DENVER (AP) — First, Colorado’s Supreme Court ruled that former President Donald Trump wasn’t eligible to run for his old job in that state. Then, Maine’s secretary of state ruled the same for her state.
Both decisions are historic. The Colorado court was the first court to apply to a presidential candidate a rarely used constitutional ban against those who “engaged in insurrection.” Maine’s secretary of state was the first top election official to unilaterally strike a presidential candidate from the ballot under that provision.
What’s next? Can Trump be put back on the ballot?
Both decisions are on hold while the legal process plays out. That means that Trump remains on the ballot in Colorado and Maine and that his political fate is now in the hands of the U.S. Supreme Court.
The Maine ruling will likely never take effect on its own. Its central impact is increasing pressure on the nation’s highest court to state clearly whether Trump remains eligible to run for president after the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol.
What’s the legal issue that could keep Trump off the ballot?
After the Civil War, the U.S. ratified the 14th Amendment to guarantee rights to former slaves and more. It also included a two-sentence clause called Section 3, designed to keep former Confederates from regaining government power after the war.
“Section 3 of the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution doesn’t require a criminal conviction to take effect.”
The measure reads: “No person shall be a Senator or Representative in Congress, or elector of President and Vice-President, or hold any office, civil or military, under the United States, or under any State, who, having previously taken an oath, as a member of Congress, or as an officer of the United States, or as a member of any State legislature, or as an executive or judicial officer of any State, to support the Constitution of the United States, shall have engaged in insurrection or rebellion against the same, or given aid or comfort to the enemies thereof. But Congress may by a vote of two-thirds of each House, remove such disability.”
Congress did remove that disability from most Confederates in 1872, and the provision fell into disuse. But it was rediscovered after Jan. 6.
All the suits failed until the Colorado ruling. And dozens of secretaries of state have been asked to remove him from the ballot. All said they didn’t have the authority to do so without a court order — until Maine Secretary of State Shenna Bellows’s decision.
The Supreme Court has never ruled on Section 3. It’s likely to do so in considering appeals of the Colorado decision — the state Republican Party has already appealed, and Trump is expected to file his own shortly.
Bellows’s ruling cannot be appealed straight to the U.S. Supreme Court — it has to be appealed up the judicial chain first, starting with a trial court in Maine.
The Maine decision does force the high court’s hand, though. It was already highly likely the justices would hear the Colorado case, but Maine removes any doubt.
Trump lost Colorado in 2020, and he doesn’t need to win it again to garner an Electoral College majority next year. But he won one of Maine’s four Electoral College votes in 2020 by winning the state’s 2nd Congressional District, so Bellows’s decision would have a direct impact on his odds next November.
Until the high court rules, any state could adopt its own standard on whether Trump, or anyone else, can be on the ballot. That’s the sort of legal chaos the court is supposed to prevent.
What is Trump’s argument?
Trump’s lawyers have several arguments against the push to disqualify him. First, it’s not clear Section 3 applies to the president — an early draft mentioned the office, but it was taken out, and the language “an officer of the United States” elsewhere in the Constitution doesn’t mean the president, they contend.
Second, even if it does apply to the presidency, they say, this is a “political” question best decided by voters, not unelected judges. Third, if judges do want to get involved, the lawyers assert, they’re violating Trump’s rights to a fair legal procedure by flatly ruling he’s ineligible without some sort of fact-finding process like a lengthy criminal trial. Fourth, they argue, Jan. 6 wasn’t an insurrection under the meaning of Section 3 — it was more like a riot. Finally, even if it was an insurrection, they say, Trump wasn’t involved in it — he was merely using his free speech rights.
Of course, the lawyers who want to disqualify Trump have arguments, too.
The main one is that the case is actually very simple: Jan. 6 was an insurrection, Trump incited it, and he’s disqualified.
Why has this process taken so long?
The attack of Jan. 6, 2021, occurred nearly three years ago, but the challenges weren’t “ripe,” to use the legal term, until Trump petitioned to get onto state ballots this fall.
But the length of time also gets at another issue — no one has really wanted to rule on the merits of the case. Most judges have dismissed the lawsuits because of technical issues, including that courts don’t have the authority to tell parties whom to put on their primary ballots. Secretaries of state have dodged, too, usually telling those who ask them to ban Trump that they don’t have the authority to do so unless ordered by a court.
No one can dodge anymore. Legal experts have cautioned that, if the Supreme Court doesn’t clearly resolve the issue, it could lead to chaos in November — or in January 2025, if Trump wins the election. Imagine, they say, if the high court ducks the issue or says it’s not a decision for the courts to make, and Democrats win a narrow majority in Congress. Would they seat Trump or declare he’s ineligible under Section 3?
Why was this action taken in Maine?
Maine has an unusual process in which a secretary of state is required to hold a public hearing on challenges to politicians’ spots on the ballot and then issue a ruling. Multiple groups of Maine voters, including a bipartisan clutch of former state lawmakers, filed such a challenge, triggering Bellows’s decision.
