https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/07/25/trump-legal-cases/

It hardly constitutes an optimal context for a presidential victory.

Former US president Donald Trump still looms large enough that two national US calendars, which in the past have always run in parallel, seem set to collide as his gravitational pull slams them together. He faces a mounting set of legal and criminal reckonings and it’s almost impossible that all will be postponed. Many are set to intersect with the schedule of political primaries, party conventions and even the next presidential election.

Since Mr Trump faced his first criminal indictment in Manhattan in March on campaign finance and business records and tax falsification charges, he has appeared subdued and chastened in the dock. Unlike the civil defamation lawsuit, based on a sexual assault that a jury determined he indeed committed against writer E Jean Carroll, he won’t have the option of not attending these criminal trials.

Last week, a Trump-appointed Federal District Judge in southern Florida, Aileen Cannon, rebuffed his request for an indefinite postponement of his trial on 37 felony counts related to the alleged purloining, mishandling, concealing and unauthorised exposure of numerous highly sensitive government documents. Instead, she scheduled the trial for May 20, 2024.

While many complications may create delays, including the difficulty of getting attorneys cleared to review classified materials and finding a qualified jury, the Southern District of Florida is noted for its “rocket docket”, and may prove unsympathetic to his favourite legal tactic of endless delays.

Meanwhile, a judge in New York City has scheduled March 25 for Mr Trump’s state-level charges. As with the federal-level Florida case, he will be required to attend, while presumably his Republican rivals will be campaigning, fund-raising and debating.

By then the former president will already be embroiled in a second civil lawsuit brought by Ms Carroll on the same essential facts because he inexplicably repeated his accusations that she was lying about their alleged encounter after she won a resounding jury verdict last year. Shortly after, Mr Trump took to CNN to repeat his denials, claims that he didn’t know who she is (despite numerous photographs showing them together), and implications that she is unbalanced.

Interest in round two, which will surely result in yet another judgment against him, has been stoked by a stunning recent ruling by federal District Court Judge Lewis Kaplan. It held that, while the civil court jury ruled in favour of Ms Carroll on sexual assault and not rape charges under the exact meaning of the terms under New York State law, nonetheless their findings of fact establish that Mr Trump had indeed “raped” her “as many people commonly understand the word ‘rape’” .

It will not help Mr Trump in any elections whatsoever, even Republican primaries, that a federal judge has ruled it is legally accurate to describe him as an established rapist under the commonly understood meaning of the term. All of that is likely to be reinforced and disseminated by a disastrous second lawsuit he could have avoided by simply restraining his impulse to lash out at her again despite what had just happened in a court of law.

Criminal courts are almost certainly Mr Trump’s least preferred environment since few of his standard tactics work well there. Indeed, many of his closest legal associates now face disbarment precisely because they followed his preferred stratagems in legal proceedings, where such shenanigans are not well tolerated outside the white-collar civil proceedings that he has been used to.

Even then, New York State isn’t through with its least-favourite son.

New York’s attorney general, Letitia James, is suing Mr Trump, much of his family, and their private company on civil charges of systematically misrepresenting their assets by overvaluing them to investors and undervaluing them for tax purposes. Her ultimate goal is to not merely regain assets but to bar Mr Trump and his two older sons, Donald Jr and Eric, from ever running any businesses in the state again. That civil trial is scheduled to begin this October.

Arching over it all is special prosecutor Jack Smith’s apparent upcoming additional federal charges related to the January 6, 2021 insurrection and Mr Trump’s broader failed coup effort following President Joe Biden’s electoral victory in November 2020. Mr Trump recently received a so-called target letter from the Justice Department, reportedly advising him that he may well face charges of conspiracy to defraud the US, obstruction of an official proceeding, and, to the surprise of many, conspiracy to defraud people of their constitutional rights. There is little doubt another federal indictment will follow soon enough.

This, logically, seems to focus on the more sinister underlying efforts to overturn the election results – such as the plot to promote “fake electors” from Republican-controlled states that would secure victory for Mr Trump over Mr Biden despite the election outcome – than just the more dramatic mayhem of January 6.

Mr Trump also seems likely to face charges in Georgia on related state-level crimes, given that he was recorded pressuring senior officials to “find” exactly the number of non-existent votes he needed to defeat Mr Biden there.

These charges are merely looming, so there is no indication yet when expected additional trials might begin. But the first Republican primary debate is scheduled for August 23, kicking off the nomination campaign. Republican primary voting begins with the Iowa caucuses and New Hampshire primary in January 2024 and culminates in March. The Republican National Convention will be in Milwaukee from July 15-18, potentially right in the middle of the current front-runner’s varying criminal trials and other legal woes.

Only if he survives all that comes with his potential rematch with Mr Biden. Suffice it to say, the developing calendar smashing together Mr Trump’s political ambitions and legal exposure doesn’t seem like the optimal context for victory.

As the legal schedule now stands, his criminal trial in Florida may begin mere days after the end of the one in New York. It’s already taking its toll.

In the last quarter of fund-raising, most of Mr Trump’s donation dollars went not to his presidential campaign, as most donors no doubt expected, but to an affiliated “political action committee” that serves mainly to steer funds into paying his mounting legal bills.

Mr Trump’s rapidly filling, unavoidable criminal trial agenda could well hammer his presidential ambitions with a continuously running, self-authored anti-Trump TV ad campaign that will most likely only get more damaging as the 2024 presidential election approaches.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/07/20/it-is-americas-right-not-its-left-whose-views-on-the-israeli-occupation-have-changed/

Conservative claims that Joe Biden is implementing an outlandish new liberal conceit by labelling the Palestinian territories as ‘occupied’ are cynical and dishonest inversions of the truth,

The partisan schism over US policy towards Israel and the occupation that began in 1967 is solidifying in ways that should alarm both Israelis and Palestinians albeit for different reasons. Republicans are increasingly embracing the annexationism championed by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s radical new cabinet, while US President Joe Biden’s administration is working to restore Washington’s commitment to peace.

Last week, an official editorial in The Wall Street Journal, an authoritative conservative establishment publication, fulminated against the Biden administration’s Middle East policies by relying on two glaring falsehoods.

It condemned Mr Biden’s opposition to proposed Israeli judicial “reforms” that would strip the judiciary of most powers over the government. It insisted that Mr Biden has been treating Israel’s government more harshly than he has the Iranian regime.

The absurdity of this claim is clear. A distinct coolness between Mr Netanyahu and Mr Biden is evident, but US support for Israel remains generous and robust. By contrast, the Biden administration has held firm against unreasonable Iranian demands in nuclear negotiations and maintained remarkably harsh sanctions and significantly ramped up military deterrence against Teheran.

