This is a link to a gift article.
Several reporters at The New York Times worked together for months unraveling the secrets of Jeffrey Epstein’s financial success. How did he go from being a high school math teacher to a multimillionaire? His greatest trick, it appears, was cultivating and leveraging friendships among people who were wealthy and powerful. Name-dropping was a tactic. So were lying and boasting, as he rose in elite circles, cultivating contacts, references, women, and friends.
Steve Schmidt is a veteran political strategist who worked for Republicans, most recently for John McCain in 2008. When Trump was elected, Schmidt was a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project. In 2020, he registered as a Democrat. He currently writes a blog at Substack.
This one is brilliant. Pete Hegseth is the embodiment of the moral and spiritual and intellectual rot at the core of the Republican Party today.
Schmidt writes:
There is no “Secretary of War” or “War Department” in the United States of America under US law.
Each time a news organization uses Pete Hegseth’s concocted title, and submits to his “War Department” fantasy, it is an act of corruption.
It is a direct and specific choice that immolates journalistic ethics by embracing fantasy at the demand of power.
Journalism confronts power.
Journalism doesn’t obey it, heed it, submit to it, appease it, or accept the premise that make-believe is real if the leader believes it so, regardless of reality.
This was posted by a man in the chain of command for the release of nuclear weapons after the commission of a war crime on his orders, which was followed by evasions, deflections of responsibility, and an attempt to stab a US Navy admiral in the back:
When General of the Army George Marshall, Chief of Staff of the US Army Secretary of State and Defense died, President Harry Truman said the following in remembrance of his titanic life. He made an unfortunate reference to the traitorous Robert E. Lee, who was exceeded in every way by Ulysses Grant, a man who bested him, yet was smeared into oblivion over 100 years time by the the same type of white nationalists and Christian Taliban who slither around Mar-a-Lago. That is, until one day, the truth escaped its dungeon and a foremost savior of the Union was seen clearly again.
[Truman said:]
General Marshall was an honorable man, a truthful man, a man of ability.
Honor has no modifying adjectives — a man has it, or he hasn’t. General Marshall had it.
Truth has no qualifying words to be attached to it. A man either tells the truth, or he doesn’t. General Marshall was the exemplification of the man of truth.
Ability can be qualified. Some of us have little of it, some may have moderate ability, and some men have it to the extreme.
General Marshall was a man of the greatest ability.
He was the greatest general since Robert E. Lee.
He was the greatest administrator since Thomas Jefferson.
He was the man of honor, the man of truth, the man of greatest ability.
He was the greatest of the great in our time.
I sincerely hope that when it comes my time to cross the great river that General Marshall will place me on his staff, so that I may try to do for him what he did for me.
*******************
Perhaps one reason that Pete Hegseth fetishizes the “War Department” is that, when it existed, it commanded a segregated force. The Defense Department has always commanded a desegregated force.
Before the US Army was desegregated a young Army Lieutenant named Jackie Robinson faced trumped up charges at a kangaroo court martial.
Here is Jackie Robinson’s legacy perfectly preserved for all time in the magnificent eulogy he received from Reverend Jesse Jackson, to whom I hope we can all send good wishes and prayers this holiday season, as he struggles through the ravages of the burdens handed him with dignity and grace:
[Jackie Robinson’s eulogy by Reverend Jesse Jackson.]
Powerful men have a long tradition of sending powerless young men to die in unworthy causes in far away lands.
There should be an extremely low tolerance for such men in 2025 America, but they are not only tolerated, but indulged.
The hypocrisy of the US Congress on the matter of Pete “Kill them all!” Hegseth is bottomless and dangerous. Their faithlessness to the American soldier, sailor, airmen and marine is obscene.
The man who jumped up on a table screaming, “Kill all Muslims!” was exactly who the Congress was warned about. Yet, the warnings were unheeded because the Congress cared more about pleasing Trump than the institutions of the US Army, Navy, and Marine Corps that predate the independence of the United States. They cared more about sating a stirred-up Fox News mob than a 19-year-old private.
Shameful doesn’t begin to describe it.
It is a dereliction of duty, and the most profound type of moral betrayal.
The 119th MAGA Congress is an abomination, led by a religious nutter and weakling who is neither bright, decent, funny, nor wise.
In other words, he is a perfect MAGA puppet who thinks he is a ventriloquist. In truth, the hand inserted into his most sacred space, the one he hides his bespectacled head within, is smeared with orange hand paint.
Faithless, treacherous and disloyal are the Hegseth ethos. They are a perfect mirror of the only reflection of equal rottenness in America: the crazed MAGA Congress, filled from bottom to top with corrupt loons, belligerent liars, sexual deviants, conspiracists, fraudsters, women beaters, and insider traders, who worship Trump together.
Pete Hegseth is the leader of a military that is unready and unprepared to fight a necessary war. He is a performance artist, a late-stage mid-tier Fox News star who is a herald of disaster to a population filled with indifference. It is about to find out the hard way how much damage a small group of evil men and women can do to a nation.
Ismael Loera writes in The Fulcrum about the recent scandal at Success Academy, the celebrated charter chain that regularly posts high test scores. Recordings leaked, showing that the leadership required teachers and all other staff to contact legislators on behalf of charter schools.
To a seasoned New Yorker who follows the shenanigans at charter schools, this is no scandal. It’s simply the charter school way of doing business. Both students and staff are props for their political and financial interests. Loera lives in Boston, so she might not be accustomed to Success Academy’s tactics.
Success Academy has been systematic about mobilizing its teachers and its students to demand legislation to protest any restrictions and to oppose accountability. This not a New York City phenomenon. It’s the way that charters get a firm foothold in state legislatures.
The fact that Loera finds this blatant political activity disturbing seems to reflect a certain naïveté. The charter lobbyists in every state have worked as other lobbyists do: they write the legislation; they build in privileges and protections; they attack the motives of anyone demanding accountability. Eva Moskowitz has been more eative than most charter leaders in using students to pack legislative hearings, to take buses to the state Capitol, and to engage in activities to protect the charters’ interests.
Loera wrote:
When I was running a school, I knew that every hour of my team’s day mattered. A well-prepared lesson, a timely phone call home to a parent, or a few extra minutes spent helping a struggling student were the kinds of investments that added up to better outcomes for kids.
That is why the leaked recording of Success Academy CEO Eva Moskowitz pressuring staff to lobby elected officials hit me so hard. In an audio first reported by Gothamist, she tells employees, “Every single one of you must make calls,” assigning quotas to contact lawmakers. On September 18th, the network of 59 schools canceled classes for its roughly 22,000 students to bring them to a political rally during the school day. What should have been time for teaching and learning became a political operation.
This is not simply about one leader’s poor judgment. It exposes a structural reality in the charter model. Unlike traditional public schools, charters must continually secure their share of taxpayer dollars, which creates pressures that blur the line between education and politics. Public money intended for classrooms can easily be redirected toward political activity.
Success Academy has a history of doing this, having mobilized staff and families for rallies during the early days of Mayor Bill de Blasio’s administration. More recently, charter leaders aimed pointed comments at Zohran Mamdani’s opposition to lifting the charter school cap in NYC beyond the current limit of 275, avoiding his name but making clear he was the target. That level of hostility toward an elected official’s policy stance edges close to electioneering and shows how charters use taxpayer resources and compromise public trust.
The pattern makes clear that this is not a one-time mistake but a recurring strategy. If a school cannot survive without turning its teachers and its students into a lobbying force, then it does not deserve to survive.
The costs of this pressure are real. Every hour assigned to calling legislators is an hour lost to lesson planning, supporting a struggling reader, or improving curriculum. Involving children in rallies goes even further, turning students into props for a cause they did not choose. Families send their children to school to learn, and taxpayers expect their dollars to fund classrooms, not political campaigns.
I know from personal experience how easily this kind of mission drift happens. As a charter school leader, I once sat through an anti-union presentation about blocking organizing. The tactic was different, but the impulse was the same: using institutional power to shape employees’ civic choices. Whether the issue is suppressing a union drive or directing staff to advocate for legislation, coercing political activity erodes trust and undermines the purpose of schools.
Charter networks have also invested heavily in professional lobbying. Families for Excellent Schools, a former NYC advocacy group for charters, once spent nearly $10 million on lobbying in a single year in New York. Success Academy itself reported $160,000 in federal lobbying in 2024. Those outlays are legal. But was Moskowitz trying to save money by conscripting educators and even students into the work that paid lobbyists usually do? That is legally questionable. The fact that someone on the inside took the risk to leak the recording shows some recognition of how inappropriate these practices were.
Lawmakers have already taken notice. State Senators John Liu and Shelley Mayer called the Moskowitz rally “an egregious misuse of instructional time and state funds” and urged a formal investigation.
Publicly funded institutions should never compel political participation, and clear boundaries protect everyone. Leaders know their limits, employees know their rights, and families can trust that students will not be pulled into political theater.