Bellows is a Democrat and the former head of the Maine chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union. Trump’s attorneys asked her to recuse herself from the case, citing social-media posts calling Jan. 6 an “insurrection” and bemoaning Trump’s acquittal in his impeachment trial over the attack.
She refused, saying she wasn’t ruling based on personal opinions. But the precedent she sets is notable, critics say. In theory, election officials in every state could decide a candidate is ineligible based on a novel legal theory about Section 3 and end their candidacies.
Conservatives argue that Section 3 could apply to Vice President Kamala Harris, for example — it was used to block from office even those who donated small sums to individual Confederates. Couldn’t it be used against Harris, they say, because she raised money for those arrested in the unrest after the murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police in 2020?
Is this a partisan issue?
Bellows is a Democrat, and all the justices on the Colorado Supreme Court were appointed by Democrats. Six of the 9 U.S. Supreme Court justices were appointed by Republicans, three by Trump himself.
But courts don’t always split on predictable partisan lines. The Colorado ruling was 4-3 — so three Democratic appointees disagreed with barring Trump. Several prominent legal conservatives have championed the use of Section 3 against the former president.
That was the advice from one financial analyst as U.S. investors awoke on Saturday to news of an apparent armed rebellion against Moscow led by Yevgeny Prigozhin, the owner of the powerful Russian mercenary organization Wagner Group.
Others speculated that the crisis in Russia could drive U.S. stocks lower, as some traders were already betting on a selloff once markets reopen on Monday due to this sudden spike in geopolitical risk.
“The developments in Russia are ultimately going to suggest President Putin’s leadership is weakening quickly and that resources may shift away from the war with Ukraine. It is too early to say how this will impact Wall Street, but the risk of desperate measures from Putin might make some investors nervous,” Edward Moya, senior market analyst at Oanda, said Saturday.
A simmering feud between Prigozhin, the leader of the military contractor whose mercenary forces have been fighting alongside Russian military troops in Ukraine, and the Russian Defense Ministry came to a head early Saturday as Prigozhin led his troops to successfully overtake a Russian military outpost near the Ukrainian frontier, which the Kremlin has used as its command center for overseeing the war in Ukraine.
Amid the mixture of reliable information and unfounded speculation, market analysts have scrambled to make sense of the situation and what it might mean for financial markets and the global economy.
The main theme that has emerged so far is that U.S. stocks would suffer unless the Russian military managed to quickly suppress the rebellion, as may have occurred with reports late Saturday that Prigozhin had halted a Wagner advance on Moscow and, in fact, might be relocating to neighboring Belarus. But how would something that could potentially cut short the war in Ukraine — which has been a bugbear for markets since the full-scale invasion by Russian forces in February 2022 — be a negative for stocks?
The answer is that chaos leads to uncertainty, and that uncertainty is anathema to markets — especially when it could disrupt global oil and food supplies.
“I’d bet on this creating more uncertainty which is generally going to be negative for risk … in the short term at least you see higher geopolitical risk premia — longer term the risks are on both sides really: does this precipitate the collapse of the Russian front and the war ends?” said Neil Wilson, chief market analyst at Finalto, in a note to clients on Saturday.
Others noted that the crisis is coming at a vulnerable time for U.S. markets, while Michael Antonelli, a market strategist at R.W. Baird & Co., suggested in a tweet that the crisis “has to be” bearish for U.S. stocks.
The S&P 500 index SPX, -0.77% closed out its worst week since March on Friday as a series of interest-rate hikes in the U.K. and across Europe last week sparked fresh fears of a global recession. Some analysts noted that the pullback swiftly followed signs that investors are growing more bullish following a powerful rally that sent stocks to their highest levels in 14 months. There are concerns that this shift in sentiment could presage investors’ final capitulation.
Sven Henrich, founder and lead strategist of Northman Trader, noted that the Cboe Volatility Index VIX, +4.11%,
the market’s so-called fear gauge, which measures the stock market’s expectations for volatility over the next 30 days, managed to finish last week below 13.5, its lowest level since January 2020, even as stocks pulled back.
If stocks do continue to slide, that would mean new lows for the Vix have proved to be a reliable counterindicator, suggesting that investors had grown complacent before being walloped by a fresh shock.
Asian markets will be the first to react to ongoing developments by Sunday evening Eastern time, but derivatives traders using CME Group’s Globex platform to trade swaps tracking the value of U.S. equity indexes are already betting on a selloff.
Meanwhile, bitcoin BTCUSD, +0.11%,
an asset that does reliably trade 24/7, was down just 0.8% at $30,675, a slight pullback after achieving its highest level in a year late last week. By Saturday evening the leading cryptocurrency has reversed that earlier dip.
Where might investors turn for safety if markets do become chaotic?