The second glaring falsehood merits particular attention. The editorial claims that, under Mr Biden, “all of the West Bank and East Jerusalem is treated as occupied territory”. “This is now a liberal article of faith,” it insists.

These assertions – that it’s somehow incorrect to label the occupied Palestinian territories as “occupied”, and that doing so is a new and especially liberal conceit – invert reality. Shortly after the occupation began in 1967, it was labelled exactly that by the UN Security Council, including the US, and was reconfirmed countless times ever since. This makes Israel’s occupation a legal and diplomatic fact, not anyone’s opinion.

The suggestion is that liberals have adopted a weirdly anti-Israel stance by claiming Israel is an occupying power. Yet the opposite is true, as the editorial’s cynical authors are surely aware. In fact, it is the American right that has abandoned a longstanding bipartisan Washington consensus recognising the reality of the occupation and endorsing a two-state solution.

In 1980, then-president Ronald Reagan, a conservative hero, strongly supported Security Council resolutions condemning Israel’s de facto annexation of occupied East Jerusalem and declaring it null and void. Both presidents Bush, father and son, were also clear on the reality of occupation and the need for two states.

But in the 21st century, radical Christian fundamentalists support for the occupation and annexation steadily spread from the fringe to the mainstream in right-wing discourse.

The Donald Trump administration proved decisive. His Israel policy was run by three religiously conservative, pro-settlement Jewish Americans personally close to him: his son-in-law Jared Kushner, and two of his attorneys, Jason Greenblatt and David Friedman.

Mr Trump endorsed Israel’s annexation of the Golan Heights and issued an ambiguous statement recognising Israel’s sovereignty in Jerusalem but leaving it unclear whether he was making distinction between West Jerusalem and occupied East Jerusalem.

As US ambassador to Israel, Mr Friedman, the most radical of the group, was unusually empowered. During his tenure, everyone more senior at the State Department studiously avoided Palestine-Israel issues. He was, therefore, usually able to get his way.

He fought hard for the elimination of all references to the occupation or the occupied Palestinian territories in State Department documents, most notably the annual Country Reports on Human Rights Practices. From their outset, these crucial documents tracked Israel’s abuses and carefully distinguished Israel from the clearly identified “occupied territories”.

During Mr Friedman’s ambassadorship, State Department references to the occupation began to quickly disappear. The area designation in the annual reports was immediately switched from the traditional “Israel and the Occupied Territories” to “Israel, the West Bank and Gaza”. By 2018, all references to the occupation were eliminated. Under Mr Biden, Mr Trump’s area designation unfortunately persists, but the fact of occupation is clearly labelled and shot through the analysis of human rights realities in the occupied territories.

Mr Trump’s 2020 “Peace to Prosperity” proposal, overseen by Mr Kushner, was the key turning point. By encouraging Israel to annex 30 percent of the West Bank, including the Jordan Valley thereby surrounding any potential Palestinian mini-state within a greater Israel, the White House gave its blessing to the Republican right, especially radical fundamentalist Christians, to openly embrace occupation and annexation as legitimate and even desirable.

This otherwise ineffectual document succeeded in its unstated but actual primary mission of stretching the “Overton window” of political discourse on the occupied territories in Washington to include support for annexation. For the Republican right, there was no turning back. Cue editorials pretending that this radical transformation of conservative attitudes that has smashed a longstanding, bipartisan foreign policy consensus is merely the rejection of an outlandish new liberal “article of faith”.

Who else has recognised the reality of occupation? The Israeli military, repeatedly, going before Israeli courts to justify measures such as checkpoints and live-fire zones that are allowed to occupying powers under international law. The Israeli government, too, has frequently cited the occupation when convenient. But whenever it comes to settlements and other civilian projects that grossly transgress international human rights law – because the Palestinians and other occupied peoples have the right not to be colonised – Israel reverts to pretending there is no occupation after all.

What Israel has tried to create is a mobile, ever-shifting landscape where “Israel” legally exists wherever and whenever Israeli settler happens to be hunkering down, with or without permission of Israeli authorities, and everywhere else is an amorphous and undefined occupation, with the status of the land and its people to be determined at some future date. Or not.

Comparing the Biden administration’s Human Rights Reports with such conservative editorials and Republican presidential candidates’ scramble to outdo each other in support for Israel and annexation, it is clear that Mr Trump and his annexationist inner circle succeeded in demolishing the pre-existing bipartisan consensus in favour of peace.

With Mr Netanyahu’s judicial “reforms” set to severely undermine Israel’s “Jewish democratic” bona fides over Mr Biden’s strong objections, and the bitter partisan split developing over the occupation, the decades-old “special relationship” between the two countries seems ready to give way to a less “special”, more normal, status, at least with Democrats. That may dismay Israelis, but alarmingly for Palestinians, most Republicans now appear irreversibly pro-annexation.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/07/12/a-new-court-ruling-on-disinformation-pokes-another-hole-in-americas-constitution/

The US legal system is stuck in an ongoing pattern of undermining everything it’s meant to stand for.

The more than 200-year-old US constitutional system has been strained, almost to the breaking point, repeatedly in the 21st century. The latest instance is potential new limitations on co-operation between the government and corporations to limit online disinformation.

A Louisiana judge has ordered President Joe Biden’s administration, including public health and security agencies, not to engage social media companies with “the purpose of urging, encouraging, pressuring or inducing in any manner the removal, deletion, suppression or reduction of content containing protected free speech”.

That effectively bars the government from working with these platforms to try to create voluntary standards that protect the public from especially egregious and harmful disinformation. It privileges the free-speech rights of wild-eyed individuals, who could always still say whatever they want in their own media, at the expense of the same rights of private companies and the government itself, not to mention the interests of the general public and constitutional order.

The century began its ongoing pattern of stress-testing the creaking US Constitution with the fraught aftermath of the 2000 presidential election between George W Bush and Al Gore. The result was a virtual stalemate, with a result in Florida that was so close it became clear that no amount of contested recounts would produce a clear outcome either way. The election was ultimately decided by the Supreme Court, which voted strictly along partisan lines to halt any further recounts in the state, handing Mr Bush the presidency.

Although Mr Gore graciously accepted their ruling, not only did the electoral system appear badly broken (Mr Bush lost the popular vote), but the Court initiated a process of shattering self-inflicted delegitimisation which continues today. In addition to all justices voting in a manifestly partisan manner, they adopted stances on state authority that flatly contradicted well-established liberal and conservative positions on the issue, obviously in order to promote a politically advantageous outcome for their ideological allies.

The ensuing 15 years saw disasters ranging from plainly unconstitutional torture with impunity by the government following the 9/11 terrorist attacks to the 2010 “Citizens United” ruling that unleashed a tidal wave of unaccounted-for “dark money” from wealthy powerbrokers and corporations that flooded the US political system on all sides with uncontrolled, unprecedented and legally sanctioned corruption.