Policy reforms can strengthen those boundaries. Oregon bars employers from disciplining workers who refuse to attend political or religious meetings, and Connecticut bans mandatory political meetings outright. New York should adopt similar protections and go further for publicly funded schools. Any requirement that employees engage in political lobbying during work hours or with public resources should be explicitly prohibited. Students should never be taken out of class to participate in political events.
Some will argue this is only one leader’s excess. That response ignores the incentives built into a model that ties school growth and charter renewal to political capital. Unless lawmakers act, the cycle will repeat. The safer and fairer path is to set boundaries that keep politics out of the school day, protect staff from coercion, and safeguard children’s learning.
When I left school leadership, a mentor told me, “The real test of a model is what it makes people do under pressure.” The Success Academy scandal is a test for the charter sector, and it’s failing. Institutions that rely on coerced speech to sustain themselves are not just bending rules; they are breaking faith with the families and taxpayers who fund them.
Ismael Loera is the Director of People and Culture at Room to Grow and a Paul and Daisy Soros and Public Voices Fellow with the OpEd Project.
Heather Cox Richardson makes two important points in this post:
I wonder: How can we survive another 3 and one-half years of this craziness?
No matter what Trump does or says, he will stil be President. The Republicans who control the House and Senate will not impeach him, no matter what. His Cabinet of lapdogs will not invoke the 25th Amendment to remove him. The best we can hope for is a Democratic sweep of both houses of Congress in 2026 so Trump is not allowed to get away with lying and grifting and destroying the global economy.
On Friday, G. Elliott Morris of Strength in Numbers reported that “polls show Trump’s position plummeting.” On Friday morning, the average job approval rating for Trump was 42.6% with 53.5% disapproving.
Those numbers break down by policy like this: Gallup polls show that only 35% of Americans approve of Trump’s immigration policy with 62% opposed. A new poll out from CBS News/ YouGov today shows that support for Trump’s deportations has dropped ten points from the start of his term, from 59% to 49%. Fifty-eight percent of Americans oppose the administration’s use of detention facilities. The numbers in a CNN/SSRS poll released today are even more negative for the administration: 59% of Americans oppose deporting undocumented immigrants without a criminal record while only 23% support such deportations, and 57% are opposed to building new detention facilities while only 26% support such a plan.
American approval of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) is unlikely to rise as news spreads that last Monday, the government gave ICE unprecedented access to the records of nearly 80 million people on Medicaid, allegedly to enable ICE to find undocumented immigrants. Kimberly Kindy and Amanda Seitz of the Associated Press reported that the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services signed an agreement with the Department of Homeland Security that enables ICE to access Medicaid recipients’ name, ethnicity and race, birthdate, home address, and social security number.
Undocumented immigrants are not eligible for Medicaid, although they may use it in an emergency to cover lifesaving services in a hospital emergency room. The release of personal information from Medicaid lists is unprecedented. Senator Adam Schiff (D-CA) warned: “The massive transfer of the personal data of millions of Medicaid recipients should alarm every American…. It will harm families across the nation and only cause more citizens to forego lifesaving access to health care.”
Trump’s tariffs are not popular. An Associated Press–NORC poll on Thursday found that 49% of Americans thought Trump’s policies have made them worse off while only 27% think his policies have helped.
And then there are the Epstein files.
A YouGov poll from Tuesday showed that 79% of Americans think the government should release all the documents it has about the Epstein case while only 4% think it should not. Those numbers included 85% of Democrats, but also 76% of Independents and 75% of Republicans. And that was BEFORE the publication of the Wall Street Journal article detailing the lewd and suggestive birthday letter Trump apparently contributed to Epstein’s fiftieth birthday album.
As Morris notes, Trump is underwater on all the issues of his presidency, but he is most dramatically underwater over Epstein.
You don’t need polls to see that Trump, at least, is panicking. He is throwing red meat to his base in what appears to be an attempt to regain control of the narrative. After his July 12 threat to strip comedian and talk show host Rosie O’Donnell of her citizenship (she was born in New York, and he does not have that power), he has kept up a stream of social media posts that seem designed to distract his wavering followers from the news around them.
On Wednesday, Trump announced on social media: “I have been speaking to Coca-Cola about using REAL Cane Sugar in Coke in the United States, and they have agreed to do so. I’d like to thank all of those in authority at Coca-Cola. This will be a very good move by them—You’ll see. It’s just better!”
But Coca-Cola had apparently not gotten the memo. It uses cane sugar in a number of foreign markets but has used high-fructose corn syrup in U.S. products since 1985. On its website, it wrote: “We appreciate President Trump’s enthusiasm for our iconic Coca‑Cola brand. More details on new innovative offerings within our Coca‑Cola product range will be shared soon.”
Social media users posted memes of Coke bottles emblazoned with the words “Trump is on the List” and, in small letters below, “Now with cane sugar.”
On Thursday, after observers had noted both the president’s swollen ankles and what appeared to be makeup covering up something on his hand, the White House announced that Trump has been diagnosed with chronic venous insufficiency, a condition that his physician described as a “benign” and common condition in which veins don’t move blood back to the heart efficiently.
Trump has never offered any information about his health, and his doctors have presented accounts of his physical exams that are hard to believe, making observers receive this announcement at this moment with skepticism. “Chronic venous insufficiency is a condition where the veins in the legs have difficulty drawing attention from the fact that the Epstein Files still haven’t been released,” one social media meme read.
Today, Trump posted on social media: “The Washington ‘Whatever’s’ should IMMEDIATELY change their name back to the Washington Redskins Football Team. There is a big clamoring for this. Likewise, the Cleveland Indians, one of the six original baseball teams, with a storied past. Our great Indian people, in massive numbers, want this to happen. Their heritage and prestige is systematically being taken away from them. Times are different now than they were three or four years ago. We are a Country of passion and common sense. OWNERS, GET IT DONE!!!”
Hours later, he posted that his post “has totally blown up, but only in a very positive way.” Then he threatened to block the deal to move the Commanders back to Washington, D.C., from a Maryland suburb unless they “change the name back to the original ‘Washington Redskins.’”
At the turn of the last century, those worried that industrialization was destroying masculinity encouraged sports to give men an arena for manly combat. Sports teams dominated by Euro-Americans often took names that invoked Indigenous Americans because those names seemed to them to harness the idea of “savagery” in the safe space of a playing field. By the end of the twentieth century, the majority of Americans had come to recognize the racism inherent in those names, and colleges started to retire Native American team names and mascots. In 2020 the Washington football team retired its former name, becoming the Commanders two years later. At about the same time, the Cleveland baseball team became the Cleveland Guardians in honor of the four pairs of art deco statues installed on the city’s Hope Memorial Bridge in 1932.
Trump’s attempt to control the narrative didn’t work. “The thing about the Redskins and Indians is that Donald Trump is on the Epstein list,” one social media user wrote. The post was representative of reactions to Trump’s post.
Today marked the end of the first six months of Trump’s second term, and he marked it with a flurry of social media posts praising his performance as “6 months of winning,” and attacking those he sees as his opponents. He again went after the Wall Street Journal, which ran the story about Epstein’s birthday album. He complained the paper had run a “typically untruthful story” when it said Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent had had to explain to Trump that firing Fed chair Jerome Powell would be bad for markets. Trump took exception to the idea he did not understand the interplay of the Fed and markets, despite his repeated threats against Powell.
“Nobody had to explain that to me,” he wrote. “I know better than anybody what’s good for the Market, and what’s good for the U.S.A. if it weren’t for me, the Market wouldn’t be at Record Highs right now, it probably would have CRASHED! So, get your information CORRECT. People don’t explain to me, I explain to them!”
Tonight, Trump’s social media posts seemed to project his own fears on Democrats he perceives as enemies. He once again claimed Senator Schiff, who managed one of the impeachment cases against Trump when he was a representative, had falsified loan documents in 2011 and should go to prison. In 2023, a judge determined that the Trump Organization had falsified loan documents. Trump posted: “Adam Schiff is a THIEF! He should be prosecuted, just like they tried to prosecute me, and everyone else—the only difference is, WE WERE TOTALLY INNOCENT, IT WAS ALL A GIANT HOAX!”
On Late Night with Stephen Colbert last night, Schiff said: “Donald, piss off…. But Donald, before you piss off, would you release the Epstein files?”
Trump also posted an image of intelligence agents and politicians in prison garb as if in mug shots, and reposted both an image of what appears to be lawmakers in handcuffs and an AI-generated video showing former president Barack Obama being arrested by FBI agents and then being held in a jail cell.
Meidas Touch posted: “The crazy thing about Donald Trump posting an AI video of Obama getting arrested is that Trump once had someone organize a party for him and invite a bunch of ‘young women’ and it turned out Jeffrey Epstein was his only other guest.” Alan Feuer and Matthew Goldstein broke the story of that party in Saturday’s New York Times.
