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Judges Have One Defense Against Trump They (Mostly) Haven’t Used Yet
New Republic • 4 weeks ago

Judges Have One Defense Against Trump They (Mostly) Haven’t Used Yet

While Congress’s unwillingness to counteract Donald Trump’s escalating authoritarianism has prompted much public handwringing, the past few months have brought out some public frustration with the judiciary’s efforts to rein in Trump. Recently, a Reuters analysis of court records revealed that federal judges around the country found that the Trump administration had unlawfully detained immigrants a staggering 4,400 times, with the administration consistently deploying the same legal arguments that have been slapped down a hundred times already.In one representative example of frustration, Minnesota District Judge Michael J. Davis wrote that “there has been an undeniable move by the Government in the past month to defy court orders or at least to stretch the legal process to the breaking point in an attempt to deny noncitizens their due process rights,” in an order granting release to one petitioner. Before Border Patrol commander Greg Bovino was unceremoniously dumped following public backlash to the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minneapolis, a federal judge in Chicago had ordered him to appear for daily briefings to explain what seemed like continuous violations of a court directive to limit use of force.On a handful of occasions, federal judges have broached the natural conclusion of this executive defiance, the only real tool that judges have at their disposal to move past the mere issuing of an order to actually enforcing it: contempt. Maryland Judge Paula Xinis raised the prospect of contempt over the Justice Department’s recalcitrance in providing information in the case of the wrongfully deported Kilmar Ábrego García. Minnesota Judge Patrick Schiltz threatened acting ICE Director Todd Lyons with it over the failure to release one particular detainee. Then there is D.C. Judge James Boasberg, who is looking into whether administration officials could be held in contempt over a failure to heed his order for Homeland Security to turn around planes that were removing people under the Alien Enemies Act—a case more than a year old.This week, a judge in Minnesota finally took the leap and issued a contempt order against the government attorney in a case in which the government had failed to release a petitioner with all his documents despite a court order (this attorney also happens to be a military judge advocate general detailed to the Justice Department, which is a whole separate issue). Matthew Isihara is ordered to pay a $500 fine daily for every day the petitioner goes without the return of his documents.Yet in the face of all this flagrant disregard of federal court directives—a mix of the malicious and the incompetent—this has been the only formal contempt finding against a public functionary or official, amounting to a somewhat limited fine. Why? Some of it has been Trump-appointed judges running cover for the ailing president, but also, unlike Congress’s refusal to use clear tools at its disposal to preserve its own authority, the courts’ relative inability to constrain and punish executive misconduct and noncompliance is a bit more practical.In the context of an administration unafraid of reputational damage that might traditionally give pause to government officials, it may be that the only way to force compliance is acute individual consequences for high-level officials who oversee unlawful and often unconstitutional acts. The obvious avenue for that is criminal contempt, which would serve as both acknowledgment and punishment for the fact that, it seems pretty evident, the officials involved are aware that they are and have chosen to be in flagrant violation of court requirements.One small problem with that: Criminal contempt of federal court is a federal crime, like any other, and who prosecutes federal crimes? It’s certainly not the judges themselves; if one of these processes got far enough along for a judge to make a formal referral to the Justice Department, a DOJ prosecutor would have to pick it up, which in practice would mean that one of the DOJ attorneys who hasn’t already quit over administration overreach would have to bring a case against another executive branch official. A judge could, in theory, appoint an outside attorney as a sort of special prosecutor to take on the case, but that opens up some novel questions about separation of powers given that the prosecution of crimes is generally understood as an executive prerogative. In any case, as a federal crime, this would be something the president could pardon, a power Trump has not at all been restrained about.The courts have a bit more control over what are known as civil contempt sanctions. These do not require a court to pursue a full-fledged prosecution but instead are intended to force agencies or officials into compliance through means like fines—such as the one Judge Provinzino has levied against Isihara—and potentially detention pending compliance. This avenue gives judges some flexibility to sidestep the constraints of criminal contempt, but it still presents questions around enforcement. It’s unclear exactly how the administration will formally respond to Provinzino’s order. The U.S. attorney for the District of Minnesota, Daniel Rosen, already called it “a lawless abuse of judicial power.” Noncompliance with this contempt order would constitute further contempt and involve additional officials if these directed Isihara not to comply.Here too, the efforts would likely have to be individualized, identifying and holding accountable the officials making the decision to defy the courts. As Rutgers legal scholar David Noll recently wrote in a paper examining civil contempt against federal executive