Finalto’s Wilson said investors could seek shelter in the currency market, where the U.S. dollar DXY, +0.47%,
Swiss franc USDCHF, -0.02%
and maybe the euro EURUSD, +0.32%
and British pound GBPUSD, +0.02%
could benefit from a spike in demand. More “de-risking” could send investors into ultrasafe government bonds like U.S. Treasurys TMUBMUSD10Y, 3.741%,
which could help to push yields lower, as bond yields move inversely to prices.
Wilson anticipated that European indexes could be “more exposed to de-risking due to makeup and proximity to Russia and the war in Ukraine.” He also noted the possibility that this latest crisis could send the S&P 500 and Nasdaq Composite COMP, -1.01%
higher if investors decided to seek shelter in high-quality growth names like Apple Inc. AAPL, -0.17%,
Nvidia Corp. NVDA, -1.90%
or Microsoft Corp. MSFT, -1.38%,
which have helped to drive this year’s equity-market rally.
Whatever happens, the outcome of the crisis should be more clear within the next 35 hours, Wilson said.
“[H]ow the market opens after the weekend will depend on what happens in the next 36 hours. … [I]t could all be over by then,” Wilson said.
Regardless, one of the first to interpret the market’s reaction on Monday will be Melbourne-based Chris Weston, head of research at online broker Pepperstone.
Until then, he cautioned investors against reading too much into the Wagner situation, since analysts’ visibility into a very complicated geopolitical situation is “poor.”
“The humble market participant would simply say they have no edge in knowing how this plays out and our visibility to read this through to markets is currently poor — the information is often biased and it’s hard to truly know what is fact and what is fed to influence. … [W]ill this lead to genuine regime change, fail or perhaps inflame and lead to a market shock?” Weston said in comments provided to MarketWatch.
“At this point we simply don’t know, but it feels like we get enough clarity on potential outcomes and even timelines in the next 24-48 hours — at this point the prospect of modest downside risk on Monday is elevated and naturally we’ll be watching crude and EU assets most closely,” he said.
Terry Haines, founder of Pangea Policy, said in an email to clients that the ongoing uncertainty fueled by the Wagner rebellion reveals the fragility of the Putin regime, and might marginally boost chances of a Ukraine victory.
But Haines also conceded that it’s a “developing and unstable situation with various facets that on net add to geopolitical uncertainties, to which markets usually react negatively.” Investors must also consider that, should that rebellion fail, it could be “replaced by stronger Russian control” or create further instability as “Wagner disintegrates.”
In that same vein, Jim Bianco, head of Bianco Research, offered up a joke aimed at all the armchair geopolitical analysts suddenly flocking to Twitter.
Markets may take a look at this crisis and view it as a “bullish development after some initial volatility, the Kobeissi Letter’s editor in chief and founder, Adam Kobeissi, told MarketWatch in Saturday comments.
“After all, the end of the war in Ukraine is the market’s top geopolitical driver right now, and if this increases the odds of a peace agreement and/or Russia withdrawing from Ukraine, it is likely to be perceived as bullish over the next few weeks,” he said.
He recommended that investors keep an eye on prices of oil and gold, which could be particularly sensitive to any fresh developments.
Donald Trump once famously bragged that he could shoot someone on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue and not lose any supporters.
What he didn’t mention was how quickly the news media would pretend like it never even happened.
Instead, we’d focus on the latest juicy tidbits of who was in and who was out among the Mar-a-Lago crowd. We’d write features about how his old crew had migrated to South Florida with him and how the state itself had become “Trump-ified” in his image. And we’d scramble over each other for “scoops,” such as who is about to endorse him, or when and where his next rally would be, with the hope of winning an invitation aboard his private jetliner.
Because we’re doing it right now. Donald Trump is the only president who used the threat of violence and then actual violence in an attempt to remain in power — the very definition of a coup. It was the singular unique act of his tenure, truly historic. In 232 years of elections, no other president had done anything remotely close to what Trump did.
Failing to mention Jan. 6 in a story about Trump is akin to writing about Neil Armstrong without mentioning the moon landing or about Jeffrey Dahmer without bringing up cannibalism.
Donald Trump speaks at a rally on the White House Ellipse on Jan. 6, 2021, ahead of the Capitol riot.
Kent Nishimura via Getty Images
Yet, somehow, this key bit of context almost never makes it into news coverage of Trump’s 2024 campaign. Instead, he is treated like any other candidate — with the focus on things like how he will fend off Ron DeSantis, what nickname he’ll come up with for Nikki Haley, and what strategy he’ll use to win back suburban women voters. We’re already seeing the puff profiles about his campaign staff that make those stories possible.
It all raises an intriguing question. What level of depravity would Trump have to engage in before news outlets regularly mentioned it in coverage? Serial killing? Child molestation? Both? Or would we, even then, ignore that conduct to get an inner circle aide to return a phone call?