—
Ellie Leonard is a journalist who posts on Substack, where her blog is called “The Panicked, Unpaid Writer.”
She took the trouble to document the long relationship between Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. They were not just acquaintances. They were close friends. For years.
This is extremely awkward for MAGA World, because one of their obsessions was the failure of the Justice Department to release the Epstein files. Those files, they assumed, would contain the long list of names of powerful men who participated in Epstein’s orgies with underage girls. It would also contain the flight logs of Epstein’s private airplane(s), including the names of everyone who visited Epstein’s private island, officially named Little James Island, but unofficially called “Pedo Island.” The files might also contain the videos of prominent men taking advantage of young girls, which is a felony. Epstein had video cameras in all of his residences.
Trump would like everyone to stop talking about Epstein. On national television, he denounced the MAGA followers who want to see the Epstein files. He denounced them as “stupid” and “weaklings,” and he said he didn’t want their support anymore.
Fact is, no matter what’s in the Epstein files (assuming they have not been incinerated) won’t hurt Trump. He may lose some rabid fans. He will still be president until the election of 2028.
But the Epstein story won’t go away. MAGA was encouraged to believe that Democrats were hiding them and Trump would release them. Trump now says that the files shouldn’t be released because innocent people might be implicated. Or he says the files don’t exist. Or he says that the files were created by Obama, Hillary Clinton, James Comey, and Biden.
House Democrats offered a resolution demanding the release of the Epstein files. Republicans voted the resolution down, putting them into the awkward position of defending Attorney General Pam Bondi’s claim that the files don’t exist. but if they do exist, they should not be released.
Bondi made this claim after saying on national television that the Epstein list of clients was “on her desk.” Maybe she confused her grocery shopping list with Epstein’s list of clients.
Jeff Tiedrich writes a funny, scatologial post about the Pete Hegseth hearings. As he says, it’s going to be a long four years. You should subscribe to his blog so he can continue to write. In the last line of his post, not included here:
Donny Convict is what would happen if Dunning and Kruger had a baby, and then dropped it on its head. he’s too fucking stupid to know just how fucking stupid he is. he has these moronic ideas, and then blurts them out like he’s the biggest genius who ever lived. and the MAGA yokels are right there to gobble it all down. yay, Donny! yay, External Revenue Service
Wikipedia: The Dunning-Kruger effect is a cognitive bias that causes people to overestimate their abilities in a specific area, particularly when they have low ability in that task.
Jeff writes:
the Confederacy of Sewer Clowns Big Top Confirmation Circus rolled into DC yesterday, and the first jester to summersault into the ring was Pete Hegseth.
Pete is, of course, the ahem allegedly publicly drunk, ahem allegedly sexual-abusing goon who Donny saw on Fox News and then picked to head the Department of Defense.
here are a few things we learned about ahem allegedly Piss-Drunk Pete.
Pete is catastrophically unprepared and unqualified for the job.
Senator Duckworth: “…you’re unqualified to do that. you can’t do the acquisition and cross-servicing agreements, which essentially are security agreements. you can’t even mention that. you’ve done none of those. you talked about the Indo-Pacific a little bit, and I’m glad that you mentioned it. can you name the importance of at least one of the nations in ASEAN, and what type of agreement we have with at least one of those nations, and how many nations re in ASEAN, by the way.”
Hegseth: “I couldn’t tell you.”
Senator Duckworth: “no, you couldn’t, because you couldn’t bother to—”
Hegseth: “I know we have allies in South Korea, Japan and Australia.”
Senator Duckworth: “none of those countries are in ASEAN. I suggest you do a little homework before you prepare for these types of negotiations.”
this is the crux of the matter. take away Pete’s ahem alleged predatory behavior towards women. take away the ahem alleged public drunkenness. Pete Hegesth utterly lacks the skills and knowledge required to head the Department of Defense — a massive bureaucracy that employs over 2.91 million people.
as a member of the Minnesota National Guard, Pete rose to the rank of Major. after that, he became a Fox News morning chat-show bobblehead. there’s a reason that Defense Secretaries are almost always lifetime military officers: it takes a lifetime of experience to acquire the skills necessary to do the job. Pete has none of that.
Pete’s only real qualification for the job — the only qualification that matters to Dear Leader — is that he’ll willingly carry out any order. for instance, Pete seems totally cool with shooting American civilians.
Senator Hirono: “in 2020, then-President Trump directed former Secretary of Defense Mark Esper to shoot protestors in the legs in downtown DC — an order Secretary Esper refused to comply with. would you carry out such an order from President Trump to shoot protesters in the legs?”
Hegseth: [dodges the question]
Senator Hirono: “that sounds to me that you would comply with such an order. you will shoot protesters in the legs.”
Hegseth: [silence]
Pete believes the Geneva Conventions are an intrusive annoyance.
Senator King: “I want to be clear. are we going to abide by the Geneva Conventions and the prohibitions on torture or are we not?”
Hegseth: “what an America First national security policy is not going to do is hand its prerogatives to international bodies.”
oh, that’s lovely. we’re going to ignore a decades-old human rights agreement that almost every other nation on the planet abides by, because AMURRIKKKA FIRST. does Piss-Drunk Pete not realize that the Geneva Conventions also protects American soldiers and civilians? treaties only work when all countries abide by them. Pete should have learned this working well with others crap in kindergarten.
Pete seems totally cool with invading our allies’ territory.
Senator Hirono: “would you carry out an order from President Trump to seize Greenland, a territory of our NATO ally Denmark, by force?”
Hegesth: “President Trump received 77 million votes—”
Senator Hirono: “we’re not talking about the election. my questions is, would you use our military to take over Greenland, an ally of Denmark?”
Hegesth: [refuses to answer the question]
Senator Hirono: “that sounds to me like you would contemplate carrying out such an order.”
Pete has a real problem with women in the military, and is also a willing firehose of right-wing propaganda.
Hegseth: “commanders meet quotas to have a certain number of female infantry officers or infantry enlisted. and that disparages those women—”
Senator Gillibrand: “commanders do not have to meet quotas for the infantry. commanders do not have to have a quota for women in the infantry. that does not exist. It does not exist. and your statements are creating the impression that these exist. because they do not. there are not quotas.”
Pete absolutely does not want women serving in the combat. he wrote a book about it. he thinks women serving in the military is just more DEI crap that the commie Democrats cooked up to make America weak. and Pete’s willing to lie and claim that female combat soldiers are being forced upon commanders.
this ‘women can’t do a man’s job’ nonsense is the same misogynistic bullshit we’re hearing from the screech monkeys, about how Los Angeles is burning to the ground because the LA fire chief is a lesbian.
in Donny Convict’s America, only white men should be in positions of authority.
now let’s ask a Republican why he’s on Team Piss-Drunk Pete.
Senator Rounds: “he wants to bring lethality back in.”
here’s the dictionary definition of lethality: the capacity to cause great harm, destruction, or death — basically, what the United States Military already has.
so, why is Senator Rounds so excited to have the military “restored” to its current state? because MAGA Republicans have been brainwashed into believing that commie-marxist Democrats have turned the US armed forces into a bunch of emasculated sissiex who can’t fight. it’s why Esteemed Senator Fidel Cancun practically orgasmed over Russian army propaganda — because he believes this shit, too.
Donny Convict buys into this nonsense as well. he claims that when he took office in 2017, the army didn’t have any bullets.
it’s a lie so patently dumb that only a MAGA would believe it — but it’s why Republicans are so hot to have Pete come in. he’s going to bring back lethality — and brutality — against our allies, against American protesters, against anyone Dear Leader tells him to.
what could possibly go wrong?
Jay Kuo, lawyer, humorist and political consultant, watched the confirmation hearings of Pete Hegseth for the position of Secretary of Defense. Hegseth is notoriously unqualified. His Republican defenders treated his lack of experience and knowledge as a plus, a breath of fresh air. To charges of drunkenness, adultery, and womanizing, the Republican attitude was “Yawn. Everyone does it.”
Kuo writes:
Trump’s nominee for Defense Secretary, weekend Fox & Friends host Pete Hegseth, is many things: a serial adulterer, an accused rapist, a right-wing crusader and an often out-of-control drunk.
What he is not is qualified in any way to lead the Defense Department.
But apparently none of that posed any bar to the GOP senators on the Armed Services Committee, who appear ready to send Hegseth through to a full floor vote, which is now expected to go his way along a party line or near-party line vote.
Still, even assuming Hegseth’s confirmation is now assured, Democrats did a good job of laying the groundwork for resistance to and criticism of Hegseth’s leadership. They pulled no punches and demonstrated that it still matters to stand firm on the question of job qualifications, obeying the rule of law, and disqualifying questions of character.
No qualifications? Even better!
Republican senators spent much of yesterday’s confirmation hearing twisting Hegseth’s vices into virtues and his negatives into notches. For example, even though Hegseth has never led an organization of more than 200 people or a department with a budget of hundreds of millions let alone billions of dollars, this was somehow a plus.