officers, judges can potentially strip federal officials of immunities and issue fines and professional repercussions like disbarment, though that will itself likely be subject to litigation. The most significant sanction is civil detention, when a court could order an official imprisoned pending compliance.The problem here is that this also runs through executive branch compliance, specifically the U.S. Marshals. If a federal judge actually orders that a DOJ supervisor or even a high public official like Homeland Security Secretary Kristi Noem or Attorney General Pam Bondi be held until DHS stops refusing to release certain detainees, or the DOJ complies with the law mandating the full release of the Epstein files, would the Marshals comply? They are under statutory requirement to enforce court orders but are ultimately also an agency under the DOJ. Are they going to move forward even if their own leadership orders them to stand down? Noll argues that judges could deputize others, potentially state or local police officers, sheriffs, or retired law enforcement, to carry out arrests, which may be true legally but is difficult to imagine in practice (particularly given Trump officials’ insistence on large security details).If we’re in a slow-rolling constitutional crisis now, then the aggressive pursuit of contempt charges along one of these lines will likely put us at an acute inflection point from which there will, I think, be a clear before and after. Either the courts possess the power to constrain the executive or they don’t, and if they don’t, then people like Stephen Miller might take it as a sign that they can move forward unconstrained with their authoritarian, white nationalist designs. Still, I don’t think this means a victory for the bad guys; this is the exact kind of situation that would probably break through to the normie voting public and kneecap Trump apologists’ arguments that he’s just another president working with the other branches. Given the fact that a recent YouGov poll found that near majorities of respondents are increasingly willing to use words like “corrupt” and “cruel” to define the Trump administration, this is a pretty favorable environment for the stoking of normie anger.These are not exactly new questions, but they are unresolved in part because they’ve never really been pushed to the breaking point. The most famous showdown between a federal court and executive branch officials came in 1861, as the Civil War was ramping up. President Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus and was challenged by Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney (writing for a circuit court), in a decision known as Ex Parte Merryman, which ruled that only Congress could suspend the writ in this way.Federal troops refused to honor the order to release the case’s namesake, John Merryman, and refused to transmit an order of contempt to their commanding officer, General George Cadwalader. Lincoln himself eventually dismissed Taney’s decision, and the whole thing was rendered moot when Congress itself authorized the suspension in 1863. You could say that in this instance the executive officials “won” the confrontation with court power, but this was in the context of an unfolding war on U.S. territory and at an earlier time in the history of the courts and their relationship to executive power.Part of Trumpworld’s strategy here seems to be to disregard the courts strategically, which is to say, not all the time. While high-profile violations of court orders garner headlines, the administration has also been complying with plenty of directives. It has released withheld federal funds, not interfered with Federal Reserve Governor Lisa Cook’s duties, not taken steps to unconstitutionally end birthright citizenship as that case winds toward SCOTUS, and withdrawn the National Guard from cities, among other things. Even in some of the cases where it initially flashily resisted courts, it has ended up complying; after a good amount of scorn and saber-rattling under intense public scrutiny, officials did bring Ábrego García back, even as they tried immediately to gin up reasons to imprison him.The calculus, it seems, is to avoid crossing some diffuse line that would represent a full-blown repudiation of the courts’ authority and the consequences that would result in public opinion and within the government itself. The DOJ is already facing a widespread staff exodus, driven in part by the White House’s overt political pressure and a sense of loss of mission. Trump is in polling freefall, and organized, committed community resistance has become the norm in jurisdictions where Noem and Miller have sent their paramilitary blob of federal agents, to the point that the residents of the Twin Cities, at great cost, seem to be on the verge of successfully pushing them out.So instead of going to war with the federal courts, the administration is judging that it can defy them mostly around the key priority of the nationwide crackdown on immigration and speech, where it can use a mix of procedural tricks and outright noncompliance against what are often already heavily disenfranchised people stuck in a system that is heavily controlled by the executive. These are largely oceans of individual habeas cases that are too numerous and particularized to break through the noise, making them easier to ignore, at least until a judge actually moves forward with a real contempt effort, as Provinzino has now done.The pursuit of judicial contempt charges might ultimately be necessary to break the administration’s facade of unrestrained power. Even if there are a good number of procedural and practical obstacles to an effective contempt sanction, civil or criminal, it will further shunt Trump and his henchmen into having to publicly embrace authoritarianism, which it turns out is an increasingly losing proposition.

Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Water Wars
New Republic • 4 weeks ago

Trump Is on the Wrong Side of the Water Wars

Why is water so different from air? It sounds like the start of a joke. But it’s a fair thing to wonder after the Trump administration last week officially revoked the so-called endangerment finding, a 2009 scientific conclusion that climate change threatens human health and that greenhouse gases were therefore an appropriate subject for federal regulation under the Clean Air Act.This move paves the way for the elimination of all federal regulation of greenhouse gas emissions. These rollbacks may kill a lot of people long before the associated climate effects kick in, though, because the emissions that the government has been regulating also reduce general pollution. The Environmental Defense Fund projects that the rollbacks could trigger an extra 37 million asthma attacks between now and 2055.The Trump administration is not at all concerned about blowback, though, and in fact was making victory laps much of last week, with Interior Secretary Doug Burgum saying that all the extra carbon dioxide in the air would be good for plants.Contrast that with how eagerly President Trump is trying to blame Democrats for a recent large sewage spill into the Potomac River.“Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., who are responsible for the massive sewage spill in the Potomac River, must get to work, IMMEDIATELY,” the president posted Tuesday on Truth Social. “If they can’t do the job, they have to call me and ask, politely, to get it fixed. The Federal Government is not at all involved with what has taken place, but we can fix it,” he added. “This is a Radical Left caused Environmental Hazard.”None of this is true, of course—as Maryland Governor Wes Moore pointed out, the federal government is actually responsible for overseeing the segment of sewer line that failed. And maybe that’s why Trump decided to weigh in. But this is also an odd issue for Trump to highlight. Although the spill of over 200 million gallons of raw sewage is widely being referred to as the largest in the nation’s history, it hasn’t resulted in any boil-water advisories yet—and water quality is not exactly a signature Trump issue anyway. In his first administration, he scrapped the Clean Water Rule, significantly narrowing the scope of federal water protections. This time around, his administration is also attempting to roll back federal protections.This isn’t the only story recently suggesting that clean water may have political significance that clean air doesn’t. Last week, Charlie Hope-D’Anieri wrote about the wild-card candidacy of a retired water scientist running for secretary of agriculture in Iowa. Chris Jones almost certainly will not win, Hope-D’Anieri acknowledged. But he’s upending long-standing, almost sacred conventions in Iowa politics by challenging the ethanol industry, and arguing “that farmers should be required to make basic, specific adjustments to their practices to prevent the ruination of the state’s water supply.” And, perhaps surprisingly, he’s getting some traction, including good turnout at campaign events.On Tuesday, Inside Climate News reported a new poll that suggests Jones’s early success is not just a freak accident. “Eighty-five percent of voters in Iowa’s first and third U.S. House districts,” reports Anika Jane Beamer, “say they would be more likely to vote for an elected official who prioritizes protecting clean water, including cutting industrial agriculture pollution.” These are both “vulnerable, narrowly Republican districts,” Beamer notes. It’s not impossible that these will be some of the districts that determine whether Democrats flip the House in November.“It’s very clear that Iowa’s water crisis has reached a boiling point,” Food & Water Action political director Sam Bernhardt reportedly said at a press conference announcing the poll results. Now, you might be inclined to dismiss any single poll along these lines—and it’s worth noting that Food & Water Action did commission this one. But it’s also consistent with prior polling showing that water quality is a strikingly popular issue, which doesn’t seem as vulnerable to the partisan divides seen on other environmental topics. Pew polling from 2023 found that 63 percent of people thought the federal government was doing “too little” to “protect water quality of lakes, rivers and streams,” and only 7 percent said it was doing “too much”—making it the top issue when compared to air quality, climate change, protecting animals and their habitats, and protecting natural parks and nature preserves. Regular polling from the Value of Water Campaign has also found that the number of voters