The answer could be critical to the future of American democracy. While he was still in office, Trump spoke regularly about deserving a third term because the investigation into his 2016 campaign’s ties to Russia had ruined so much of his first. With his handling of COVID driving down his approval numbers in 2020, he actually floated the idea of postponing the November election when polls suggested he would lose.
If he were to regain the White House, on what basis does anyone believe that he would ever willingly leave?
Quid Pro Quote
Do you want a ride on Trump’s shiny, newly refurbished airplane to cover one of his campaign events? Or an invite to a news conference at one of his pre-rally photo opportunities with his “special” guests? How about an actual interview at his Mar-a-Lago country club?
Well, then you’d better be careful about what you write and say about Jan. 6, 2021, and Trump’s role in it. Stating the simple truth of that day in plain language must be avoided. Instead, craft a tortured sentence or two, preferably in the passive voice, that completely decouples Trump’s repeated lies about a “stolen” election that began in the wee hours of election night, continuing right through his vitriolic Jan. 6 rally, and the subsequent bloody assault on police officers that took place just up the street at the Capitol.
It is astonishing, reading much of the coverage about him these days — not just in the right-wing media echo chamber, but from normal, mainstream news outlets. Often, there is no reference to Jan. 6 at all. When it is mentioned, it’s typically described as if his supporters just spontaneously turned up at the Capitol on that particular day and became a bit unruly, having nothing to do with Trump whatsoever.
How we got to a point where a man who attempted an actual coup is treated like any other candidate for office cannot really be fathomed without an understanding of how political journalism has come to be practiced.
Trump speaks with reporters aboard his plane after a campaign rally in Waco, Texas, on March 25, 2023, while en route to his resort in Palm Beach, Florida.
Reporters who cover entertainment — sports, say, or movies — have long understood that their livelihoods depend on their subjects liking them. Not respecting them as professionals who have jobs to do, but actually liking them. Because celebrities can choose to speak to you, and make your career a success, or can freeze you out, making your job damned-near impossible. Exclusive interviews and quotes and photos are gold in this world. Getting them means promotions and higher-paying jobs with more glamorous outlets.
So it is, nowadays, in political journalism as well. Not government journalism, which often requires expertise in a particular subject area — banking or health care, for example — but which at the very least involves knowing the rules and processes of the governmental body in question. Political journalism today, in contrast, is really only about who is winning and, perhaps more important, who is likely to win.
Subject area expertise is almost nonexistent. Instead, it’s all about how Candidate X will message voters better than Candidate Y. Covering this is obviously easier if you have good connections with “senior advisers” and “top strategists” to both X and Y, so you can file reports based on “people familiar with” X and Y’s “thinking.”
It is no coincidence that this type of reporting has come to be called “horse race” journalism. Except unlike in sports where the results — who wins, who loses, who will get high-round draft picks to start rebuilding next year — in the end carry no real consequence, the failure of political journalism can be catastrophic.
‘Scoops’ In The Age Of Trump
A big piece of the problem is the value my industry places on “scoops,” that is, having a story before anyone else.
In three and a half decades in this business, I’ve never understood this obsession. So what if you get details of a campaign announcement the day before everyone else? How has that improved your readers’ ability to understand this world?
I’ve often seen SCOOPs in Twitter posts by reporters, with a news release from a candidate containing identical information coming literally minutes later.
The only “scoops” that constitute a public service are stories that would not have been known to the public at all without your having written them. Frankly, those are the only scoops we reporters should ever worry about getting.
I was lucky enough to have spent my formative years as a journalist in Florida, where the public records laws were among the strongest in the country. If a city council member or a county commissioner or, later, a state legislator or governor’s appointee refused to provide me information about public business, fine. I would find out some other way, usually through official documents.
It often took longer than I would have liked, but in every instance, the story was something that otherwise would never have seen the light of day.
Trump exits Trump Tower to attend court for his arraignment on April 4, 2023, on charges related to the hush-money payoff of porn star Stormy Daniels during the 2016 campaign.
Noam Galai via Getty Images
Those sorts of articles take time, though. Days or even weeks. Meanwhile, the incentive structure in political journalism rewards a “scoop” that drives traffic not merely today, but right this minute. And that means having sources in various campaigns willing to tell you things first. And it means having a tacit agreement that you won’t make them look bad.
In days past, of course, most political journalism was also bad political journalism. It wasn’t ideal, but it did not represent a threat to the republic. Having various outlets handle Mitt Romney or John Kerry or John McCain or Barack Obama with kid gloves for self-serving reasons didn’t really hurt American political discourse because all of those people shared basic American values about fair play and the rule of law and the sanctity of elections.
None of them, for instance, would have dreamed of trying to overturn an election defeat.
Today, we’re in a different place. Trump has shown very plainly that he does not believe in any of those things we long assumed were in the DNA of any serious candidate for major office.
Trump vs. Democracy, Round 2
Despite all this, journalists continue to invent all manner of justifications about working to maintain access to Trump, even if it requires soft-pedaling his actions in his final two months in the White House.
