would be documented evidence of Trump’s “genuine” concern for stopping corruption, right?

Twelfth, Trump should be dying to participate in the impeachment hearings if he had a valid reason for strong-arming Ukraine. House Judiciary Committee Chairman Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.) commented, “If the President thinks the call was ‘perfect’ and there is nothing to hide … [he would] provide any exculpatory information that refutes the overwhelming evidence of his abuse of power.” Instead, Trump is bent on undermining the process and encourages his helpmates in the House to raise one bogus conspiracy theory after another.

C’mon, who are Republicans kidding? Saying Trump is concerned about corruption is about as believable as saying he is concerned about his own conflicts of interest or nepotism. If this is the best Republicans can come up with, there really is no factual or constitutional defense for Trump.