As the New York Times noted,
Mr. Hegseth and his Republican allies on the panel made the case that his lack of experience compared with previous defense secretaries would be a plus.
Mr. Hegseth said: “As President Trump also told me, we’ve repeatedly placed people atop the Pentagon with supposedly the right credentials, whether they’re retired generals, academics or defense contractor executives. And where has it gotten us?”
His utter inexperience was even “a breath of fresh air” per Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt, with Hegseth being an outsider rather than from “the same cocktail parties that permeate Washington.”
In his opening statement, Hegseth even argued that he didn’t have a similar biography to Defense Secretaries of the last 30 years” but that “it’s time to give someone with dust on his boots the helm.”
This may have made for a good sound bite, but it is disrespectfully false and misleading. It completely whitewashes the fact that his predecessor, Gen. Lloyd Austin, whom Hegseth has implied was a DEI hire, literally ran a war in a desert. Sen. Chuck Hagel, who served as Defense Secretary under President Obama, still has shrapnel in him from his service in Vietnam.
Sen. Tammy Duckworth (D-IL) drove home the point that Hegseth simply isn’t qualified for the job when she asked him to name just one country within ASEAN (the Association of Southeast Asian Nations), yet Hegseth began talking about South Korea, Japan and Australia.
“Mr. Hegseth, none of those countries are in ASEAN,” responded Sen. Duckworth, who is a combat veteran who lost both legs and mobility in her right arm when her Blackhawk helicopter went down during the Iraq War from hostile fire. “I suggest you do a little homework,” she said.
As reporter Jordan Weissmann remarked, “This might seem like a small, embarrassing gotcha, but ASEAN is an acronym you encounter a lot if you do even very basic reading about the Pentagon’s strategy to counter China.”
The Trump “yes” man
Given that Hegseth’s senate confirmation is more or less in the bag, questions around whether he would be an independent check upon Trump’s excessive executive power have grown in importance.
For example, Sen. Angus King (I-ME) asked Hegseth whether the U.S. would abide by the Geneva Conventions and the prohibitions on torture. Rather than state that we would, Hegseth responded, “What an America First national security policy is not going to do is hand its prerogatives over to international bodies that make decisions about how our men and women make decisions on the battlefield.”
In a similar vein, Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) had this exchange with Hegseth that highlighted the danger of having a puppet heading the Pentagon, with loyalty to Trump over the U.S. Constitution:
Sen. Slotkin: “As the Secretary of Defense, you will be the one man standing in the breach should President Trump give an illegal order, right? I’m not saying he will. But if he does, you are going to be the guy that he calls to implement this order. Do you agree that there are some orders that can be given by the Commander-in-Chief that would violate the US Constitution?”
Hegseth: “Senator, thank you for your service, but I reject the premise that President Trump is going to be giving illegal orders.”
Sen. Slotkin then pressed Hegseth on this, giving real-world, not hypothetical, instances where his predecessor, Secretary of Defense Mark Esper, apologized for deploying forces in D.C. to put down protests and convinced President Trump not to deploy the 82nd Airborne. Hegseth resisted responding with yes or no answers and refused generally to second-guess or get ahead of conversations that he would have with the president, only grudgingly admitting by the end of the line of questioning that there are “laws and processes under our Constitution that would be followed” (using the passive voice, I should add).
During Sen. Slotkin’s questioning, Hegseth also appeared to confirm that he would use active duty U.S. forces to staff things like detention camps for migrants, which Sen. Slotkin noted the military is not trained to do as it is more of a policing function.
A disqualifying past history
When Democrats had opportunities to question Hegseth about his troublesome history, they scored blows over his alleged sexual assaults, public intoxication, mismanagement of nonprofits and opposition to women in combat.
The most notable exchange occurred between Sen. Tim Kaine (D-VA) and Hegseth, when Kaine sought to clarify whether any of the behavior of which Hegseth is accused (including allegations of sexual assault, public drunkenness and spousal abuse) would be disqualifying for a nominee, at least in his opinion, were it proven to be true.
Hegseth repeatedly refused to address Kaine’s questions, claiming again and again that the allegations against him were from anonymous sources and that they were false. Kaine caught Hegseth in a bit of a trap, however, when he laid out the series of instances of adultery that included the incident he claimed as a consensual encounter. Even were that true, it still happened, Kaine pointed out, months after the birth of his daughter by the woman who would become his second wife after he had cheated on his first.
Sen. Kaine pointed out that it was Hegseth’s judgment that concerned him. The exchange is worth viewing in its entirety:
Sen. Kaine later went on MSNBC to underscore how evasive Hegseth had been. “Should committing a sexual assault be disqualifying to be Secretary of Defense? Not a hard question. Should spousal abuse be disqualifying to be Secretary of Defense? Not a hard question. Should drunkenness on the job be disqualifying to be Secretary of Defense? Not a hard question. He wouldn’t answer any of them. And that was very telling to me.”
On the question of Hegseth’s alcohol consumption, one GOP committee member, Sen. Markwayne Mullin (R-OK), rose to defend the nominee. He accused Democrats of hypocrisy, asking whether they had ever demanded senators who showed up drunk to step down from their positions.
This defense was awkward in three respects. First, it seemed to confirm that Hegseth indeed has a drinking problem, just one that is shared by some of Mullin’s Senate colleagues. Second, it completely ignores history because a prior nominee for Secretary of Defense, Sen. John Tower, was denied confirmation precisely because of issues over his excessive drinking and womanizing. And third, as Kaitlan Collins of CNN later pointed out to Mullins during an interview, how is the bad behavior of a senator a defense of someone who wants to run the Pentagon?
Gaming the system
By the time Hegseth even set foot in the committee room, the game was already rigged in his favor.
The main holdout in the GOP has always been Sen. Joni Ernst (R-IA), who is a sexual assault survivor and a combat veteran. Ernst has brought attention to the plight of female service members and has pressed for changes to how the Pentagon deals with cases of sexual assault. Because she sits on the Armed Services Committee, a no vote from her likely would have doomed Hegseth, whose nomination might never have even gotten out of committee.
Sen. Ernst had been lukewarm to Hegseth before the MAGA bullying began. As the New York Times reported,
Ms. Ernst initially appeared hostile to [Hegseth], telling reporters that he would “have his work cut out for him.” After a private meeting with Mr. Hegseth, she said on Fox News that she was not yet a “yes” on his confirmation.
Her confession prompted an immediate backlash from outside groups affiliated with Mr. Trump, who targeted her with ads and social media posts, while prominent Iowa Republicans threatened to mount primary challenges against her in 2026.
Within days, Ms. Ernst met with Mr. Hegseth again, and announced that she had been heartened by his promises to audit the Pentagon and appoint a senior official to deter sexual assaults in the military and ensure that female service members would be considered for combat roles if they could meet the requirements.
Sen. Ernst’s political capitulation went beyond merely bowing to GOP pressure. Per reporting by Jane Mayer of The New Yorker, Sen. Ernst, along with Sen. Susan Collins (R-ME), even declined an offer to meet with Hegseth’s accuser—the woman who filed a complaint with the police claiming Hegseth had raped her after a GOP conference in Monterey, California.
So much for supporting victims of sexual assault.
The FBI background check on Hegseth was already woefully deficient because its investigators interviewed none of Hegseth’s accusers or former spouses. This is contrary to standard protocol, which advises interviews of all current and former spouses of nominees. When the FBI background check finally came back, it came with instructions not to share it with any of the Committee members beyond the chair and the ranking Democratic member.
Finally, to hamstring the vetting process even further, the GOP only permitted only one round of questioning of Hegseth, which completed after just four hours yesterday. Seven minutes for each senator to question the nominee, who largely refused to answer the question asked, produced the desired result: It barely scratched the surface of what the public is entitled to know.
We have all wondered about Trump’s remarkable ability to dodge accountability for his scandals. He promoted an insurrection that sent a violent mob to attack the U.S. Capitol. The mob pummeled law enforcement officers. People died. Trump escaped accountability. He escaped impeachment. Twice. He brought home boxes of highly confidential documents that belonged in the National Archives. A friendly judge whom he appointed threw out the case.
Trump has escaped accountability all his life. Tomorrow, Election Day, is the last chance to hold him accountable. Will he hoodwink the American public again?
Peter Baker, chief White House correspondent for The New York Times, wrote about Trump’s lifelong escape act. He is the Harry Houdini of politics.
Baker wrote:
When the history of the 2024 election is written, one of the iconic images illustrating it will surely be the mug shot taken of Donald J. Trump after one of his four indictments, staring into the camera with his signature glare. It is an image not of shame but of defiance, the image of a man who would be a convicted felon before Election Day and yet possibly president of the United States again afterward.