We need to have people close to Trump who will talk to us, because like it or not, he is a major player in American politics and we don’t want to be shut out.
We will play good cop-bad cop to get information, with some of our team sucking up to Trump and others taking it right to him, so we get all the coverage, not just some of it.
We are not betraying our audience by ignoring Jan. 6; rather, by cozying up to his people we are getting leaks about his plans and his thinking that our audience needs to know.
And, finally and least convincingly: People already know all about what he did, and, besides, it’s not our job to remind them.
What these rationales have in common is the failure to view Trump’s behavior as having crossed not just a red line in a rule-of-law democracy, but a barb-wire-fenced no-mans-land with a neon sign above it flashing: “Thou shalt not pass.”
We’re not talking about marginal tax rates here, or what an appropriate social safety net should look like. We’re talking about the very foundations of our constitutional republic. American journalism, after all, is not a thing separate and apart from American democracy. The former does not exist without the latter.
As a young reporter in upstate New York, I was taught that if a city council or a school board or a judge tried to close a hearing to the public, it was my job to stand up and object and ask for a delay until our lawyer could arrive. News outlets sue elected officials all the time for the release of public documents. In other words, we are not merely stenographers of our democracy, but active participants.
We treat political corruption as unequivocally bad, as we do murder and other violent crimes. We don’t waste time quoting experts telling us that bribery and homicide are wrong. We proceed from the premise that they are. Yet when it comes to Trump, we impose the “neutral observer” standard to an actual attempt to end our democracy?
I sometimes wonder if my colleagues have already forgotten that Wednesday afternoon and evening.
Stop for a moment and think: What if Donald Trump had succeeded that day? What if, instead of Mike Pence, the vice president had been someone with the character of Mark Meadows or Scott Perry and they’d gone along with Trump’s demands?
What should we have called Trump, had he managed to remain in office despite losing the election by 7 million votes? How should we have described the government we would have had at that point? Because it sure as hell would not have been a democracy anymore.
That it did not happen does not mean it could not have happened, or that it cannot.
Collectively, I think, America has already forgotten that — and no small thanks to my profession.
The Insurrection Was Televised
Constantly reminding our audience of what Trump did, by the way, is not “partisan” or taking sides. To the contrary. Not constantly reminding our audience is taking sides. Trump’s side.
Nor is it a matter of interpretation. This is not a he-said, she-said thing.
If you personally witness that shooting on Fifth Avenue, you don’t have to say that so-and-so is accused of shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, or that so-and-so allegedly shot someone.
We use the “accused” and “alleged” qualifiers when we write police stories because we are relying on law enforcement officials to describe events. That does not apply when we personally observe something.
The shooting happened. You saw it happen.
In this Jan. 6, 2021, file photo, rioters break into the Capitol in Washington.
Just so, there is no need to water down descriptions of what Trump did leading up to and on Jan. 6, 2021. He did it in plain sight, on live television, on social media. Every single day, for two full months.
His lying about the election results (he’d already been seeding this storyline for months, by the way, with claims that the only way he could lose was if Democrats cheated) began just hours after polls closed, when he claimed that he already had won and demanded a stop to all ballot counting.
His lawyers followed with a series of lawsuits alleging fraud in key states. Not a single one of them cited evidence to back up any of those claims, and he lost every one.
Then the Electoral College voted on Dec. 14, and that should have been the end of it. Of course, it wasn’t, and Trump then shifted his focus to stealing a second term through fraudulent “alternative” electors from the various states that his vice president would be able to cite during the congressional certification.
But Pence refused to go along with that illegal, unconstitutional scheme. So, on Dec. 19, Trump called his followers to Washington on the morning of that ceremony, and his plan morphed into a literal coup attempt.
No, Trump did not call out the military to keep himself in power, but it’s important to remember why he did not do this. Seven months earlier, during a protest outside the White House, Trump had ordered a public square cleared so he could walk to a photo op outside a church. Accompanying him were Defense Secretary Mark Esper and Joint Chiefs Chair Mark Milley. Both soon afterward publicly apologized for their presence, and they and other top military leaders made clear that they had zero role in presidential elections.
Trump did not execute a Third World-style miliary coup because his military leaders had pre-empted him by publicly stating that they would refuse to take part. Trump aide Peter Navarro to this day continues to vilify them for taking this stand.
But “coup” — in Trump’s case, technically an “autogolpe,” or self-coup — is not defined by the participation of the military. It is defined by violence or the threat of violence.
And starting with that Dec. 19 tweet — “Be there. Will be wild.” — the threat of violence was ever-present. It was there when he opened the French doors to the Oval Office so Pence could hear his followers at a protest a few blocks away the night of Jan. 5. It was there the following morning, when he told aides that he didn’t care if some of his supporters were armed, that he wanted them allowed into his rally anyway, where he would urge them to march on the Capitol, with himself leading the way. And it was there at 2:24 p.m. on Jan. 6, when he tweeted that Pence lacked the “courage” to go along with his plot, which sent his mob into a boiling rage. His followers, having already breached the Capitol, swarmed the entrances minutes after that post.