The arrival of Donald Trump and his “Make America Great Again” movement (which brought the Louisiana lawsuit) initiated a series of sustained challenges to the system from within that have neither brought down the US constitutional order nor been successfully suppressed. Indeed, Mr Trump remains the leading Republican candidate for the 2024 presidential nomination, and makes no secret of his intention to use his power to inflict “retribution” for his supporters against all of their perceived adversaries.

One of the earliest and most alarming challenges to the constitutional order posed by the Trump movement was the mobilisation of disinformation and conspiracy theories largely through social media. It developed into an unprecedented and sustained attack on the very notion of objective reality beyond mere assertion and opinion. Most disturbingly, this attack on the very concept of verifiable truth combined internal and external forces, both working, for their own reasons, to try to secure Mr Trump’s victory over Hillary Clinton.

Internally to the country, Mr Trump’s campaign and movement elevated fabrication, conspiracy theorizing, wild speculation and baseless allegations to a campaign specialty, if not an art form. Externally, a sustained and focused campaign by Russian intelligence, carefully monitored by a number of US government agencies and outlined in the final report by special counsel Robert Mueller, used many of the same tactics and tropes to promote Mr Trump and undermine confidence in both the US political system and the notion of objective reality.

The Kremlin thus sought to export its “nothing is true and everything is possible” domestic political atmosphere to the United States, with devastating effectiveness and consequences. Mr Trump continues to complain about “the Russia hoax,” and it’s true that definitive evidence linking his campaign to unlawful cooperation with Russian intelligence was never established. But the Russian use of disinformation on behalf of his candidacy and against the US constitutional system and political culture was all-too-real and exhaustively documented.

There is no telling how many of the more than 1.1 million Americans who have died from Covid-19 refused a vaccination that could have saved them. But the number may be in the hundreds of thousands. Even Mr Trump was booed by his own supporters when he once made the mistake of promoting vaccination at a rally.

Mr Trump may be out of office and off of Twitter, but the disinformation threat is by no means over. His allies in Congress have been using subpoena powers to investigate, intimidate and deter disinformation researchers at universities and think tanks in co-ordinated parallel to lawsuits seeking to restrict government communication with social media companies.

Those who embrace the spread of online falsehoods are naturally hostile to efforts to study and counter this malignancy. It’s no surprise that Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio, one of the leading promoters of the baseless conspiracy theory that the 2020 election was stolen from Mr Trump, is leading the attack on these researchers.

Meanwhile, undeterred new research shows that Russian and Chinese covert efforts sought to influence US public opinion reaction to criminal charges filed against Mr Trump. There is no doubt such forces, both inside and outside of the country, are preparing another onslaught against the 2024 elections, whether he is a candidate or not.

Meanwhile, undeterred new research shows that foreign powers sought to influence US public opinion reaction to criminal charges filed against Mr Trump. If this is true, then there is no reason to doubt that such forces, both inside and outside of the country, are preparing another onslaught against the 2024 elections, whether he is a candidate or not.

When courts try to prevent government public health and security agencies from helping social media companies voluntarily create safeguards in the public and national interest on manifestly spurious “free speech” grounds, it is another depressing reminder that the US body politic seems increasingly unable to overcome even thoroughly diagnosed malignant and metastasising cancers like online disinformation.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/07/05/affirmative-action-us-clarence-thomas/

Rather than being “colorblind,” the US Constitution has always been aggressively color-conscious, mostly to the extreme detriment of minority groups.

The US Supreme Court has issued another shocking but unsurprising ruling that arbitrarily dispenses with precedents and upends long-settled law at the expense of the historically disempowered. Last year, women were denied a 50-year-old individual right in America to early-term abortions. Now African American and Latino students will be deprived of “affirmative action” programmes considering race in university admissions.

The hypocrisy and absurdity were best illustrated by Justice Clarence Thomas’s passionate invocation of “our colourblind Constitution.” All six Republican-appointed Justices describe themselves as “originalists” or “textualists,” meaning that they seek to discover the “original” or the literal meaning of constitutional texts, respectively.

Originalism is unworkable not just because of radically transformed sociopolitical contexts, but because the framers of the Constitution frequently disagreed about the broader implications of their compromises. Each was willing to live with a passage based on their own interpretations. But the assumption there was a shared originary understanding of constitutional texts is demonstrably false.

Rigorous textual analysis is indispensable to jurisprudence, but “textualism” tends to reduce it to a crude game of definitions, etymologies, centuries of Anglo-American legal technicalities, and other questions having little to do with a decent outcome or rational interpretation of constitutional law under current circumstances. It often hints at the old BBC radio game My Word!, only without the charm and wit.

These methodologies are intended to transfix the meaning of constitutional law, insofar as possible, in bygone eras when black people were enslaved or excluded, women subordinated and disenfranchised, racism codified throughout society, and segregation, enforced by brutal lynching, the norm in many states.

The Constitution has had many anti-racist admirers, most notably Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, who saw in it potent correctives to such barbarism. But originalism and textualism are thinly-veiled efforts to slow, block, or now reverse much of the constitutional progress since 1954.

The ruling involved extraordinary colloquies between Mr Thomas and two liberal justices, Sonia Sotomayor and newcomer Ketanji Brown Jackson.

Ms Sotomayor outlined the undeniable endurance of structural and institutionalised racism and its profoundly negative effects for African Americans and Latinos. Mr Thomas countered that discrimination based on race can never be tolerated in any context. He posed as a champion of highly qualified Asian-American student applicants, arguing that Harvard’s admissions policies come primarily at their expense.

He accused Ms Jackson of viewing all aspects of life through an irreducible racial framework. She denied this and countered that his insistence that race is, or should be, irrelevant to law is so divorced from the social realities shaped by the Constitution it is effectively delusional.

Mr Thomas’s implacable hostility to affirmative-action is especially noteworthy because he is arguably the greatest-ever beneficiary of these programmes and ethos, and concomitant expectations of inclusivity. He attended Holy Cross College and Yale Law School based on affirmative action. He enjoyed a meteoric rise on the political right, and, at the tender age of just 33, headed his own federal agency, the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission. A mere 10 years later, following a contentious Senate committee hearing chaired by current US President Joe Biden, he was confirmed to the Supreme Court.

His spectacular career, especially given his upbringing amid poverty and segregation, is undeniably impressive, even inspiring. But it’s equally undeniable that, at every stage, and precisely because it coincided with the institutionalisation of affirmative action and the imperative of greater racial diversity in universities, corporations and government, his race played a significant role in his cascading triumphs. Unfortunately, he now appears mortified by this appropriate corrective, as if it were a badge of shame.