Sometimes lost amid all the shouting of a high-octane campaign heading into its final couple of weeks is that simple if mind-bending fact. America for the first time in its history may send a criminal to the Oval Office and entrust him with the nuclear codes. What would once have been automatically disqualifying barely seems to slow Mr. Trump down in his comeback march for a second term that he says will be devoted to “retribution.”
In all the different ways that Mr. Trump has upended the traditional rules of American politics, that may be one of the most striking. He has survived more scandals than any major party presidential candidate, much less president, in the life of the republic. Not only survived but thrived. He has turned them on their head, making allegations against him into an argument for him by casting himself as a serial victim rather than a serial violator.
His persecution defense, the notion that he gets in so much trouble only because everyone is out to get him, resonates at his rallies where he says “they’re not coming after me, they’re coming after you, and I’m just standing in the way.” But that of course belies a record of scandal stretching across his 78 years starting long before politics. Whether in his personal life or his public life, he has been accused of so many acts of wrongdoing, investigated by so many prosecutors and agencies, sued by so many plaintiffs and claimants that it requires a scorecard just to remember them all.
His businesses went bankrupt repeatedly and multiple others failed. He was taken to court for stiffing his vendors, stiffing his bankers and even stiffing his own family. He avoided the draft during the Vietnam War and avoided paying any income taxes for years. He was forced to shell out tens of millions of dollars to students who accused him of scamming them, found liable for wide-scale business fraud and had his real estate firm convicted in criminal court of tax crimes.
He has boasted of grabbing women by their private parts, been reported to have cheated on all three of his wives and been accused of sexual misconduct by more than two dozen women, including one whose account was validated by a jury that found him liable for sexual abuse after a civil trial.
He is the only president in American history impeached twice for high crimes and misdemeanors, the only president ever indicted on criminal charges and the only president to be convicted of a felony (34, in fact). He used the authority of his office to punish his adversaries and tried to hold onto power on the basis of a brazen lie.
Mr. Trump beat some of the investigations and lawsuits against him and some proved unfounded, but the sheer volume is remarkable. Any one of those scandals by itself would typically have been enough to derail another politician. Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s first bid for the presidency collapsed when he lifted some words from another politician’s speech. George W. Bush came close to losing after the last-minute revelation of a long-ago drunken-driving arrest. Hillary Rodham Clinton fell short at least in part because of an F.B.I. investigation into emails that led to no charges.
Not Mr. Trump. He has moved from one furor to the next without any of them sinking into the body politic enough to end his career. The unrelenting pace of scandals may in its own way help him by keeping any single one of them from dominating the national conversation and eroding his standing with his base of supporters.
He even turned that mug shot into a marketing tool, selling T-shirts, posters, bumper stickers, coffee mugs and even beverage coolers with the image and the slogan, “NEVER SURRENDER.” And victory next month may yet help him escape the biggest threat of all — potentially prison.
Nonetheless, the full record stands out.
Making and Losing Money
Mr. Trump got an early start learning how to cut corners. As a high school student at New York Military Academy, he knowingly borrowed a friend’s dress jacket with a dozen medals attached to wear for his yearbook photo, in effect appropriating medals that he did not win himself, according to a new book, “Lucky Loser,” by Russ Buettner and Susanne Craig of The New York Times.
He likewise cheated to get into college, according to his estranged niece, Mary L. Trump. The future president paid a friend to take the SAT for him, Ms. Trump asserted in her own book, earning a score that later helped him transfer to Wharton business school at the University of Pennsylvania, a credential he has boasted about ever since. (A spokeswoman for Mr. Trump has denied this, and the widow of a man with the name cited by Ms. Trump as the test-taking friend said that she was confident her husband did no such thing.)
After graduating from Pennsylvania in 1968, however, the former military academy cadet had no interest in serving in the real military and risked being sent to fight in Vietnam. He managed to avoid the draft with a diagnosis of bone spurs in his heels — a diagnosis that evidently was obtained as a favor from a podiatrist in Queens who rented his office from Mr. Trump’s father, Fred C. Trump. Two daughters of the podiatrist, who died in 2007, have said that he often told them about saving the younger Mr. Trump from Vietnam as a courtesy to his landlord.
Freed from military obligations, Mr. Trump went into the family business, helping run his father’s empire of rental apartment buildings in the outer boroughs. Even in those early days, he came under suspicion of misconduct. In 1973, the Justice Department sued the Trump family company for racial discrimination in renting apartments. Applications from Black applicants were marked C for “colored.” Mr. Trump fought the matter in court but ultimately agreed to a settlement that the Justice Department at the time called “one of the most far-reaching ever negotiated.”
His business career vaulted him to fame, and he had notable successes, perhaps most prominently the rehabilitation of the Commodore Hotel and the construction of Trump Tower. But he often reached further than he was able to deliver. His record in business was pockmarked with plenty of failures.
The Trump Shuttle airline? Failure. His dreams of building a Television City in Manhattan? Failure. A United States Football League franchise? Failure. The Trump Plaza Hotel and Casino, Trump Taj Mahal, Trump’s Castle Casino Resort, Trump Mortgage, Trump Vodka, Trump University, Trump Steaks, GoTrump.com? All failures.
His most spectacular flameouts came in the gambling mecca of Atlantic City, where he overextended himself building or buying three casinos that ultimately cannibalized each other’s clientele as he failed to keep up with enormous debt payments. He filed bankruptcy for the Taj Mahal in 1991 and then for the other two casinos in 1992. He also filed bankruptcy in 1992 for the Plaza Hotel.
Even after recovering from that debacle, Mr. Trump failed again. His casino company filed for bankruptcy in 2004 and then again in 2009, for his sixth trip into that process. In his various bankruptcies, he was compelled to sell assets, and creditors were forced to write off some of his debt. But Mr. Trump has boasted that he still made money in Atlantic City even after leaving a trail of losses for nearly everyone else involved, including workers who lost jobs.
Mr. Trump played the game along the edge, and sometimes over the line, of propriety. To grease his path, he would hire a governor’s son or a federal prosecutor’s brother. Along the way, he was investigated time and time again. Federal, state and local authorities looked into his ties with the Mafia, found violations of money laundering laws and penalized him for skirting stock trade rules.
At one point when Mr. Trump was strapped for cash to make an interest payment, his father sent a lawyer to one of the son’s casinos to buy $3.5 million in chips without placing a bet. New Jersey’s casino regulators imposed a $65,000 fine for what amounted to an illegal loan.
But Mr. Trump makes a point of not admitting misdeeds or mistakes. Even his failures he portrays as triumphs. “I made a lot of money in Atlantic City,” he once said, “and I’m very proud of it.”
For years, Mr. Trump’s personal life was full of scandal, too, enough to make him a frequent topic of the gossip columns of the era. He did not mind. There was almost no headline too scandalous for him. “There’s no bad press unless you’re a pedophile,” he said in front of his campaign manager later in life.
After marrying the Czech model Ivana Zelnickova in 1977 and fathering three children, Mr. Trump began carrying on an affair with a younger model, Marla Maples. He and Ivana fought out their divorce battle in the news media, at one point making the tabloid front pages 11 days running. He even maneuvered The New York Post into running a banner headline “Best Sex I’ve Ever Had”supposedly describing Ms. Maples’s assessment of their bedroom life.
While living with Ms. Maples, he boasted of infidelity to a reporter during a call when, bizarrely, he impersonated a spokesman for himself and insisted that Mr. Trump had “three other girlfriends” in addition to the woman sharing his home. He and Ms. Maples later married anyway and had a daughter before divorcing, too.
He met Melania Knauss, a Slovenian model, and married her in 2005. But he was not always faithful to her either, according to other women. Stephanie Clifford, a porn film actor who goes by the name Stormy Daniels, claimed to have had a tryst with Mr. Trump in 2006, four months after Melania Trump gave birth to his fifth child.
Karen McDougal, a former Playboy Playmate of the Year, said she had a 10-month fling with Mr. Trump around the same time. Michael D. Cohen, then Mr. Trump’s lawyer and self-described fixer, arranged for six-figure payments to be made to both Ms. Clifford and Ms. McDougal in 2016 to ensure their silence before the presidential election, hush-money that would later come back to haunt Mr. Trump.
His view of women and his belief in his right to pursue them with impunity ultimately was put on display before that election anyway. The now-famous “Access Hollywood” tapeposted by The Washington Post weeks before the final balloting revealed his belief that he could “do anything” with women because he was famous. “When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he said. “Grab ’em by the pussy. You can do anything.”
While he later dismissed that as mere “locker room banter,” Mr. Trump has been a one-man #MeToo magnet, accused by two dozen or so women of sexual misconduct that goes well beyond banter. One said he grabbed her breasts and tried to run his hand up her skirton an airplane. Another said he kissed her while she worked for him, and at least two others said he groped them at the U.S. Open. Perhaps most famously, E. Jean Carroll, a writer, said he raped her in the dressing room of the Bergdorf Goodman department store in Manhattan in the 1990s.