A Coup By Any Other Name
All of which makes the use of that word, “coup,” critically important.
While many outlets did use it during the Jan. 6 hearings last summer, with the evidence of Trump’s behavior getting plenty of airtime, you almost never see it now that Trump is actively seeking the White House again.
It would be one thing, perhaps, if Trump had apologized for his actions leading up to that day, for all the lying he had done about the election and riling up his followers to the point where they were beating police officers with flagpoles bearing the United States ensign.
But he hasn’t. To the contrary, he has continued the election lying, and recently has been lionizing those who wound up in jail for their actions that day as “patriots” and “political prisoners.” He has lent his name to a “J6 Choir” of accused domestic terrorists, and publicly honored them at a recent rally.
Trump greets convicted rioter Micki Larson-Olson while visiting the Red Arrow Diner after a campaign rally on Thursday, April 27, 2023, in Manchester, New Hampshire.
The Washington Post via Getty Images
In fact, 17 of the 20 still behind bars in Washington have been charged with assaulting police officers. The remaining three are charged with other serious crimes related to Jan. 6.
Despite this, Trump is almost always covered as if he were any other “normal” candidate for office. The entirety of his actions from Nov. 4, 2020, through Jan. 6, 2021, are now wrapped up in a cute shorthand about the legal peril out there related to that day, and how it could affect his dream of returning to the Oval Office.
We’ve seen this movie before, obviously, in the way the news media collectively covered Trump’s White House. We came up with euphemisms like “unpredictable” and “shambolic.” The term of art for Trump himself was “mercurial.” Just as coverage of his 2016 campaign, once he became the nominee, tended to normalize his various abnormal pronouncements, so did his White House coverage normalize his behavior.
Imagine for a moment that the mayor of your town owned a restaurant a few blocks from City Hall and that anyone who needed a building permit or a zoning variance was expected to frequent it. That mayor would be in jail, right? Well, that’s exactly what Trump did with the White House. But instead of making this unprecedented, Third World-level corruption a sustained focus of coverage, reporters instead used Trump’s Washington hotel as a place to hit up administration sources who’d had a drink or three for those all-important SCOOPs.
Ironically, from a practical standpoint, Trump needs the news media right now a whole lot more than the news media need Trump.
If every single story about Trump in every single news outlet mentioned his role in Jan. 6 — as well it should, for the sake of accuracy and thoroughness ― do people think his campaign would shut us all out? Of course not. It just means that his people would not be able to use as a criterion the willingness of a reporter to hide important facts from the audience when doling out access.
Democracy Hanging In The Balance
In his first run for president, Trump was treated as an entertaining joke. Someone who would make those boring summer months before primary voting started more tolerable. Print outlets and television appreciated the enormous audience that reflexively responded to Trump content, even if it was to read and watch with the sole purpose of being angry. Hence the camera shots of an empty stage with a chyron promising that Trump would soon appear.
Yes, there were plenty of stories about his past in New York and Atlantic City that made it obvious that the genius businessman he played on television was just that — a character he played on television. There was even a fair amount of analysis of his statements through the years that warned of his authoritarian bent. Overall, though, he was seen as a harmless buffoon. And that more or less set the tone for the coverage of his White House.
Sure, he was unusual by the standards of all his predecessors, or most elected officials, or, for that matter, most adult human beings — but he made for great copy and for great ratings! As CBS’s Les Moonves put it in 2016 about Trump’s campaign: “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS.”
Despite this prologue, I had honestly believed that Jan. 6 would end that attitude forever, at least when it came to Trump.
One prominent reporter trapped in the Capitol that day literally pleaded for help. Others who had for the previous six years covered Trump with all the aforementioned euphemisms suddenly accepted the gravity of what was going on and accurately put the blame on the one person who had caused it. All of the ironic, above-it-all detachment, the nothing-can-faze-me tone was gone as thousands in Trump’s mob attacked hundreds of police officers, with democracy hanging in the balance.
I had thought, going forward, that the description of Trump as an autocrat who had betrayed the Constitution would be hung around his neck in every story that mentioned him.
Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally March 25, 2023, in Waco, Texas.
Starting with his appearance at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Orlando just weeks after his failed coup attempt, where Trump all but announced his campaign to retake the presidency in 2024, reporters began their efforts to ingratiate themselves with him and his staff.
And by reporters, I’m not just talking about the “journalists” in the Trump Apology Corps — that is, those organizations that exist entirely in the Trump disinformation bubble, where, for example, the domestic terrorists who violently attacked police, leading to the death of five of them and injuries to another 140, are instead portrayed as the victims of that day.
Actual reporters for genuine news outlets, many of whom I know and like and respect, who have somehow developed the same relationships with Trump and his inner circle as they would with any other candidate and treat him as such in their coverage.