He was one of few Black conservatives available to run Ronald Reagan’s Equal Employment Opportunity Commission (EEOC), and then replace the first Black Supreme Court Justice, Thurgood Marshall.

As EEOC Chairman in 1983, Mr Thomas acknowledged: “God only knows where I would be today” without affirmative action policies, which he correctly called “critical to minorities and women in this society.” Now, he resembles a survivor in a lifeboat using an oar to beat back others attempting to clamber on.

Crucially, Mr Thomas’s “colourblind Constitution” dogma is especially unworkable from originalist or textualist perspectives. The original Constitution didn’t explicitly mention slavery, but plainly allowed it, defining slaves as “3/5 of a person” for purposes of congressional representation. In 1857, the Supreme Court ruled that no Black residents could be considered citizens and “had no rights which the white man was bound to respect.”

After constitutional amendments outlawing slavery and ensuring citizenship for following the Civil War, and a brief period of greater equality in the South known as “Reconstruction,” by 1896 the Supreme Court had promptly endorsed the growing practice of abusive racial segregation. Unequal separation by assumed race was consistently endorsed by the Court until the first legal cracks appeared in 1954. But the attempt at real redress only began in the mid-to late 1960s when policies such as affirmative action were developed.

It is impossible to argue that this project is complete, given the ongoing socio-economic gaps between “African Americans” and others, particularly those currently considered “White.” Instead, Mr Thomas and the court majority argue that any effort to redress centuries of rampant racial mistreatment with decades of limited succor is racist against everybody else.

The “colourblind Constitution” canard might just barely be plausible if US history began in 1965, although that would still involve a grossly unequal playing field. In fact, the Constitution has been aggressively colour-conscious throughout its history, mainly at the expense of minority groups. Consequently, Mr Thomas and his ilk are forced to rely on ahistorical myths to rationalise halting and reversing efforts to correct these monumental and profoundly lasting government-imposed wrongs. Many suggest income-based preferences instead, but that would probably intensify a troubling trend towards elite student bodies split mainly between the very rich and the very poor.

Meanwhile back at Harvard, over 40 per cent of “White” students were admitted because of family “legacies,” parental donations, ties to staff, or participation in, often boutique, sports teams rather than academic merit. Yet none will likely feel the neurotic sting of assumed inferiority that haunted Mr Thomas at Yale and until today. White preferences are normalised and normative in US society.

As the country celebrated its 247th birthday on Tuesday, this radical Supreme Court, wrapping itself in the disingenuous twaddle like “our colourblind Constitution” that informs this privilege and inequality, appears determined to preserve and protect as much of it as possible.

Happy birthday, America.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/06/19/america-looks-set-for-a-biden-trump-rematch-and-voters-are-rightly-dreading-it/

The president and his main challenger have yet to convince most voters they can succeed, and yet they are the only real choices.

As incumbent US president Joe Biden formally kicked off his re-election campaign at a rally in front of 2,000 union members in Philadelphia, last week the 2024 election campaign came more sharply into view – and most Americans appear decidedly underwhelmed. A rematch of the last election, pitting Mr Biden against his predecessor, Donald Trump, seems to be shaping up, though most Republicans and Democrats say they would prefer a different choice.

Mr Biden is effectively running unopposed. His only noteworthy challenger is Robert F Kennedy, Jr, noted for anti-scientific opposition to most vaccines. Were Mr Kennedy running as a Republican, he might be polling ahead of several well-established candidates, although surely not Mr Trump. However, as a Democrat, he really doesn’t stand a chance.

Many Democrats are frustrated by Mr Biden’s slow start. A major fundraising quarter went by with virtually no activity from his nascent campaign. Instead, Mr Biden was happy to leave matters to the Democratic National Committee. From his perspective, especially since he’s effectively unopposed, it makes sense. But many Democrats would have preferred a more vigorous and earlier re-election effort, if nothing else for party morale.

Moreover, there are growing doubts that Mr Biden still has the energy and physical wherewithal for a long and gruelling campaign against the likes of Mr Trump, who adores campaigning but profoundly dislikes governing, or Florida Governor Ron DeSantis who has been focusing heavily on his youthful 44 years and three young children, all under age 6. That’s now mainly aimed at Mr Trump, 77, but could be even more powerful against the 80-year-old Mr Biden should Mr DeSantis upend the current trajectory and secure the Republican nomination.

Mr Biden is clearly showing his age. He still speaks lucidly on policy matters, and journalists who have had extended lunch and other meetings with him privately report he’s alert, acute and on point. However, he has shown signs of confusion at times and, to take just one particularly odd recent example, he ended an otherwise unremarkable speech about the importance of greater gun control measures with the cryptic comment “God save the Queen, man”.

The video of the moment suggests he knew perfectly well what he was saying and it was some kind of eccentric joke. Unfortunately, his aides were unable to explain just what it might have been about, and later suggested he was somehow referring to an audience member. But they were unable to successfully assuage doubts that, perhaps, Mr Biden had a spectacular and public “senior moment”.

But even if it’s true, as it would appear, that he remains mentally formidable, there are significant reasons to question whether he has the stamina for months of exhausting campaigning. In 2020, campaigning was remarkably light because of the coronavirus pandemic, but that will not be the case for the next 17 months before Americans return to the polls. And there is virtually no enthusiasm for his running mate, Vice President Kamala Harris, suddenly emerging as the Democratic presidential nominee.

There are numerous potentially impressive Democratic candidates who could credibly replace Mr Biden – mainly, governors including Gretchen Whitmer of Michigan, Gavin Newsom of California, JB Pritzker of Illinois, Roy Cooper of North Carolina and Jared Polis of Colorado, none of whom are elderly. But if Mr Biden cruises to an unopposed nomination only to find himself physically overwhelmed by the demands of an exhausting campaign, Ms Harris could end up inheriting the nomination by default.

Yet Mr Biden has been a figure of endless surprises since he roared back to the head of the pack after the South Carolina Democratic primary in February 2020. As President, he has secured a remarkable string of legislative achievements with very little leverage in Congress. And his administration’s handling of the war in Ukraine is surely the best US foreign policy performance since the liberation of Kuwait in 1990-91. So, the millions of Democratic doubters may find themselves, yet again, pleasantly surprised by Uncle Joe.

The polls consistently suggest that Mr Trump, if not going from strength to strength in the Republican primaries, is at least maintaining a very healthy lead over Mr DeSantis and all other challengers. Yet he, too, is showing his 77 years, and more importantly, is facing severe legal and reputational peril that, although it may not threaten his ability to secure the Republican nomination, could very well render him effectively non-competitive in a general election.

