Trump Legal News: Good Times, Bad Times

There was much action on the Trump legal front yesterday, as he got one piece of good news and one piece of bad news.

We'll start with Trump's good news, although most readers have probably already heard it by now. The five judges that heard the appeal of his bond ruled that he does not have to come up with the full amount, and that $175 million will be satisfactory.

This decision is, according to the numerous New York legal experts who were all over TV yesterday, out of the ordinary. Normally, a person has to pony up, and there's no mercy. One would think this would be doubly true just a day after the defendant bragged that he absolutely has $500 million in the bank. But once again, the Donald has pulled some Trump-Fu out of his MAGA hat, and bent the legal process (partly) to his will.

There are many people out there who are angry about this news, including many of our readers. We know because we read the e-mails we get. For those folks, we'll point out five things:

1. While most people who get hit with this kind of judgment are at least somewhat liquid, Trump clearly is not, despite his braggadocio over the weekend. If he's forced to sell half a billion dollars in property at a discount, and he somehow wins on appeal, he can't go back and re-buy that real estate at bargain prices. No, he'd be permanently damaged. So, there's at least some justification for easing up on him.
   
   
2. He only has 10 days to come up with the money, and at that point the reduction would no longer be available and he'd have to come up with the full amount.
   
   
3. Even at $175 million, he might have trouble coming up with the funds.
   
   
4. He's still being charged interest on the full sum, to the tune of $112,000 per day (and $3.5 million in total, to date).
   
   
5. If you agree with Frank Luntz that the "victim" narrative could serve to rally the MAGA crowd, well, the consideration he's being shown is going to make that a harder sell.

So, this "good" news does come with some caveats.

And as long as we are on the subject, quite a few readers wrote in yesterday to question our note that Mar-a-Lago is not likely to be seized, as it is protected by Florida's homestead law. What it boils down to is that Florida's homestead law is very homeowner-friendly, and says that if a person lives in a Florida residence for 1,215 days or more, that is their home and it cannot be seized to satisfy a judgment. Meanwhile, Trump made a deal back in 2002 with the city of Palm Beach that Mar-a-Lago would NOT be a residence, and would only be used as a social club. So, if Mar-a-Lago was targeted for seizure, AG Letitia James would first have to go to court and successfully argue that Trump's agreement with Palm Beach overrides Florida state law. That's a tough hill to climb, especially since James is not based in Florida and so is not versed in the relevant law. Given these difficulties, it is fair to say that while Mar-a-Lago is very symbolic, it's near the bottom of James' list, and even if she tries for it, she's likely to fail.

Moving along to the bad news for Trump, Judge Juan Merchan dealt him a double whammy in the New York hush-money case. First, Merchan said he absolutely was not buying the argument that prosecutors in the office of Manhattan D.A. Alvin Bragg had engaged in professional misconduct and deserved to be sanctioned. The Judge fairly well read Trump lawyer Todd Blanche the riot act, while the former president sat in the room and took it all in.

Second, and more importantly, Merchan said that he sees no need for further delays, and that the trial will begin on April 15. So, there's a very decent chance Trump will be a convicted felon by mid-May. While we tend to doubt that this particular conviction will hurt him, in and of itself, the line "He's already a convicted felon and he has three more trials to go" could be a useful weapon in the hands of Joe Biden and his surrogates.

Trump was, of course, furious about Merchan's decision, and was all over Truth Social whining and moaning about unfair treatment and the deep state and blah, blah, blah. Is anyone still listening to this stuff at this point? Even the True Believers? In any case, all the kvetching on Earth did not help Trump in his fraud case, and it's not going to help him here, we think. (Z)

Republican Study Committee Goes Off the Deep End

Yesterday, the Republican State Leadership Committee (RSLC) issued a very interesting report on the 2024 election, and GOP strategy. According to the RSLC's analysis, which it shared with Axios, running solely against Joe Biden is not going to be sufficient in 2024. While the President does not inspire wild devotion with too many people outside of Leslie Knope, he also does not trigger a burning hatred among many people, either. Or, at least, not among many people who are persuadable voters. So, the RSLC concludes that the GOP is going to need—hold on to your hat—an actual platform and actual policy ideas to run on. What a novel idea!

The members of the RSLC are no RINOs; the Committee's website says they are "AMERICA'S ONLY LINE OF DEFENSE AGAINST SOCIALISM IN THE STATES," in ALL CAPS, just like that. They really want Republicans to win elections, and they have looked critically at the last three cycles to try to figure out what went wrong for the GOP.

As chance would have it, the Republican Study Committee (RSC), which is the single largest ideological caucus in Congress, and includes 166 of the 218 Republicans serving in the House (76%), anticipated this need. So, they unveiled a platform they call "Fiscal Sanity to Save America." It is their proposal for the FY 2024-25 budget and it is, in a word, bonkers. Let's run down some of the key elements, and then we will explain what we mean in describing it in that way:

• The RSC wants to cut Social Security benefits. The plan actually describes this as "raising the retirement age," but Social Security doesn't have a single retirement age, it has almost 100 of them, derived from a formula. So, changing the retirement age really just means changing the formula to give everyone less money (see here for a detailed explanation).
  