And in so doing, they are normalizing Trump’s coup attempt as an acceptable political tactic. After all, if news media professionals, who follow this stuff in detail day in and day out, don’t treat Jan. 6 as particularly significant, why should ordinary Americans who pay minimal attention to politics?
Whitewashing Jan. 6 Away
Republican consultant Sarah Longwell recently described focus groups that found, initially, that even Trump-supporting voters were on Ukraine’s side after Russian dictator Vladimir Putin invaded in early 2022. Then right-wing media began offering a steady diet of anti-Ukraine “news.” Volodymyr Zelenskyy was corrupt. Billions of dollars of American aid were being squandered. Russia actually has a right to that land.
Month after month it continued, until a year later, support for Ukraine among Trump’s followers has fallen dramatically.
Mass media matters. What journalists say, and just as important, what we don’t say, shapes public opinion. And the consensus practice of not mentioning what Trump did leading up to and on Jan. 6 — how it was without precedent in the nation’s history, and how his scheme would have literally ended our democracy — is whitewashing that day away.
In the days and weeks immediately afterward, an overwhelming majority of Americans understood that the former president had incited it, for the purpose of staying in the White House. Two years of Trump lies and lukewarm media pushback later, that percentage is far lower, and an increasing number of Republicans now believe Trump was not responsible for his own coup attempt.
How much deeper into the looking glass are we going to fall if journalists fail to provide the most basic of context to our audience?
I’m not suggesting that we not ask for interviews, that we not try to travel with his campaign. We absolutely should be making those requests, as we do for other candidates.
Trump supporters gather outside the U.S. Capitol building on the second anniversary of the coup attempt on Jan. 6, 2023.
Anadolu Agency via Getty Images
But we absolutely should not make that request, or accept an invite, with even the hint of an implicit agreement to soft-pedal or, worse still, to not mention Trump’s post-election words and deeds. You would never have agreed to interview Charles Manson on the condition that you not mention his murders. Well, what Charles Manson and his groupies did to Sharon Tate and her friends is what Donald Trump tried to do to our democracy.
In an age when most journalism is produced and consumed online, with no physical “column inch” limit like with print, there is simply zero excuse not to include just a sentence or two of context about Trump’s Jan. 6 conduct in every news account about him. The relative clause “who attempted a coup to remain in power” adds precisely eight words to a story.
In the end, if American voters decide that they would prefer an autocracy to a representative democracy, that is their prerogative, to end this 236-year-old experiment. But they should do so with their eyes wide open. And it is our job as journalists to make sure they have the necessary information to make an informed choice.
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee has dropped its subpoena against former President Donald Trump as it wraps up work and prepares to dissolve next week.
Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson, the committee’s Democratic chairman, wrote in a letter to Trump lawyer David Warrington on Wednesday that he is formally withdrawing the subpoena. “As you may know, the Select Committee has concluded its hearings, released its final report and will very soon reach its end,” Thompson wrote. “In light of the imminent end of our investigation, the Select Committee can no longer pursue the specific information covered by the subpoena.”
The committee had voted to subpoena Trump during its final televised hearing before the midterm elections in October, demanding testimony and documents from the former president as it has investigated his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection and efforts to overturn his 2020 defeat.
Lawmakers on the panel have acknowledged the subpoena would be difficult to enforce, especially as Republicans are poised to take over the House in January. But the move had political and symbolic value.
“We are obligated to seek answers directly from the man who set this all in motion,” Rep. Liz Cheney of Wyoming, the panel’s vice chair and one of two Republicans on the nine-member committee, said at the time. “And every American is entitled to those answers.”
Trump then sued the panel in November to avoid cooperating. The lawsuit contended that while former presidents have voluntarily agreed to provide testimony or documents in response to congressional subpoenas in the past, “no president or former president has ever been compelled to do so.”
The committee’s request for documents was sweeping, including personal communications between Trump and members of Congress as well as extremist groups. Trump’s attorneys said it was overly broad and framed it as an infringement of his First Amendment rights.
While the panel never gained Trump’s testimony, the committee interviewed more than 1,000 witnesses, including most of his closest White House aides and allies.
Many of those witnesses provided substantive detail about his efforts to sway state legislators, federal officials and lawmakers to help him overturn his defeat. And White House aides who were with him on Jan. 6 told the panel about his resistance to tell the violent mob of his supporters to leave the Capitol after they had broken in and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s victory.
In its final report issued last week, the committee concluded that Trump engaged in a “multipart conspiracy” to upend the 2020 election and failed to act on the violence. The panel also recommended that the Justice Department investigate the former president for four separate crimes, including aiding an insurrection.
On social media Wednesday evening, Trump and his lawyers construed the move as a victory. “They probably did so because they knew I did nothing wrong, or they were about to lose in Court,” Trump wrote on his social-media site. He called the panel “political Thugs.”