The indictment brought against him in the federal Espionage Act case filed two weeks ago by special prosecutor Jack Smith cannot seriously be dismissed as a partisan vendetta or an exaggerated triviality. The indictment tells the story of a former president who, with apparent disregard for national security and the well-being of US troops around the world, treated the most sensitive military and intelligence documents as, at best, trophies or keepsakes, leaving them completely unsecured in open public places at his Florida hotel and displaying them to random individuals with no security clearances.

There is every reason to fear that the trial will drag on well past the general election, and possibly for many years. However, even some of Mr Trump’s diehard supporters will be given pause if they ever actually read the damning charging papers, complete with photographs and other documentary evidence.

These days, presidential elections are effectively decided by a few hundred thousand Americans in five or six swing states. These voters, including many suburban women, turned decisively against Mr Trump in 2020, delivering the White House to Mr Biden. They appear to have moved even further from Mr Trump, his candidates and his brand of politics in the 2022 midterms. And since then, Mr Trump, with his threats of “retribution” against his adversaries – not to mention the civil judgment that he sexually assaulted a well-known writer in the 1990s – has, if anything, alienated them further still.

It may still be that the general public will get their way, and that neither Mr Trump nor Mr Biden will be their party’s nominee. However, it’s far more likely that most Americans will again face a distasteful binary choice between A and B. If so, Mr. Biden is very likely to secure a second term – or as much of it as he can complete.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/06/12/donald-trump-indictment-classified-documents/

The former US President is going to find it extremely difficult to explain his obstructionist actions.

Last Thursday, former US president Donald Trump was indicted, for a second time, on serious criminal charges. Unlike the hush money and tax evasion case brought by the elected Democratic district attorney in Manhattan, the new charges stem from the very federal government that Mr Trump used to lead. Thirty seven counts regarding core national security concerns have been brought by an independent, non-partisan, special prosecutor, Jack Smith.

Before they had even seen the indictment, Republican leaders rushed to Mr Trump’s defence, accusing US President Joe Biden of being personally responsible, even though both he and attorney general Merrick Garland, who appointed Mr Smith, ensured that there was no political input from the administration. A personal aide, Walt Nauta, who followed Mr Trump from the White House into private life, is accused of physically moving and concealing from the authorities boxes of allegedly purloined classified documents.

The substance of the indictment is devastating, including an apparent”smoking gun”: audio of Mr Trump apparently waving around highly sensitive military planning documents while declaring them classified and noting that while he was president he could have declassified them, but, out of office, he no longer could.

That not only adds almost irrefutable proof that Mr Trump deliberately absconded with classified material, and that his claims to have created a system whereby any document he removed from White House offices were automatically declassified are nonsense. All of his former senior officials have scoffed at the idea, which flouts the official declassification process to which even presidents must adhere.

Even if the documents were declassified, the Presidential Records Act mandates that all presidential documents be transferred to the National Archives, and the Espionage Act prohibits any unauthorised removal of government documents and, especially, their dissemination. The indictment outlines at least two cases of dissemination, wherein highly sensitive classified documents were shown to individuals with no security clearances whatsoever.

Mr Trump is going to find it extremely difficult to explain away his obstructionist actions and statements, such as asking his aides: “Wouldn’t it be better if we just told them we don’t have anything here? … Look, isn’t it better if there are no documents?” exactly as his attorneys eventually falsely attested; or when he praised an attorney who had allegedly destroyed official documents; or when he instructed Mr Nauta to move 64 boxes of documents just before authorities were coming to search for classified material.

The indictment details with photographs how these boxes including some of the most highly sensitive US government information involving military plans against key adversaries, one country’s support for terrorist activities, and the nuclear capabilities of other states were piled high on an open stage at his Florida hotel. Many were then moved to a nearby bathroom, and after that disseminated among offices and storage places, none of which had adequate security – if any at all – and which were accessible to virtually anyone coming and going and what amounted to an open public space.

Any hostile intelligence services that failed to take advantage of this extraordinary opportunity must be kicking themselves. Unlike the dull and technical Manhattan charges, any American juror will readily understand these laws and why it is unacceptable, from a national security perspective, to have them broken, especially in this cavalier manner.

Mr Trump’s attorneys will no doubt argue that because other senior former officials like Mr Biden, Mike Pence, and Hillary Clinton were found to be in possession of sensitive materials after they left office, he is being unfairly singled out. However, none of them attempted to conceal the material from the authorities or obstruct justice.

The case appears so strong that Mr Trump’s best option may be to try to obstruct and delay proceedings so endlessly that they continue beyond his lifetime. In that, he may have an invaluable ally: Judge Aileen Cannon, who will be presiding. She was one of Mr Trump’s last appointments, and at a hearing last September granted his outlandish requests, including restricting government access to its own classified documents.

Her ruling was harshly struck down by a highly conservative appellate court, and she is now widely regarded as one of the least competent and most pro-Trump judges in the country. That this evidently highly partisan judge would be appointed, apparently randomly, twice in a row on Mr Trump’s cases seems extraordinarily unlikely. Yet it has happened.

In a criminal trial, especially under close scrutiny, her rulings can probably only go so far in protecting him from a jury verdict. However, she could assist him by approving endless delays and otherwise making the government’s task as difficult as possible. But she may not end up presiding over the full trial after all, especially if Mr Smith makes a major effort to somehow secure any other judge in the Southern District of Florida.

Mr Trump’s reaction was predictably outrageous. He denounced the entire law enforcement system, called Mr Smith “a psycho,” and declared himself “an innocent man” victimised by yet another “witch hunt”. He also hinted at violence by his supporters, and authorities are preparing for that. But his mayhem-prone supporters may be incarcerated or deterred by the long prison sentences given to ringleaders of the January 6 insurrection.

A bigger complication than threats of mayhem is how unprecedented this trial will be. Mr Trump is not only the former president, he’s also the current front runner for the Republican presidential nomination.

Ms Cannon, in her widely derided September ruling, argued that former presidents and current candidates deserve special consideration and safeguards. This was firmly and specifically rejected by the appellate court, but there’s every danger that, if she is the trial judge, she will continue to kowtow to the former president.

If she continues to carve out special protections for Mr Trump, Mr Smith may find his mountain of damning evidence repeatedly sidelined, or the proceedings endlessly delayed. The first task of the special prosecutor, then, is to do everything possible to secure a different, more competent, and less shamelessly biased judge for the full trial.

But for the country, the result of the 2024 election is infinitely more important than the outcome of this trial. Mr Trump has been frank about his authoritarian intentions. Whether he ever goes to prison or not, politically, the verdict is already in: he cannot be allowed anywhere near the White House ever again.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/05/29/biden-debt-ceiling-deal/

The US President has shown once again his superpower is his normality, transparency and predictability.

A few days ago, in these pages, I predicted that the ongoing debt ceiling crisis would reveal US president Joe Biden to be finally out of his depths or have unexpected depths of sophistication. Or, I added, a jerryrigged agreement could simply postpone a day of reckoning.

