Arresting Trump still leaves 74M angry voters | Will Bunch Newsletter

April Fool’s Day came early this year, thanks to the foolish notion that the 2023 Phillies and their seemingly loaded offense would pick right up where the team left off during 2022′s epic run to the World Series. Instead, the Phils are off to their worst start — surrendering 37 runs in just four games — since the Grover Cleveland administration. It’s a good lesson for Trump Indictment Day about getting your hopes up.

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📮 Last week I asked readers whether Democrats would do better in 2024 to face Donald Trump or Ron DeSantis. “I believe the Democrats would stand a better chance of keeping the White House if Republicans nominate Donald Trump,” wrote Barry Rosen, a transplanted Philadelphian living in Oak Grove, Missouri. “While DeSantis’s political positions on most issues are no less vile than Trump’s — and he actually appears to have opinions that aren’t strictly based on how much money it will put in his pocket, unlike Trump, my belief is that Trump will inspire the strongest turnout among [Democrats].”

This week’s question: Which Trump investigation — Stormy Daniels, Georgia election interference, classified documents or Jan. 6 — poses the greatest legal risk for POTUS 45? For a chance to be featured in my newsletter, email me your answer.

On this historic day of Donald Trump’s criminal arraignment in New York City — the first-ever for an American ex-president — his support from his fellow Republicans is a mile wide but only about a foot deep. Literally on that second count.

On Monday, a day for the TV networks to go all O.J.-white-Bronco — were you seriously expecting anything less? — with endless coverage of “Trump Force One” on the West Palm Beach tarmac and an SUV motorcade that actually stopped for red lights, helicopter shots revealed Trump fans lining the Florida leg of his journey in a thin row, just one person deep.

Don’t tell this to Trump or his ratings-driven ego, but the lifeless corpse of Warren G. Harding, another scandal-ridden and girl-crazy president, drew much bigger throngs as it wended its way across America in 1923. Still, the dozens who did flock to Mar-a-Lago upon news of POTUS 45′s groundbreaking indictment were at least buying the merch — “I haven’t even finished setting up, and I’ve already made $300!” the owner of a pop-up called the MAGA Mall told the Washington Post — and, more importantly, toeing the party line.

“I’m frankly scared,” Kevin Hulbert, a tourist from Maryland who came to the Trump mansion to show his support, told a reporter from a local CBS affiliate. Hulbert said he was “here in support of President Trump’s right not to be prosecuted illegitimately for a political purpose.”

But while the MAGA diehards half-baked in bright Florida sunshine were few on this epic week for politics, Trump’s support within the GOP for gaining the 2024 nomination for a second term seems to have grown in tandem with his legal woes, including three other serious criminal investigations drafting right behind the Stormy Daniels matter in Manhattan.

Proving the maxim there is no such thing as bad publicity, the polls conducted since news broke Thursday that the Manhattan grand jury has indicted Trump have shown that the only American president to have been impeached twice has opened up his widest lead yet over his only serious rival so far, Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis. A Yahoo News/YouGov survey released Monday showed Trump with a 26-point Republican primary lead over DeSantis, compared to only eight points a couple of weeks ago. And DeSantis has showed no sign of fighting back. A lot could happen in the next 15 months, but as Yogi Berra famously said, it gets late early out there.

For the last five days, the media speculation about the personal fate of Trump in his new role as criminal defendant, and what that tells us about the fate of the United States, has been utterly breathless. But I’m here to argue that the future of the American Experiment hangs less on Trump and more on the Kevin Hulberts of our nation.

Look at it this way: There seems to be a misconception, albeit rarely spoken, that things were just hunky dory in the U.S. of A. until the mid-2010s, when some sort of pied piper came down a golden escalator on 5th Avenue to get the confused populace too drunk on Trump Vodka to realize the utter buffoonery they were falling for. But this is not what happened. The real story of America in the 21st Century is not Donald Trump, but the 74 million who voted for him — not despite his crudity and his cruelty and his lack of respect for the law, but because of it.

It’s easier to see with hindsight how the base of the Republican Party was hankering for a culture warrior years before the start of the 2016 campaign — how the establishment cred of foreign-policy-driven John McCain and investment banker Mitt Romney left them ice cold, but they went gaga in 2008 for Sarah Palin, a kind of John-the-Baptist for the Trump movement who talked about “real America” and Barack Obama “palling around with terrorists.” Palin’s incendiary rhetoric was still echoing as Trump discovered birtherism.

Today, nearly eight years since the Trump Tower escalator ride, his supporters define Trump not by who he really is, or what people say about him, but by who hates him. The liberals and the eggheads and the effete corps of impudent snobs who teach diversity in their kid’s class and ordered them to wear masks in the supermarket are now the prosecutors and journalists who want Trump, their great defender, behind bars. Hence the Catch-22 where every new subpoena only elevates Trump in the polls.

That’s why it’s ridiculous to think America’s problems will go away even if Trump is ultimately tried and convicted in four separate courtrooms, and somehow gets prison time. Many of the 74 million who voted for Trump in 2020 will become angrier and more resentful than the day they pulled that lever. Their journey that accelerated with Palin and the Tea Party and lifted off during Trump will be looking for new and more extreme orbits.