calling “reliable water access” a “very” or “extremely important” issue has been rising for five years straight.There are some caveats, of course, to how far political concern over water quality can go. The water crisis in Flint, Michigan, reached appalling levels for years, and it didn’t seem to make a huge political difference. A lot of people are comfortable ignoring quality issues with other people’s water.Still, the political relevance of water availability and quality doesn’t seem likely to fade in the near future. It’s a key concern for the MAHA segment of Trump’s supporters. And the water crisis playing out in the American West, as the Colorado River dries up, is only getting worse, affecting both blue states and red. This past weekend, the seven states trying to negotiate a solution to this missed their deadline for a second time. Water might not be a deciding factor in the midterms this November—there are a lot of issues that might take that prize. But as a political issue, it’s not going away.Stat of the Week3 degrees CelsiusThat’s the level of global warming a new report says governments need to prepare for—double the 1.5 degree Celsius (2.7 degree Fahrenheit) limit that leaders agreed to in 2015.What I’m ReadingAs Trump Obliterates Climate Efforts, States Try to Fill the GapAs the Trump administration scraps the endangerment finding, Maxine Joselow has a timely report for The New York Times about how some states are trying to step up in the climate fight.The end of federal greenhouse gas limits is an obstacle, but not a death knell, in the fight against climate change on the state level, experts said.Colorado helps explain why.In 2019, Gov. Jared Polis, a Democrat, set an ambitious goal of reducing the state’s greenhouse gas emissions 50 percent by 2030, from 2005 levels. Colorado is now on track to meet this goal by 2032, a two-year delay for which local leaders have largely blamed the Trump administration’s environmental rollbacks.Read Maxine Joselow’s full report at The New York Times.This article first appeared in Life in a Warming World, a weekly TNR newsletter authored by deputy editor Heather Souvaine Horn. Sign up here.

The Revolutionary Crappiness of Darren Aronofsky’s On This Day … 1776
New Republic • 4 weeks ago

The Revolutionary Crappiness of Darren Aronofsky’s On This Day … 1776

I’m a big fan of Tom Hooper’s 2008 HBO miniseries John Adams. Perhaps it’s because I’m a dad. Its genre is very much that of Dad Cinema classics like Master and Commander, in that it offers a granular, somewhat sentimental depiction of military history, an emphasis on neat, easily repeatable historical fun facts, and a wide-ranging account of the exploits of Great Men. And sea battles! It has a sea battle! It’s also based on David McCullough’s biography of the founding father, a very popular book in the genre of Dad History—or Airport Nonfiction, as Anne Trubek calls it. Imagine the experience of falling asleep with your bedside lamp still on, having read six pages of a 750-page work of popular history that lies heavily on your rising and falling belly. They made a TV show of that!But I also like to think that I admire John Adams for other reasons. The best way I can describe this show, if you haven’t seen it, is that it is very, very gross. Hooper—famous for his Oscar-winning snot-drenched close-ups of Anne Hathaway in his film adaptation of Les Miz—loves reminding us how nasty the eighteenth century was, and how gnarly and smelly and damp life in the new republic could be. His frame is full of intimate images of rotting teeth and sweaty wigs and shit-smeared boots and bloody streets. In this show, we see a man tarred and feathered, the gruesome process of a family being inoculated against smallpox, a sailor have his leg amputated, a young woman undergo a mastectomy, John Adams nearly die of fever in Holland, and George Washington lose a tooth at dinner. The ideas are important to Hooper, and so are the historical narratives (true and false), but what’s most important is the bodies. These choices make John Adams aggressively, and appealingly, a story about how the foundations of American democracy were laid by a group of extremely physically vulnerable human beings. They were vulnerable to violence, to illness, to infection, to weather. It was just as easy to die as it was to stay alive in New England in the 1770s. And while much of the show is grisly, it can also be quite moving. To think that this nation was built by such fragile creatures.Watching the episodes that have aired thus far is a surreal experience, a work of national memory that feels more like hallucination than history.As a fan of John Adams and its pungent, provocative physicality, I was dismayed to watch