The first scenario has been avoided as Mr Biden has neatly escaped a dangerous trap. The emerging solution appears to be a combination of scenarios two and three: a familiar deal that vindicates several of the President’s defining strategies.

On Saturday night, Mr Biden and Kevin McCarthy, the Republican Speaker of the House of Representatives, announced an agreement to extend the debt ceiling for two years in exchange for strikingly narrow spending cuts and caps.

Many significant details are not yet known, but the broad outlines are clear. The White House and the House of Representatives have done a fairly standard deal, at least when Democrats hold the presidency. Republican presidents ask for, and receive, unconditional debt ceiling expansions, which allow the Treasury Department to borrow money to pay for debts already incurred by Congress.

However, a pattern has emerged whereby Republicans do not extend this courtesy to Democratic presidents. Republicans suddenly remember that they are supposed to be alarmed at national budget deficits and debts, no matter whether they are becoming a greater or lesser percentage of GDP.

Many Democrats were petrified that Mr Biden, negotiating almost entirely in secret and apparently on Republican terms, was poised to cheerfully give up far too much to avoid a massive crisis. Yet this does not appear to have happened.

The actual cuts in spending are extremely limited, and even the caps to spending increases seem to hew reasonably well to major White House goals developed under the last Congress. Republicans gained a symbolic sop – at least in terms of national expenditure, although undoubtedly with alarming significance for many individuals and families – with some potential restrictions on nutritional and other support for poor people and, more importantly, new work requirements on “able-bodied” individuals without dependents.

Savings will be decidedly modest. For Republicans, it’s a matter of principle. And while few Democrats are going to be happy about these changes, even fewer will be kept up at night. It was a big win for one side, in their own eyes, and not much of a loss for most people on the other side.

The numbers are not going to be huge. For Republicans, it’s a matter of principle. And while few Democrats are going to be happy about these changes, even fewer are going to be kept up at night. It was a big win for one side, in their own eyes, and not that much of a loss for most people on the other side.

On the other hand, Mr Biden appears to have protected much of the most important spending he was able to secure in the first two years after his election. Total spending cutbacks over 10 years under these terms may be limited to a mere $650 billion.

Mr Biden had no white rabbit to pull out of his hat, no brilliant and unanticipated gimmick, or unexpected genius solution. As is so often the case with the wily old fox, the President’s superpower is his normalcy, transparency and predictability. While he disingenuously insisted he would never negotiate over budget issues with the debt ceiling being effectively held hostage – though of course that’s exactly what he did – from the onset he stressed the two biggest themes of his presidency: bipartisan compromise and political patience.

This approach and rhetoric has consistently infuriated many progressive Democrats. But it has just as consistently worked. It is exactly what secured the huge pandemic bailout which began his term. And the hard infrastructure act. And the high-tech investment act. And the social spending and climate change bill. And more besides. Very little of that appears meaningfully threatened, indeed it would be more accurate to say it largely has been protected, by the terms of this agreement.

In effect, Mr Biden has again delivered what he said he would, in exactly the way he said he would do it, despite numerous doubts, including my own, particularly as the witching hour approached. The Treasury Department, by the way, has cited next Wednesday as the first day a potential default might begin. Presumably it’s ready to come up with a few last-ditch workarounds to buy extra time to test the legislative viability of the agreement.

And here’s where Mr Biden truly got the better of Mr McCarthy.

Both leaders now must sell a compromise agreement that no one is going to be happy with to members of Congress on both sides, including the Democratic progressive-left and Republican hard-right. While their tasks may be roughly similar, the obstacles and consequences for failure each will face are radically different.

The murmurs of unease among progressives is extremely muted compared to categorical opposition already emanating from right-wing conservatives. It may not be simple or comfortable for the President to get his House ducklings in a row, but it just may not be possible for the House Speaker.

And now the political calculation has completely flipped. Before this agreement, there was every reason to suspect the sitting president would face most of the blame for any financial calamity. But if the Republican House Speaker makes a solemn agreement with the President to save the economy, and that is sabotaged by his own extremist faction, they, and he, will be left holding the bag essentially alone.

Unless Democrats make the unimaginable blunder of opposing the agreement in sufficient numbers to create a real obstacle to passage, which seems highly unlikely, this has now become an internal Republican problem and, probably, crisis. There will be members of the extreme right who will tell Mr McCarthy they didn’t support him for Speaker so that he could release the only real “bargaining chip” hostage they have for such limited restrictions. It will be very surprising not to start hearing hyperbolic fulminating about betrayal, treason and a war against the country’s fiscal sanity and financial future.

In the old Roadrunner cartoons, the hapless predator Wile E Coyote – a self-declared “super-genius” – produces one apparently ingenious trap after another, only, in horror, to find himself holding the bomb just as it is about to explode. In the coming days, the House Speaker may discover he, too, is unexpectedly in possession of a round, black, hissing object that his vanished opponent has surreptitiously managed to hand back to him.

https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2023-05-27/great-lebanon-bank-heist-needs-solving-for-imf-world-bank-bailout?srnd=opinion&leadSource=uverify%20wall&sref=tp95wk9l

A Ponzi scheme at the Banque du Liban brought the economy to its knees, yet the alleged culprit remains at large.

The pilfering of Lebanon’s wealth is, arguably, the bank heist of the 21st century. The long-serving governor of the Banque du Liban, Riad Salameh, has become the focus of international pressure for accountability, leading to frustration over his, and Lebanese institutions’ generally, refusal to cooperate with Western investigations.

Untold billions of depositors’ money, stored in a number of banks in many currencies and supposedly delivering implausibly generous interest rates, turned up missing during a financial crisis that took hold in 2019.  The BDL is Lebanon’s central bank, controls the lire, and regulates the commercial banks that were once a bedrock of the economy.

The Lebanese lire has since lost more than 90% of its value, and most depositors are still unable to access their savings. They are allowed small monthly withdrawals, almost always in the form of unreliable lire, no matter the designated currency denomination of their deposits. Ordinary people have been repeatedly driven to staging half-baked armed robberies to finance medical emergencies and other crises.

No one knows how much cash was spirited out of the country over decades of systematic plunder, while an illusion of solvency was maintained by a Ponzi structure using newer deposits to back older ones. But the national wealth was gutted. The middle classes who can are leaving en masse. Those who can’t flee have been reduced to poverty, and the working classes to savage penury.

Like all other massive crimes committed in Lebanon in recent decades — including the assassination of former Prime Minister Rafik Hariri in 2005 and the devastating 2020 Beirut port explosion that reduced much of the capital to smoldering ruins — there’s been no real effort to investigate or hold anyone accountable. But the de facto cover-up of this financial malfeasance raises particular problems because of the ripple effect into the economy as a whole.