  
• The RSC wants to make all abortions illegal.
  
  
• The RSC wants to cut funding for healthcare, including Obamacare, Medicare and Medicaid. It also wants to reverse the Biden administration's $35 insulin and cheaper prescription drugs.
  
  
• The RSC wants to cut taxes on corporations and top earners.
  
  
• The RSC wants to get rid of free school lunches. After all, the satisfaction entailed in balancing the budget will surely be more nourishing to a poor, hungry 9-year-old than, you know, food.

What makes this bonkers is that it reads like a Saturday Night Live sketch, as if the RSC is somehow trying to lose as many elections as possible by helping the Democrats as much as possible. The RSCers might as well add planks embracing the kicking of puppies and the clubbing of baby seals to make sealskin toilet-paper cozies for Mar-a-Lago. Put another way, the RSC has taken the issues where the GOP is weakest and the Democrats are strongest, and has given the blue team lots and lots of ammunition to use. And again, this isn't coming from a fringe group like the Freedom Caucus, it's coming from a caucus that represents the great majority of House Republicans (and all of the leadership).

The Democrats have already jumped on this, as you might guess, with the White House, Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-NY) and House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) all issuing statements lambasting the plan. And while a policy paper from a Congressional caucus is a little too "inside baseball" for most voters at this particular moment, you can bet that Joe Biden, et al. will be bringing this up a few times later in the cycle. (Z)

Could Mike Johnson Be Replaced... By Hakeem Jeffries?

This sounds like crazy talk to us, but stranger things have happened, so we'll pass it along. Because there have been so many unexpected, premature Republican retirements in the past few months, some members of the House GOP Conference are expressing concern that the Democrats might retake control of the House in advance of November's elections, just by attrition.

At the moment, the house is 218R, 213D. When Rep. Mike Gallagher (R-WI) leaves on April 19, that will obviously make it 217 R. On April 30, a replacement for Brian Higgins (D) will be chosen in the D+9 NY-26, and that will presumably make it 214 D. It seems unlikely that three or four more Republicans will resign prior to the sure-to-be-Republicans elected to replace Kevin McCarthy (May 21), Bill Johnson (June 11) and Ken Buck (June 25). That said, Buck has hinted in interviews that he expects up to five Republicans to follow him in resigning early. Maybe he knows something more than he's saying.

At very least, Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) is freaking out (not that it's hard to get that particular response out of her). She is pushing to expel Gallagher from the House, so as to make sure his seat is vacant in time to hold a special election. If he really does stay until the 19th of April, Gov. Tony Evers (D-WI) could choose to merge the special election with the regular elections, meaning the seat would stay vacant for most of the rest of this term. Needless to say, expelling a member who has done nothing unethical or illegal, just to maintain the right partisan balance, would be a rather dramatic break from tradition and a gross abuse of the process. Of course, Greene cares little for such trivial concerns.

Our guess is that if the House does end up tied, Democrats will not push for a power-sharing agreement. But if the Democrats take the majority, they will almost certainly insist on electing a new speaker, even if he only sits for a few weeks or months. There would be some value in controlling the process of bringing bills to the floor, even if it's only briefly (ahem, the Ukraine funding). And there would probably also be some value in "We're the party that produced the first Black speaker in U.S. history." (Z)

Ronna Romney McDaniel's NBC Gig Just Isn't Going to Work Out

Yesterday, we had an item about NBC's hiring of former RNC Chair Ronna Romney McDaniel. And in that item, we noted how the hire could theoretically be a home run, if she speaks truth from her ultra-insider-Republican perspective, sort of like her fellow former RNC Chair Michael Steele does. We also pointed out how it could be a strikeout, if she continues to act as a GOP propagandist, like her fellow former RNC Chair Reince Priebus does.

With another day's worth of developments, and another day of reflection, we're having a very hard time seeing how this could plausibly be workable, long-term. We say this for three reasons:

1. Zero Credibility: Let us recall that McDaniel is not your garden-variety partisan propagandist; she's a person who gave aid and comfort to an attempt to overthrow democracy. Indeed, she may still face charges due to her efforts to interfere with Michigan electoral votes. She also described 1/6 as "legitimate political discourse," said the people who had been imprisoned should be freed, and questioned the legitimacy of Joe Biden's election. Then, during her appearance on Meet the Press this weekend, McDaniel announced that, in fact, "violence should not be a part of our discourse," that the 1/6 convicts should stay in prison, and that Joe Biden won the 2020 election "fair and square." She really should have been wearing a neck brace if she was going to make such an aggressive 180-degree turn.
   
   In any event, what this confirms is that McDaniel is a baldfaced liar. Maybe she believed she was full of it when she embraced the "stop the steal" stuff, but she said what she did in order to keep the job she had then. Or, maybe she believes she's full of it now, but she said what she did in order to keep the job she has now. How can anyone be sure which version is the truth? And that applies to anything that comes out of her mouth; she's fundamentally an unreliable narrator.
   