He has consistently denied all charges, suggesting that all of these women, one after the other, simply made it up. “Every woman lied,” he said in 2016. In a couple of instances, he has dismissed the allegations, not by saying that he would never do such a thing but by saying that he would never do such a thing with those particular accusers because of their looks. “She would not have been the chosen one,” he said last month about one of them.
In the only time one of these allegations made it to a verdict in court, a New York jury last year did not establish that he raped Ms. Carroll but did unanimously find that he sexually abused and defamed her and ordered him to pay her $5 million. Another jury earlier this year found that he continued to defame her and ordered Mr. Trump to pay Ms. Carroll $83.3 million. He is appealing both judgments.
No president in American history has been wealthier than Mr. Trump. And no president in the modern era, at least, paid less in federal income taxes in their first year living in the White House.
Tax documents obtained by The Times in 2020 showed that Mr. Trump paid only $750 in federal income taxes in 2016, the year he originally ran for president, and only $750 again in 2017, the first year of his presidency. In fact, in 11 of the 18 years examined by The Times, Mr. Trump paid no income taxes to the federal government whatsoever.
Mr. Trump and his accountants have proved to be master manipulators of the tax code, bending it to benefit him in ways that would usually be damaging to a politician. The self-proclaimed billionaire, currently estimated to be worth $5.5 billion by Forbes magazine, managed year after year to pay less in income taxes than at least half of American taxpayers through creative bookkeeping if not more questionable tactics.
One after another, judges and juries found against Mr. Trump, branding him a fraudster, a sexual abuser and, through his real estate firm, a tax cheat. The two verdicts on behalf of E. Jean Carroll have left him on the hook for nearly $100 million including interest. The tax fraud conviction of the Trump Organization made him the first president to head a criminal company.
According to a Times investigation in 2018, Mr. Trump and his siblings took a real estate empire from his father that banks a few years later would value at nearly $900 million and, through favorable appraisals, paid taxes on it as if it were worth just $57 million. Buildings given by Fred Trump to his children were valued low by the Trump family for tax purposes and high for other purposes, turning a potential $10 million tax bill into a charge of just over $700,000, The Times reported.
He has even gotten the Internal Revenue Service to send him large amounts of cash. By declaring large losses on paper at least, he collected more than $90 million in local, state and federal refunds. Even Mr. Trump was astonished. “He could not believe how stupid the government was for giving ‘someone like him’ that much money back,” Mr. Cohen, his former lawyer, recalled in congressional testimony.
Mr. Trump constantly found ways of getting around paying taxes. At one point, an invoice padding scheme allowed Mr. Trump’s family to sell supplies to itself to get out of gift taxes. At another point, he shifted ownership of a failed Chicago tower to another partnership that he also owned to try to claim additional losses for tax purposes, according to an I.R.S. inquiry, a double-dipping scheme that effectively allowed him to claim the same losses twice.
Unlike every other modern president, Mr. Trump refused to voluntarily release his tax forms, going all the way to the Supreme Court in an ultimately futile effort to shield them from public view. But he has made no apology for avoiding taxes where he can. “That makes me smart,” he famously said in 2016.
The tax forms that did eventually become public highlighted the disparity between his public claims of business conquests and his private claims of business setbacks. In the same year that he published “The Art of the Deal,” his iconic best seller promoting himself as a masterful business mogul, his core businesses reported $45 million in losses on his tax returns.
Mr. Trump relied heavily on his father’s fortune to assemble his own. While he likes to say that he parlayed a $1 million loan from his father into his own empire, the Times investigation in 2018 found that his father had begun giving him $200,000 a year in inflation-adjusted dollars starting at age 3 and that over the course of his career he received $413 million in today’s dollars from his father’s real estate business. (Mr. Trump disputes this.)
The future president was not content to exploit his own inheritance. He got into a legal battle with his own niece and nephew, who accused him of cheating them out of their share of Fred Trump’s estate. Mary Trump and her brother Fred Trump III, the children of Donald’s late brother, Fred Trump Jr., argued that they were originally supposed to split a 20 percent share of their grandfather’s estate, worth millions, upon his death. Instead, under a revised will, the two were each offered a one-time payment of $200,000.
When they sued, the future president retaliated by cutting his niece and nephew out of the family’s medical insurance fund at a time when the younger Fred Trump was using it to pay for care for his severely ill infant son. “I was angry because they sued,” Donald Trump later explained to The Times. Fred and Mary eventually settled, but were embittered that their uncle would betray them in what seemed like a bid to find cash to pay his debts.
“He was willing to squeeze his own niece and nephew and manipulate his father’s wishes, all to try and stop his own creditors from collecting the money he legally owed them,” Fred Trump wrote in “All in the Family,” a memoir published in July. “If that meant screwing his late brother — well, so be it. If it meant raiding the inheritance of his brother’s two children — well, OK.”
Mr. Trump’s relatives were not the only ones who considered themselves bilked. Over the years, so did contractors, bankers, business partners, customers and competitors, among others. By the time he first ran for president in 2016, he had been involved in 4,095 lawsuits, according to a count by USA Today, although in many of them he was the plaintiff.
Not counting personal injury lawsuits, which are common for many businesses, Mr. Trump or his firms were the defendants in at least 1,026 of those cases, accused of not paying taxes, not paying overtime, not paying companies he had hired, not paying back golf club fees that were to be refunded and not abiding by contracts. He won many of those fights but lost or settled others.
His educational and philanthropic enterprises were also seen as shams. Just after he was elected president in 2016, Mr. Trump agreed to pay $25 million to studentsof his defunct Trump University who accused him of defrauding them. Two years later, New York state authorities found “a shocking pattern of illegality” at the Donald J. Trump Foundation, which functioned “as little more than a checkbook to serve Mr. Trump’s business and political interests.”
And in 2022, one of his tax schemes came unraveled when the Trump Organization, a family-owned business that he controlled, was convicted in criminal court of 17 countsof tax fraud, a scheme to defraud, conspiracy and falsifying business records for doling out off-the-books perks to some of its top executives. The company was given the maximum fine of $1.6 million.
Scandal followed him to the White House, so much so that he called it “the cloud” and complained that it was getting in the way of governing.
The most consuming scandal of his time in office stemmed from the investigation into Russia’s interference in the 2016 election. While U.S. intelligence agencies determined that Russia sought to tip the contest to Mr. Trump, the newly sworn-in president refused to believe that and took any inquiry into the matter as an attack on his legitimacy.
Along the way, he escalated the matter by firing James B. Comey, the F.B.I. director leading the investigation into whether his campaign had any ties with the Russians, and then told visiting Russian officials the very next day that doing so had “taken off” what he called “great pressure.” Actually, it did not. Instead, it led to the appointment of Robert S. Mueller III as special counsel.
After nearly two years of investigating, Mr. Mueller concluded that the Russians did interfere on Mr. Trump’s behalf, and he uncovered a stunning array of contacts between people in the president’s orbit and Russian figures. But Mr. Mueller reported that he did not establish any illegal coordination between Russia and the campaign and that “the evidence was not sufficient to charge” anyone with criminal conspiracy.
At the same time, he outlined more than 10 instances where Mr. Trump might have committed obstruction of justice by trying to thwart the investigation — including the dismissal of Mr. Comey. Mr. Mueller said he did not decide if charges were warranted because Justice Department policy precluded prosecution of a sitting president. Mr. Trump insisted this amounted to “total exoneration,”although Mr. Mueller explicitly said he was not exonerating the president.
The investigation and media attention on what he called “the Russia hoax” embittered Mr. Trump, and during his four years in the White House he expanded the use of government power to target perceived enemies in ways not seen since Watergate. While other presidents shied away from giving the impression that they were wielding the authority of their office for political vengeance, Mr. Trump was open about going after his adversaries.
Time and again, he publicly pressed his attorneys general — first Jeff Sessions and then William P. Barr — to prosecute Democrats or government officials who angered him. At various times, he called for the prosecution of Mr. Biden, Ms. Clinton and former President Barack Obama and lashed out when advisers resisted.
He grew particularly obsessed with prosecuting certain people, like former Secretary of State John Kerry. Mr. Trump was fixated on the former top diplomat for talking with the Iranians with whom Mr. Kerry had negotiated a nuclear agreement from which Mr. Trump withdrew the United States. In meeting after meeting, Mr. Trump repeatedly badgered Mr. Barr to charge Mr. Kerry, according to a memoir by John R. Bolton, his former national security adviser.
Mr. Bolton’s memoir was another example of Mr. Trump pushing the bounds of the presidency to punish someone. Angered that Mr. Bolton had criticized him, Mr. Trump pressured the Justice Department to block his former aide from publishing his book. The decision to go to court to squelch a memoir prior to publication after it had been initially cleared for classified information by a career official was seen as so beyond the pale that the assistant attorney general who filed the suit on White House orders, Jody Hunt, immediately resigned.