Lebanon requires a bailout from the international community, especially banks and investors taking their cue from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, which would have to be at the helm of a rescue. But, while there is every reason for the developed world to want to help save Lebanon, nobody wants to throw good money after bad. Reforms will be required, and before that, an accounting of exactly how much was stolen and by whom.

That places Salameh in the crosshairs. At least six European countries are actively investigating the heist. France, which has deep historical and colonial ties to Lebanon, issued an arrest warrant for him this month when he failed to attend a judicial hearing. So has Germany, which formally asked Interpol to apprehend him. Yet Lebanon does not extradite its citizens, and earlier this month a judge released Salameh from custody pending further investigation.

Salameh, who remains in his top post at the bank, isn’t just accused of participating in the heist to the tune of $300 million for himself. He allegedly oversaw the regulatory and institutional mechanisms that allowed wealthy Lebanese institutions and individuals to surreptitiously spirit billions out of the country. Even the terrorist group Hezbollah, which is allergic to any hint of economic — not to mention institutional or political — reform has said he should resign. He says he intends to step down when his term ends in July.

Salameh is supposedly being investigated by Lebanese authorities, who say they have confiscated his passport and forbidden him from traveling. But that conveniently protects him from real scrutiny in other countries, something he certainly won’t get at home. Growing pressure on the Lebanese state to do a more convincing job of at least pretending to investigate the decades of unimaginable theft is dovetailing with yet another crisis over the selection of a new president.

Gebran Bassil, son-in-law of the outgoing president, Michel Aoun, and target of significant US corruption sanctions, passionately wants to succeed his father-in-law. France has reportedly proposed a compromise: If Bassil will support the candidacy of his top rival, Sleiman Frangieh, he would be permitted to select the new governor of the Banque du Liban succeeding Salameh. But it doesn’t seem as if Bassil is willing to step aside.

In any case, an agreement along these lines would represent a meeting of the minds among Lebanese political elites to avoid any genuine investigation into this mind-boggling crime. They wouldn’t want Salameh to spill the beans.

The Catch-22 for Lebanese power centers is that to admit that the Banque du Liban house of cards collapsed along with the economy would be a confession of the profound corruption in which they are all implicated. But without some accountability, there won’t be an international bailout, and they can continue to lord it over an increasingly hollow, decimated society.

The Catch-22 for the West and the international community is that Lebanon remains strategically and politically well worth saving. Yet there is no real reason to think the Lebanese political class is capable of contemplating, let alone undertaking, the necessary investigations and reforms, beginning with an audit of the bank.

Lebanon will have to be saved, not exactly from itself, but from a united front among its politically dominant factions. Right now, it’s hard to imagine where that even starts.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/05/16/both-biden-and-trump-face-problems-in-the-run-up-to-the-2024-elections/

The incumbent is in more trouble than Democrats anticipated but Trump self-sabotages like no one else.

There’s a long way to go before the 2024 US presidential election, but as things stand a 2020 rematch – incumbent President Joe Biden versus former president Donald Trump – looks likely, though few Americans say they want either man to be their party’s nominee. Democrats, overall, are somewhat more confident about their chances, based on the broader political landscape, the outcome of the 2022 midterms and a widespread belief, including among many Republicans, that Mr Trump may be practically unelectable.

However, both candidates face mounting and significant obstacles to regaining the White House. As with most sitting presidents, Mr Biden is virtually assured of his party’s nomination, and faces no plausible opposition. Mr Trump has a much broader range of potential rivals, but all of them are either slow off the mark and losing momentum (notably Florida Governor Ron DeSantis), have failed to make a coherent case for their candidacy (such as former South Carolina governor Nikki Haley) or just don’t seem to be viable candidates in today’s Republican Party (such as former Arkansas governor Asa Hutchinson and former New Jersey governor Chris Christie).

Yet Mr Trump’s own candidacy tends to provoke doom, gloom and even despair among mainstream Republican operatives. That’s nothing new. Yet Mr Biden appears to be in considerably more trouble than many of his supporters would have imagined at the end of last year. He faces three obvious and significant obstacles in the short, medium and long terms.

The US president does not appear to have a viable strategy to resolve the rapidly approaching debt ceiling crisis. It’s looking increasingly likely that his failure to do anything to forestall this potential catastrophe after the midterm results were known but before the new Congress came into session, when he held many more cards, was his biggest blunder thus far. If Mr Biden can pull a dramatic rabbit out of a hat in the coming weeks, and not only resolving the debt ceiling in this instance but even potentially taking the issue off the table for the long term, he will have produced one of the most stunning victories in modern presidential history and made a tremendous contribution to fiscal and political stability in the US.

But he doesn’t seem to have any plan whatsoever. Mr Biden is refusing to negotiate with de facto hostage takers in the Republican-controlled House of Representatives, who are threatening to force a default on existing US debts – all incurred by Congress in the past – if the White House won’t commit to gigantic and unspecified budget cuts. It is a dangerous and contemptible gambit.

However, if enough Republicans are willing to compromise and give Mr Biden what Democrats several times gave Mr Trump and previous Republican presidents before that, there’s no sign of it. Anyone who thinks the current batch of House right-wingers isn’t capable of deliberately demolishing the national and, to some extent, global economies simply to damage a Democratic president hasn’t been paying attention to their unprecedented radicalism and recklessness.

Mr Biden obviously thinks that when, as Barack Obama’s vice president, he compromised with former House speaker John Boehner, only to see the whole agreement fall apart under pressure from the far-right, he made a huge mistake that he intends not to repeat.

But the White House plan cannot be to simply, no matter however accurately, blame Republicans for a devastating outcome. He is the sitting president, and the chances that he will have to shoulder most of the blame for a probable cascade of ensuing disasters are quite strong – it’s a lot easier for the public to blame one person everyone has heard of rather than a couple of hundred, or even 20, that they have not. This is almost certainly what Republicans contemplating economic armageddon are counting on.

Time is running desperately short. The jig is likely to be up in as little as two weeks and, even if it can be postponed slightly, it will soon after have to be somehow resolved.

In the medium term, Mr Biden finds himself squeezed by a border crisis not of his own making. The US immigration system is badly broken, and a compromise between the parties on even the simplest aspects has proven maddeningly elusive.

A perfect storm of causal factors is driving increased waves of migration from devastated countries such as Honduras, El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Cuba, Venezuela and Ecuador. They are gathering on the Mexican border and, while the Biden administration is trying to keep them there, immigration remains one of the most potent Republican weapons, appealing even to core Democratic constituencies such as labour, African-American and even Latino groups.