   
2. Colleague Blowback: As we noted, McDaniel's would-be colleagues are furious about the hire. That criticism did not abate yesterday, with additional prominent NBC News/MSNBC personalities joining in, most obviously Rachel Maddow. In fact, Rashida Jones (not the actress), who runs MSNBC, has announced that McDaniel will not be welcome on that channel. That means that the former chair is limited to, what—NBC Evening News, Meet the Press and... Dateline NBC? Maybe McDaniel can play a corpse in the next Dateline "real crime" episode about the murder of a suburban white woman. Which, let's be honest, is every Dateline episode.
   
   
3. No Benefit: The official reason for hiring McDaniel is to give "balance" to NBC's coverage. The real reason is to try to attract viewers who are not currently watching NBC's news programming. But, as several folks pointed out in commentaries yesterday, who exactly is McDaniel going to attract? MAGA World, a.k.a. the current Republican Party, loathes her because they blame her for all the electoral losses, particularly the 2020 presidential election. Her new "insights" about 1/6 are not going to help on that front. Meanwhile, Democrats loathe her because she's the GOP equivalent to "Baghdad Bob." So, who is going to make a point of tuning in to hear what McDaniel has to say? On the other hand, there's already some segment of the viewership that says they are going to go elsewhere for their news.

Given these problems, one might rightly ask: "Why did NBC hire McDaniel in the first place?" It is certainly possible that the NBC pooh-bahs did not appreciate the extent of the disdain that the viewership and the NBC news staff both have for McDaniel. However, there is also an alternate explanation that is floating around, primarily among members of the business press. NBC is owned by Comcast, and Comcast wants to merge with Verizon. So, McDaniel's hiring may be about greasing the political skids for that, rather than for her "journalistic contributions."

In any event, don't be terribly surprised if, despite her $300,000 contract, we don't hear much from McDaniel, or if the announcement is made that she and the network have decided, after consideration, to part ways. (Z)

An Interesting Election Today In Alabama

With the two presidential races decided, there isn't a lot of electoral excitement in the next couple of months. That doesn't mean there is NO excitement, however, and today there is a special election that is worth watching. It's for the Alabama House seat in State District 10.

The seat came open because the previous occupant, David Cole (R), resigned after being convicted of voter fraud. In Alabama, you have to reside in the district you represent and Cole didn't. So, in order to run, he rented a closet in someone else's house in HD-10 and claimed that as his residence. That might work if the closet was under the stairs, and Cole was a wizard with a lightning-bolt-shaped scar. But, absent those things, Cole was sentenced to 60 days in jail, 3 years' probation and a $50,000 fine.

The reason that Cole was eager to run in HD-10 is that it had no incumbent and it's swingy. Donald Trump won it by a couple of points in 2020, but Democrat Doug Jones won it by 5 points back in 2018 during his U.S. Senate race. So, it can go either way. Cole was elected by 7 points in 2022; his Democratic opponent was Marilyn Lands, who ran on health care and the economy.

What makes today's election interesting is that Lands is back for another go-round. This time around, she based her entire campaign on reproductive rights and, more specifically, IVF access. Her Republican opponent, Teddy Powell, has tried to avoid taking a stand on IVF. So, if Lands improves substantially on her 2022 performance and, in particular, if she wins, it will be further proof-of-concept that reproductive rights are a winner for Democrats, even in red states. (Z)

UN Security Council Calls for Gaza Ceasefire

When (Z) is lecturing, his least favorite kind of history to cover is economic history. And almost as bad is diplomatic history. What those two sub-types of history have in common is that there's a lot of nuance and subtlety, and it's usually all important, and it's very hard to communicate in an efficient way.

We note that because yesterday, after fifteen attempts, the U.N. Security Council managed to approve a resolution calling for a ceasefire in Gaza. We would have liked to read the document, to evaluate the exact verbiage used, but the good people at the U.N.—the same folks tasked with preserving world peace—screwed up the link such that it's not working. What we do know is that the vote in favor was 14-0 with the United States abstaining. Given that the U.S. rejected more strongly worded versions of the resolution, while China and Russia rejected a more weakly worded version, the final version was presumably somewhere in the middle.

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu was not pleased about this result, and in response, he canceled several meetings that high-ranking Israeli officials were scheduled to have with high-ranking American officials. The White House claimed it was surprised by Netanyahu's decision. This is where the complaint about diplomatic history comes in; who the heck knows which side is telling the truth? Is the Israeli PM overreacting here, or did the White House know full well this was a shot across his bow, and now they're putting on a little theater for the benefit of the voting public?

Whatever is going on in terms of this particular chess game, it's clear that Israel's international support is slipping. Netanyahu said there will be no ceasefire this week, no matter what the U.N. thinks. He can surely deliver on that promise right now, but give it a few more weeks or months, and... well, we continue to suspect that he'll have no option but to accept a ceasefire, whether he wants to or not. (Z)

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