the new Revolutionary War documentary miniseries, On This Day … 1776. Commissioned by Time magazine, produced by Darren Aronofsky, and airing in serial installments on YouTube, On This Day is one of the highest-profile TV projects yet to be produced with generative AI tools. On This Day is a predictably, but still shockingly, disembodied affair. Watching the episodes that have aired thus far is a surreal experience, a work of national memory that feels more like hallucination than history. If John Adams’s vulgar bodiliness told a story of how vulnerable the revolutionaries were, this new series inadvertently tells a story about how very vulnerable we all still are.It’s surprising that Darren Aronofsky is involved with this. From Pi to Black Swan, Requiem for a Dream to The Wrestler, Aronofsky has made great and gory films of varying quality, but their uniting factor is their obsession with bodies. I remember so many moments from his filmography, and I’m hard-pressed to identify one that doesn’t live, paired in my mind, with the visceral sensation I felt when I first saw it. His early work through Black Swan was mostly shot on 16mm film, lending those films a grainy materiality that, in many ways, defined his aesthetic. So it was surprising to a lot of people last year when he announced that he was founding a studio—Primordial Soup—to explore the possibilities of AI technology. The first really striking moment in On This Day is a close-up of King George III. The general format of the series is that each mini-episode—the episodes thus far are all under five minutes—dramatizes a particular pivotal event that occurred on the day it was released back in 1776. The first episode, released on January 1 of this year, is about George Washington’s decision to fly the Continental Colors flag on Prospect Hill, on January 1, 1776. Before we turn to Washington, though, the episode begins with the king addressing his Parliament, declaring the colonies to be in rebellion against the throne. Aronofsky and his team are adamant to point out that all voice actors hired for the series were SAG-AFTRA members and that their performances were recorded, as we might say, old-school. But the voices throughout are bizarrely mismatched with the movement of the characters’ animated mouths. For as advanced as this technology is, it has some of the telltale problems that digital animators have long ironed out in the years since Robert Zemeckis’s uncanny-valley motion-capture odyssey, The Polar Express. This series, in other words, bears the marks of both new and old digital technology.Our vision of George begins in a medium shot, alternating with frames of bewigged lords whispering scandalously with each other. Despite the undulating synthetic background, George moves twitchily, glitchily as he speaks. When not represented in extreme close-up or in slow motion, the series has a hard time replicating the natural movements of human heads, if that’s something you think would bother you. Then we cut to a head-on close-up of George, dead eyes looking directly into camera, and, with a thump, we get an on-screen chyron telling us who he is. The series uses this stylistic signature in every episode when we meet a new, key character. It reminded me most of the pulpy grind-house character intros in Kill Bill, and much of the series’s cinematography draws on that particular style of late-’90s, post-Tarantino self-conscious visual bravado.If the main complaint against this series was that it looks like garbage—which it does—then that would be a thin complaint, indeed.But it’s the next shot, a close-up of George in profile, that struck me most. Here we get our longest, lingering view of his face, and it’s a strange face indeed. His skin is rubbery. His ear is uncannily crisp, but his cheek is blurry and scaly, almost fishy. His eyes and nose and forehead, though, are unique. Despite our close view, they are poreless, marked instead by fine topographic lines that look like a cross between the etching marks that trace the portraits on our money and fingerprints. Many of the focal-point characters of the series are marked this way. Later in this episode, as Washington rallies his troops, the frame mimics a camera lens focusing on his face, but instead of rendering a clearer image, the frame merely emboldens his cavernous crow’s feet. With the video paused, the lines resemble fissures in cracked clay, the branching capillaries of silt in a river delta. The dude looks like a lizard. They are recognizable contours, but not the contours of a human face. Technology is choppy, especially in its early days. And if the main complaint against this series was that it looks like garbage—which it does—then that would be a thin complaint, indeed. What’s