On Twitter, Trump lawyer Harmeet Dhillon said the panel had “waved the white flag.”
WASHINGTON (AP) — The House Jan. 6 committee is wrapping up its investigation of the violent 2021 U.S. Capitol insurrection, with lawmakers expected to cap one of the most exhaustive and aggressive congressional probes in memory with an extraordinary recommendation: The Justice Department should consider criminal charges against former President Donald Trump.
At a final meeting on Monday, the panel’s seven Democrats and two Republicans are poised to recommend criminal charges against Trump and potentially against associates and staff who helped him launch a multifaceted pressure campaign to try to overturn the 2020 election.
While a criminal referral is mostly symbolic, with the Justice Department ultimately deciding whether to prosecute Trump or others, it is a decisive end to a probe that had an almost singular focus from the start.
“I think the president has violated multiple criminal laws and I think you have to be treated like any other American who breaks the law, and that is you have to be prosecuted,” Rep. Adam Schiff, a Democrat from Southern California and a member of the panel, said Sunday on CNN’s “State of the Union.”
The panel, set to dissolve on Jan. 3 with the advent of a Republican-led House, has conducted more than 1,000 interviews, held 10 well-watched public hearings and collected more than a million documents since it launched in July 2021. As it has gathered the massive trove of evidence, the members have become emboldened in declaring that Trump is to blame for the violent attack on the Capitol by his supporters almost two years ago.
After beating their way past police, injuring many of them, the Jan. 6 rioters stormed the Capitol and interrupted the certification of President Joe Biden’s win, echoing Trump’s lies about widespread election fraud and sending lawmakers and others running for their lives.
The attack came after weeks of Trump’s efforts to overturn his defeat — a campaign that was extensively detailed by the committee in its multiple public hearings. Many of Trump’s former aides testified about his unprecedented pressure on states, federal officials and on Vice President Mike Pence to find a way to thwart the popular will.
“This is someone who in multiple ways tried to pressure state officials to find votes that didn’t exist, this is someone who tried to interfere with a joint session, even inciting a mob to attack the Capitol,” Schiff said. “If that’s not criminal, then I don’t know what it is.”
Members of the committee have said that the referrals for other individuals may also include ethics violations, legal misconduct and campaign finance violations. Lawmakers have suggested in particular that their recommended charges against Trump could include conspiracy to defraud the United States, obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress and insurrection.
On insurrection, Schiff said Sunday that “if you look at Donald Trump’s acts and you match them up against the statute, it’s a pretty good match.” He said that the committee will focus on those individuals — presumably Trump — for whom they believe there is the strongest evidence.
While a so-called criminal referral has no real legal standing, it is a forceful statement by the committee and adds to political pressure already on Attorney General Merrick Garland and special counsel Jack Smith, who is conducting an investigation into Jan. 6 and Trump’s actions.
The committee is also expected at the hearing to preview its massive final report, which will include findings, interview transcripts and legislative recommendations. Lawmaker have said a portion of that report will be released Monday.
“We obviously want to complete the story for the American people,” said Rep. Jamie Raskin, a Maryland Democrat and constitutional scholar who serves on the select committee. “Everybody has come on a journey with us and we want a satisfactory conclusion, such that people feel that Congress has done its job.”
The panel was formed in the summer of 2021 after Senate Republicans blocked the formation of what would have been a bipartisan, independent commission to investigate the insurrection. That opposition spurred the Democratic-controlled House to form a committee of its own. House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy of California, a Trump ally, decided not to participate after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi rejected some of his appointments. That left an opening for two anti-Trump Republicans in the House — Reps. Liz Cheney of Wyoming and Adam Kinzinger of Illinois — to join the seven Democrats serving on the committee.
While the committee’s mission was to take a comprehensive accounting of the insurrection and educate the public about what happened, they’ve also aimed their work at an audience of one: the attorney general. Lawmakers on the panel have openly pressured Garland to investigate Trump’s actions, and last month he appointed a special counsel, Smith, to oversee several probes related to Trump, including those related to the insurrection.
In court documents earlier this year, the committee suggested criminal charges against Trump could include conspiracy to defraud the United States and obstruction of an official proceeding of Congress.
In a “conspiracy to defraud the United States,” the committee argues that evidence supports an inference that Trump and his allies “entered into an agreement to defraud the United States” when they disseminated misinformation about election fraud and pressured state and federal officials to assist in that effort. Trump still says he won the election to this day.
The panel also asserts that Trump obstructed an official proceeding, the joint session of Congress in which the Electoral College votes are certified. The committee said Trump either attempted or succeeded at obstructing, influencing or impeding the ceremonial process on Jan. 6 and “did so corruptly” by pressuring Pence to try to overturn the results as he presided over the session. Pence declined to do so.
The committee may make ethics referrals for five House Republicans — including McCarthy — who ignored congressional subpoenas from the panel. Those referrals are unlikely to result in punishment since Republicans are set to take over the House majority in January.
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