There’s no easy path forward. It would absolutely ease tensions in parts of “Trump Country,” such as the Rust Belt, to focus on developing more good-paying jobs for the working class and expanding parts of the safety net, which is the Biden administration approach. But social science says the stronger motivator for Trump voters has been fear of cultural and demographic change, including gains for Black and brown people, women, and the LGBTQ community.

How do you negotiate on morality?

You can’t. But there are ways to make society more tolerant and simply better — a lot of them around education. I’ve argued in this space that our broken ways of higher education are driving division, and that free (or nearly free) public universities, more opportunities like trade schools and apprenticeships for those not attending college, and less stigma toward those without diplomas could reduce that chasm. I’ve also suggested a universal gap year of civilian national service for 18-year-olds would bring our young people out of their silos, toward a sense of common purpose.

Studies have shown the relationship between education and tolerance. That’s why the current politics over what happens in the classroom are so important. If the minority of book banners win today, American society will suffer in the future.

What does this have to do with the thing we’re all so focused on at this hour: the indictment of Donald Trump? Everything, I’d argue. A criminal conviction of a former president (who, by all evidence, has committed multiple crimes) is a great leap forward for American justice, but you don’t solve the problem of authoritarianism solely by getting rid of the authoritarian. We need to cure the pathologies that made 74 million people vote authoritarian in the first place.

Question: Do the Sixers have any chance of making the Eastern Conference Finals? — Via @ofujim on Twitter

Answer: This should be a great moment to take some shelter from the storm — the Trump overkill and rising Republican fascism — in the refuge that is sports. Unfortunately, my two favorite teams — the Union and the Phillies — are following up 2022′s near misses with dreadful starts. So what of Joel Embiid, James Harden, Tyrese Maxey, and the talent-laden 76ers? Sadly, they’ve shown little evidence they can consistently beat the two most cohesive squads in the NBA’s East, the Milwaukee Bucks and the Boston Celtics. After a bad loss, overlong head coach Doc Rivers will admit his team didn’t look prepared — but isn’t that HIS JOB to prepare them? Insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, so expect the Rivers-coached Sixers to say goodbye in the second round yet again.

On April 3, 1968, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. arrived in Memphis and delivered what would be his final speech at the city’s Bishop Charles Mason Temple, entitled “I’ve Been To The Mountaintop.” But parts of the fiery address could have easily been delivered in 2023. “If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they hadn’t committed themselves to that over there,” said King, who was tussling with Tennessee officials over a planned protest on behalf of striking sanitation workers. “But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of the press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right.”

Exactly 55 years ago, on April 4, 1968, the leader of that era’s struggle for Black civil rights was shot and killed as he stood on the balcony of the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, in a bitterly divided nation where a majority of white Americans thought King was pushing too hard. In more than a half-century since the assassination, the United States has declared King’s birthday a national holiday and erected a granite monument on the National Mall, even as conservatives twisted his words to justify white privilege or attack the heirs of his protest legacy. Today, the basic democratic rights that King extolled in his “Mountaintop” speech are under fierce assault from an authoritarian Republican Party — nowhere more right now than in the state where he was murdered, Tennessee.

In fact, a Black man that Memphis elected to the Tennessee Legislature in a validation of the 1965 Voting Rights Act that King had marched for — state Rep. Justin Pearson — is one of three lawmakers that the body’s predominantly white Republican majority is pushing to expel later this week. The alleged offense that has brought Pearson and two Democratic House colleagues — Reps. Justin Jones, also Black, and Gloria Johnson, who is white — to the brink of losing their seats was joining a protest by hundreds of mostly young people who swarmed the state capitol in Nashville seeking gun control laws after a shooter at the nearby Covenant School killed six people. Pearson held a megaphone and shouted up to a House gallery packed with demonstrators, “Enough is enough!” If Republicans carry through on their threat to boot out the three lawmakers, they will be nullifying the votes of 210,000 Tennesseans, many of them African American.

It’s unlikely that the 55th anniversary of the MLK assassination will get too much attention, given the media frenzy over Donald Trump’s arraignment in New York. The pundits are hailing felony charges against an ex-president as a victory for the rule of law, and it is, but it may be a shallow victory if the red states where King once marched are steadily undoing civil rights like freedom of speech and assembly in the 21st century. In that “Mountaintop” address, King assured his audience “that we, as a people will get to the promised land,” even if he personally wouldn’t live to see it. Why is Tennessee, and America, running from his dream?

A less momentous April 4 anniversary is the blog post that I published on Attytood exactly 10 years ago today, which was headlined: “They better legalize pot fast, because our leaders are running out of other vices to tax!” The short piece noted that both state and city leaders — still scrambling for revenue after the 2008 fiscal collapse — were looking at gimmicks like liquor taxes or keno machines, while ignoring the fact that a majority of Americans now backed legalizing weed. A decade later and ... recreational marijuana is still not legal in Pennsylvania. Sigh.