Democrats tend to view immigration as a matter of fairness to migrants and Republicans as a cultural and racial invasion. Both get it wildly wrong: the country badly needs more workers and a rational migration system. But the anti-immigration case is politically much more potent.

Knowing this, Mr Trump has been vowing to restore the borderline-criminal policy of systematically separating children from their parents to deter migration. Unfortunately, there is a real mass political market for cruelty on this issue.

In the long run, Mr Biden is haunted by his age. If he runs against Mr Trump, it will be less of a problem because both men are showing their considerable years. But right-wing media has long ago made the issue a centrepiece and won’t let it go.

Mr Trump’s campaign is already a proverbial dumpster fire. His recent “town hall” on CNNwas an unmitigated catastrophe for his chances. Mr Biden and his policies barely came up. Instead Mr Trump, spouting falsehoods in virtually every sentence, fixated on imaginary fraud in the 2020 election, the glories of the January 6 insurrection, and phony grievances involving the recent civil ruling against him in a sexual assault case and a set of probable looming criminal trials.

Of course it appealed to his diehard supporters. But if Mr Trump wanted to present a message ideally calibrated to convince crucial swing voters in evenly divided “purple” states, such as suburban women, to not even consider voting for him next year, he could hardly have done better.

Much of the country is looking at this emerging campaign with emotions ranging from disquiet to disgust. Most Republicans want to move on from Mr Trump and most Democrats would prefer another nominee than Mr Biden. But it appears the country is going to be facing this unpalatable choice, like it or not.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/opinion/comment/2023/05/10/a-jury-of-trumps-peers-have-judged-him-now-more-voters-will-too/

Voters, espeicllay women, will find it hard to ignore the $5 million verdict against the former president in his case against writer E Jean Carroll.

The verdict in a Manhattan courtroom on Tuesday, in which a jury found that former US president Donald Trump had sexually abused and defamed writer E Jean Carroll at a New York City department store in 1996, cut savagely through the veil of nonsense and gaslighting that has come to dominate US political discourse, especially on the right.

While Mr Trump and his lawyers insist that this is a “hoax” and part of “the greatest witchhunt” in the country’s history, in fact a jury of his peers has formally held Mr Trump to account for his reprehensible actions. He will have to pay Ms Carroll $5 million even though the jury also held that she had not clearly established that he raped her.

Ms Carroll proved an excellent witness. Though taunted and provoked continuously by Mr Trump’s attorneys, who harped on ancient accusations thrown against virtually every rape victim since the dawn of time – for example that she did not scream or immediately file charges with the police – she remained adamant that the attack took place. Given the amount of time that has passed, her account remained impressively consistent.

Two of her friends testified that Ms Carroll called each of them immediately after the alleged attack and told them about the harrowing experience in detail, which strongly corroborates the accusations. One of them recalled imploring Ms Carroll not to go to the police, because Mr Trump would use his financial clout in courts and elsewhere to make her life miserable. It just wasn’t worth it, she says she counselled. Ms Carroll first went public with the story in a 2019 book.

Mr Trump’s attorneys were in the unenviable position of having to argue that these three women colluded in fabricating a vicious tall tale and hugely perjured themselves to try to inflict political damage on a leader they freely admit despising. But they were unable to provide any rational explanation for why these women would do such a thing beyond sharing a highly negative view of the former president.

Moreover, Ms Carroll was backed up by two additional witnesses who said that Mr Trump had assaulted them in similar fashion. A former stockbroker testified that he groped and kissed her in the first-class cabin of a commercial airliner in the 1970s before she fled back to the safety of coach. And a former journalist for People Magazine told the jury that Mr Trump had coaxed her into a private room at his Florida hotel, pushed her against a wall and began kissing her as she tried to get away.

All of that strongly contradicted claims by Mr Trump’s lead attorney, Joe Tacopina, that “everything in this case” is either “Amazing. Odd. Inconceivable. Unbelievable.” It took the jury less than three hours to conclude precisely the opposite.

But Mr Trump proved the strongest witness, by far, against himself. Though he avoided the trial and declined to testify, his own words provided overwhelming circumstantial and characterological indictments against him. His attorneys will never allow the former president to ever again take the witness stand if they can possibly prevent it. He may or may not be the worst US president ever (a lively debate about this continues), but he’s certainly a nightmarish legal client and witness.

The jury got to hear Mr Trump’s bizarre primary argument dismissing these accusations, and the over two dozen others like it, which is that Ms Carroll is, he insists, “not my type”. It was bad enough when these claims seemed to suggest that a sexual assault and rape might be more understandable if she somehow were “his type”. But, disastrously, in a roughly contemporaneous photograph he misidentified Ms Carroll as his then-wife, Marla Maples. “That’s my wife,” he said casually, as his attorneys rushed to contradict him. No juror will have missed the irreconcilable chasm between “she’s not my type” and “that’s my wife”.

The court was also treated to Mr Trump’s account of his own predatory sexual habits as he explained in the infamous Access Hollywood videotape. In an outtake from the series, he notoriously told the interviewer that he made a habit of kissing attractive women without waiting or seeking their consent and grabbing them by their genitals. “When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything,” he insisted.

When the video was leaked before the 2016 presidential election, Mr Trump dismissed the conversation as “locker room banter”. But the stunning verdict suggests it may have been unnervingly accurate.

Worse yet, in a deposition also played for the jury, Ms Carroll’s attorneys asked Mr Trump about those remarks. He confirmed he considered himself “a star,” and said “If you look over the last million years, I guess that’s been largely true. Not always, but largely true. Unfortunately or fortunately.” Not only is this highly debatable, that this supposed historical pattern could be construed as “fortunate” appears catastrophically revealing of deep-seated predatory and misogynistic attitudes.

After all that, an effective defense required something more substantial than dismissing Ms Carroll’s allegations as simply inconceivable or unbelievable. The standard in a US civil trial is demonstrating a claim by the preponderance of the evidence, not without a shadow of a doubt. Her lawyers obviously cleared the first hurdle, except on the rape accusation, and most likely even met the second.

Putting aside other potential or looming criminal trials in Manhattan, Georgia and at the federal level, will this judgment harm Mr Trump’s chances for 2024? Thus far, his legal woes appear to have done nothing but strengthen his grip on the Republican voter base, and while he still could be defeated for the nomination, he seems in a very strong position right now.

But in a general election, and despite President Joe Biden’s dismal polling results, this verdict will almost certainly weaken his already bleak prospects. After decades of living in a grey zone of legal ambiguity created by his largely inherited vast wealth, and the protections unduly afforded to white-collar defendants by the US system, reality is finally catching up with the poster boy of privileged impunity.

Voters, particularly women, who pulled the lever for Mr Trump in 2016 while dismissing the Access Hollywood video as irrelevant macho bluster, will surely have a much harder time repeating the gesture next year.