Mr. Trump tried to put so many people who irritated him in the cross hairs of the legal system that it is hard to maintain a thorough list. He wanted prosecutors to investigate Mr. Comey as well as Andrew G. McCabe, his acting successor, and other F.B.I. officials who participated in the Russia investigation, including Peter Strzok and Lisa Page.
The president was so determined to revoke security clearances for John O. Brennan, the former C.I.A. director, and James R. Clapper Jr., the former director of national intelligence, who both criticized him on television, that his chief of staff John F. Kelly estimated that Mr. Trump raised the matter between 50 and 75 times.
He also sought to use his power to help specific companies he favored and penalize those that angered him. He told aides to instruct the Justice Department to block the merger of Time Warner with AT&T, which would include the CNN network, one of the biggest thorns in his side. The Justice Department unsuccessfully sought to stop the merger in court, although officials insisted they acted on their own initiative, not at the behest of the White House.
Mr. Trump also tried to penalize Amazon, whose founder Jeff Bezos owns The Washington Post, another media irritant, by pressing for increases in U.S. postal rates for the company and by blocking a $10 billion Pentagon cloud computing contract.
But he monetized the presidency for himself, as his Trump International Hotel in Washington and other properties became magnets for money from people and institutions currying favor, including the governments of Saudi Arabia, Turkey, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and the Philippines. Critics took him to court charging him with violating the emoluments clause of the Constitution barring the acceptance of gifts from “any king, prince, or foreign state,” although the Supreme Court threw out legal challenges.
Most notably, Mr. Trump sought to use his office to strong-arm another country to deliver dirt on Mr. Biden, a political rival. The president suspended military aid to Ukraine and leaned on its president, Volodymyr Zelensky, to “do us a favor” by announcing an investigation into supposed corruption involving Mr. Biden and other Democrats.
For that, the House ultimately impeached Mr. Trump for abuse of power on a largely party-line vote, making him only the third president ever to be charged with high crimes, although the Senate failed to reach the two-thirds vote necessary for conviction.
Mr. Trump made prolific use of his presidential pardon power to help friends and political allies — and particularly figures who he might have had reason to fear would turn against him by talking with prosecutors if faced with prison time. Critics argued that dangling pardons amounted to an attempt to obstruct investigators.
Among others, Mr. Trump gave pardons or commutations to Paul Manafort, his onetime campaign chairman; Stephen K. Bannon, his former chief strategist; Roger J. Stone Jr., his friend and political adviser, all of whom had been in the cross hairs of prosecutors looking at Mr. Trump. In the final weeks of his presidency, he also used his clemency power to help convicted felons who paid people close to him to lobby for them.
Mr. Trump’s presidency ended in violence as a result of his concerted effort to overturn the 2020 election that he lost so that he could hold onto power despite the will of the voters. He filed dozens of lawsuits and pressured state officials, members of Congress, the Justice Department and his own vice president to help reverse his defeat, something no president has ever done before. And when the crowd of supporters he told to march on Congress stormed the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, to try to stop the finalization of Mr. Trump’s defeat, he sat in the White House watching on television without trying to stop it for 187 minutes.
The House impeached him again as a result, accusing him of inciting the riot, with 10 Republicans joining Democrats. Never before had a president been impeached a second time. The Senate ultimately acquitted him again, but this time seven Republicans voted for conviction and several others said they voted no only because he was already out of office by the time of the trial.
The explosive finale of the Trump presidency did not bring an end to the Trump scandals. On the contrary, it opened a new and unprecedented chapter in the epic and still-unresolved struggles between the 45th president and the American law enforcement system.
In the months after he departed the White House, authorities in Washington, New York, Georgia, Florida and Michigan opened investigations that ultimately led them to Mr. Trump. Civil lawsuits also mounted. Mr. Trump became a target or defendant in so many courthouses that his post-presidency has become a full-employment act for defense attorneys.
A separate civil lawsuit brought by the New York State attorney general, Letitia James, went to the heart of Mr. Trump’s self-image as a tycoon of Olympian proportions. Mr. Trump’s practice of valuing properties according to his needs came back to bite him when a judge found him liable for sweeping business fraud, ruling that he illegally inflated his net worth in securing loans. The judge not only hit him with penalties that could top $450 million, he also barred Mr. Trump from leading any business in his original home state for three years. Mr. Trump is appealing.
While that judgment in itself was a first in presidential history, it barely seemed to register compared with the criminal cases brought against Mr. Trump. In what was then a stunning move, the F.B.I. conducted a search of his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida to find classified documents that Mr. Trump took with him when he left the White House and then refused to give back even when subpoenaed. That, too, was a first.
And then came what might have once been unthinkable — criminal charges against a former president. Mr. Trump was indicted not once, not twice, not three times but four times. While other presidents like Ulysses S. Grant, Warren G. Harding, Richard M. Nixon and Bill Clinton were not without their own scandals, none of them were ever charged with felonies.
The first indictment centered on those hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. Alvin L. Bragg, the district attorney for Manhattan, charged Mr. Trump with falsifying business records to cover up the affair and the payments. The second indictment came in federal court in Florida where the special counsel Jack Smith charged Mr. Trump with mishandling classified documents and obstructing authorities trying to retrieve them.
The third and fourth indictments both stemmed from Mr. Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election that he lost. Mr. Smith brought an election interference case against him in federal court in Washington, while Fani T. Willis, the district attorney of Fulton County, Ga., brought a racketeering case against Mr. Trump for trying to switch Georgia’s electoral votes. The Michigan attorney general, for her part, named Mr. Trump an unindicted co-conspirator in her own election case. He has pleaded not guilty to all charges and blamed Democrats for coming after him for partisan reasons.
The drumbeat of hearings and appeals and procedural fights that have followed may have numbed the shock value, but these cases will stand out in those future history books. He has gone to trial on only one of the four indictments so far, Mr. Bragg’s hush-money case, and the jury unanimously found him guilty of 34 felony counts. Sentencing has been pushed off until after the election.
The other three cases are in various states of limbo in part because of aggressive and successful defense moves by Mr. Trump’s lawyers aimed at delaying or undercutting the charges against him. The Georgia case was sidetracked by revelations that Ms. Willis had a personal relationship with the prosecutor she chose to manage the case.
The Florida case was thrown out in July by U.S. District Judge Aileen M. Cannon, a Trump appointee, not because she found Mr. Trump innocent but because she considered Mr. Smith’s appointment as special counsel to be procedurally improper, a decision that stunned legal experts. Mr. Smith is appealing, and the charges could be reinstated.
The federal election case was thrown off track for months by Mr. Trump’s assertion that he had immunity as president. The Supreme Court largely accepted the argument, ruling for the first time in history that presidents have substantial immunity for crimes related to official acts. Now Judge Tanya S. Chutkan must determine whether Mr. Trump’s actions in trying to overturn the election to hold onto power constituted official acts, a process that could stretch out for months.
In the end, she may not get a chance. If Mr. Trump is elected next month, he could pull the plug on the federal prosecutions, and even the state cases in New York and Georgia may be frozen while he is in office again. He knows that, and he is counting on it. As he said earlier this year, “The real verdict is going to be Nov. 5, by the people.”
Historian Heather Cox Richardson weaves together the events of the past few days and demonstrates the submission of the Republican Party to one angry man. At the Republican National Convention, the party’s elders were notably absent. No Bush or Cheney; no Romney. Trump put his daughter-in-law, Lara, in charge of the Republican National Committee. It’s the Trump party now, and he controls all its levers of power. Note below that he hasn’t stopped hawking merchandise, even in the middle of his campaign. If you can open a tweet, this is an example of Trump turning his campaign into a money-maker for himself.
She writes:
…Trump began the day by posting an advertisement for the fourth “series of Trump digital trading cards,” or NFTs (which are unique digital tokens) featuring heroic images of Trump. People who buy 15 or more of them—at $99 apiece—get a physical trading card as well. Trump said that the physical card has a piece of the suit he wore at the presidential debate, and Trump promises to sign five of them, randomly. Up to 25 people who buy $25,750 worth of the cards with cryptocurrency will be invited to a gala next month at his Jupiter, Florida, golf club.
In the ad, Trump made it a point to emphasize his enthusiasm for cryptocurrency, an emphasis that dovetails with Trump’s recent promotion of an “official” cryptocurrency project. He linked to a Telegram channel run by his sons Don Jr. and Eric that, at the time, was called “The DeFiant Ones” but has been renamed “World Liberty Financial.” While there is little public information about the project, the channel has almost 50,000 subscribers.
Hawking merchandise was an odd move for a presidential candidate, and it suggested his focus is elsewhere than on the election. Also today, Trump announced that he plans to make former Democrats Robert Kennedy Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, both of whom have endorsed him, honorary members of his transition team. Kennedy told right-wing personality Tucker Carlson that he would “help pick the people who will be running the government…”
And then, this evening, Quil Lawrence and Tom Bowman of NPR explained the story behind the surprising photos of Trump on Monday giving a thumbs-up over a grave in Arlington National Cemetery. The reporters wrote that “[t]wo members of Donald Trump’s campaign staff had a verbal and physical altercation Monday with an official” at the cemetery, where “[f]ederal law prohibits political campaign or election-related activities.” When a cemetery official tried to prevent Trump campaign staff from entering the section where the grave was located, “campaign staff verbally abused and pushed the official aside.” A Trump campaign spokesperson said the official who tried to prevent the staff from holding a political event in the cemetery was “clearly suffering from a mental health episode.”
The elephant in the room these days is that most Republicans, along with many pundits, are pretending that Trump is a normal presidential candidate. They are ignoring his mental lapses, calls for authoritarianism, grifting, lack of grasp on any sort of policy, and criminality, even as he has hollowed out the once grand Republican Party and threatens American democracy itself.
It’s hard to look away from the reality that the Republican senators could have stopped this catastrophe at many points in Trump’s term, at the very least by voting to convict Trump at his first impeachment trial. At the time, Senator Ted Cruz (R-TX) said, “Out of one hundred senators, you have zero who believe you that there was no quid pro quo. None. There’s not a single one.” Republican senators nonetheless stood behind Trump. “This is not about this president. It’s not about anything he’s been accused of doing,” then–majority leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) told his colleagues. “It has always been about November 3, 2020. It’s about flipping the Senate.”
When the Framers wrote the Constitution, they did not foresee senators abandoning the principles of the country in order to support a president they thought would enhance their own careers. Assuming that lawmakers would jealously guard their own power, the Framers gave to the members of the House of Representatives the power to impeach a president. To the members of the Senate they gave the sole power to try impeachments. They assumed that lawmakers, who had just fought a war to break free of a monarch, would understand that their own interests would always require stopping the rise of an authoritarian leader.
But the Framers did not foresee the rise of political partisanship.
In the modern era, extreme partisanship has led to voter suppression to keep Republicans in power, the weaponization of the filibuster to stop Democratic legislation, and gerrymandering to enable Republicans to take far more legislative seats than they have earned. The demands of this extreme partisanship also mean that members of one of the nation’s major political parties have lined up behind a man whom, were he running this sort of a campaign even ten years ago, they would have dismissed with derision.
Finally, devastatingly, the partisanship that made senators keep Trump in office enabled him to name to the Supreme Court three justices. Those three justices were key to making up the majority that overturned the nation’s fundamental principle that all people must be equal before the law. In July 2024 they ruled that unlike anyone else, a president is above it.
In May 2016, South Carolina Republican senator Lindsey Graham famously observed: “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
Elie Honig is a former federal prosecutor who writes at a site called Cafe, where he and other legal experts follow and explain Trump’s legal entanglements. In this post, he speculates on how Jack Smith’s effort to hold Trump accountable for his efforts to overturn the 2020 election might fare in the months ahead.. Note that he points out that the investigation was hampered by the very late start of the U.S. Justice Department.
He writes:
Dear Reader,
I remember vividly the first time I lost a key piece of evidence. The NYPD had caught our defendant in Washington Heights with a fake police badge around his neck and a loaded gun in his waistband, and we charged him with federal firearms and armed robbery conspiracy crimes. Better yet (for us on the prosecution side), we flipped a cooperating witness who would testify that he and the defendant had committed two prior armed robberies together by posing as cops and ripping off drug dealers.
A week or so before trial began, the judge held a conference to handle routine pre-trial housekeeping. I confidently laid out the cooperator’s expected testimony. “That’s out,” the judge ruled, nonchalantly. “Too prejudicial.” For those who think that every judicial decision is rendered in scholarly prose, replete with probing analysis and citations to applicable precedent: welcome to the real world.
It was a kick in the gut. “That’s such bullshit. He can’t do that,” I whined afterwards. “Sure he can,” my supervisor responded. “He’s the judge.”
My experience is a tiny-potatoes version of what the U.S. Supreme Court has done to Special Counsel Jack Smith and his 2020 election subversion case against Donald Trump. The Court declared, for the first time in our history, that a president is entitled to criminal immunity for official acts. That part was no surprise; the law has long recognized civil immunity, and the justices during oral argument seemed in no mood to affirm the lower courts’ outright rejection of Trump’s claim.
But the breadth of the Supreme Court’s decision was astonishing. The majority held, for example, that “in dividing official from unofficial conduct, courts may not inquire into the President’s motives.” (It remains unclear exactly how a judge is supposed to draw that vital distinction.) And the Court ruled that if conduct is immune, prosecutors can’t base a criminal charge on it – nor can they mention it at all during trial, even as necessary context or background.
Now the case has landed back in trial court, before Judge Tanya Chutkan. She originally wanted the parties back before her today, but Smith asked for a few more weeks to gather his thoughts; he clearly has accepted that there won’t be a pre-election trial, despite his prior dogged efforts. Trump’s counsel, ever intent on slowing things down, happily consented to the prosecution’s request for delay. When Court reconvenes on September 5, it’ll be up to the Judge to pick through the wreckage and figure out what can be salvaged.
On that question, the Supreme Court has offered pointed guidance, and it bodes poorly for the core of Smith’s indictment. Trump’s effort to coerce the Justice Department to gin up proof of non-existent election fraud? Almost certainly an “official act,” and therefore immune and out of the case altogether. Trump’s pressure campaign aimed at his vice president, Mike Pence? Probably out. And Trump’s public statements, including his tweets and January 6 Ellipse speech? Likely toast, too.
The Supreme Court conspicuously reminded Judge Chutkan that it’s unimpressed with her work so far and will be watching her closely. The justices in the majority blasted the lower courts for “the expedition of this case, the lack of factual analysis… and the absence of pertinent briefing by the parties.” Indeed, as we’ve noted here before, Smith, Chutkan, and the intermediate appeals court judges tried to shortcut ordinary process to get Trump tried before the election; the Supreme Court noticed and disapproved. Most importantly on the vital timing issue, the Court has specified that Trump can appeal Judge Chutkan’s decisions about what conduct is (and is not) immune, before trial starts. That means, as a practical matter, there’s a zero-point-zero percent chance this trial happens before the November 2024 election.
If you’ve been hoping that Trump faces accountability for trying to steal the 2020 election before voters head to the polls for the next one, don’t despair – not fully, anyway. (For the record, I’m with you. The real problem is that DOJ took over two-and-a-half years to charge the case.) Judge Chutkan still can – and I believe will – order an evidentiary hearing to enable Smith to air some of his most explosive evidence, before voters head to the polls.
The Judge now must sift through the prosecution’s evidence and determine how much of Trump’s alleged conduct was an official act (and therefore immune), and which conduct can remain in the case. She has some leeway here. The Judge could opt to take “proffers” from both sides – detailed statements by the lawyers about what they expect their evidence to show. That’s a little flat, but it’s also perfectly permissible and efficient. And then there’s the more sensational alternative: the Judge can permit Smith to call live witnesses to expound from the stand on what their trial testimony would be.
I expect Smith to push for door number two, and Judge Chutkan to agree. If that happens, brace for a series of dramatic in-court encounters. We could see Trump’s former chief of staff, Mark Meadows, take the stand to give his first-ever public accounting of what his boss did (and didn’t do) before and on January 6. And Mike Pence could testify about how Trump begged and eventually threatened him in an effort to get him to throw the election – and how, on January 6, he had to run for his life to avoid the frothing mob.
No, an evidentiary hearing won’t hit nearly as hard as a jury trial and verdict. And we won’t actually see or hear any of it, because federal courts don’t permit cameras or live audio streaming. (Fair enough, given that it’s apparently the year 1892 right now.) We likely already know the most damaging information, as revealed in 2022 during the unforgettable January 6 Select Committee hearings in Congress, and the ensuing 800-plus page report. But, really, imagine: Trump’s own former chief of staff and VP taking the stand in, say, September of an election year, to describe firsthand how their former boss trampled on the Constitution to try to steal an election. Even if we all mostly know the story by now, that simply can’t be good for Trump at the polls, just weeks before voters cast their ballots.
It’s unclear how much of Smith’s case will ultimately survive the Supreme Court’s strafing. He might eventually go to trial on a tattered indictment focused on Trump’s effort to pressure state and local officials, without any of the damning evidence relating to DOJ and the VP and incitement of the rally crowd. Or the wounds inflicted by the Supreme Court might ultimately prove fatal.
But if Smith’s goal is to expose Trump’s conduct to the American public before the election – and let’s face it, that’s plainly been a driving force for the special counsel all along, despite his refusal to acknowledge it – he’ll still have a backdoor path to partial success.
Stay Informed,
Elie
Elie Honig served as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the Southern District of New York for 8.5 years and as the Director of the Division of Criminal Justice at the Office of Attorney General for the State of New Jersey for 5.5 years. He is currently a legal Analyst for CNN and Executive Director at Rutgers Institute for Secure Communities
Diane Ravitch's blog 