almost more bothersome than the visual failure of this show is its failure of imagination. Recently, the tech blogger and entrepreneur Anil Dash wrote of the disconnect between AI boosters, who are enlivened by hype for this new technology, and artists, who can’t conceive of its utility. “For coders, AI eliminates the drudgery so they can focus on the creative/expressive part,” he wrote. “In every other creative discipline, it has the opposite effect.” Watching this series, it’s hard to imagine what AI allowed the filmmakers to do that they wouldn’t have otherwise been able to do. The sheer work of mounting this project using this technology seems to have superseded any other creative decision.In nearly every aspect of traditional filmmaking, this series makes choices that are either utterly conventional or downright nonsensical. Each episode is cut together in a feverishly quick, often arhythmic editing style. The narrative contained in each short moves at such an unsettlingly fast pace that nearly every line of dialogue needs to be exposition. Outside of a handful of sweeping aerial shots that begin the shorts, like that of the “Guns of Ticonderoga” episode, there are precious few establishing shots to root us in physical space. It’s almost as if this is a concession to the immateriality of the medium—nothing we’re seeing is real, so the filmmakers feel absolved of the duty to construct any kind of physical world on-screen. Instead, we get fast jump cuts, from tightening ropes to shouting mouths to hands dragging across musty books or the coarse fabric of flags. The visual point of view of this series is a floating, falling one, and what little information or detail the episodes wish to communicate to us drifts away untethered. Nothing we’re seeing is real, so the filmmakers feel absolved of the duty to construct any kind of physical world on-screen. When the series does decide to stop and spend a moment with an important conversation between historical actors, the resulting two-handers—like the first meeting between Benjamin Franklin and Thomas Paine—are staged, written, and acted like video game cutscenes. At worst, they feel like the cursory scripted flirtations between a pizza delivery boy and a lonely housewife in a low-budget porno. It’s unavoidable, watching these episodes, to observe that nearly every visual referent or echo in this cutting-edge animated series recalls some older, cruder vision of our technological future.In 1915, the filmmaker D.W. Griffith offered a prophecy of the future of the cinematic arts. “The time will come, in less than ten years, when the children in the public schools will be taught practically everything by moving pictures,” he said. This filmic education, he envisioned, would come to replace, to render obsolete, the written word itself. “Certainly, they will never be obliged to read history again,” he declared. No longer needed as repositories of books, libraries would be filled with long rows of single-occupant stalls, Griffith predicted. Curious minds who wished to “read up” on particular historical events, like the exploits of Napoleon, for instance, would pick a stall and press the appropriate button. He continued:Instead of consulting all the authorities, wading laboriously through a host of books, and ending bewildered, without a clear idea of exactly what did happen and confused at every point by conflicting opinions about what did happen, you will merely seat yourself at a properly adjusted window, in a scientifically prepared room, press the button, and actually see what happened.… You will merely be present at the making of history.Watching Aronofsky’s own take on the birth of a nation, I found myself thinking back to Griffith’s prophecy. Griffith was wrong about the future of film. At the moment he gave this interview, film was still a relatively young medium. Many of the things we associate reflexively with cinema—the kind of continuity editing Aronofsky inexplicably defies in On This Day, for instance—had only been common practices for a decade or less. So, understandably, the question of what film might one day become decades and decades into the future was a somewhat fanciful one. But, reading his statement in 2026, it eerily recalls the manifestos of today’s AI optimists. Griffith’s rhetoric of replacement and obsolescence—his framing of literacy as a burdensome task and research as an impossible obstacle to truth; his vision of cinema as a technology that will smooth these processes, make them supernaturally easy, transform the labor of learning into an instantaneous magic trick—would not be out of place in a viral Substack post from a Silicon Valley CEO. Why must the future of cinema necessitate the vandalizing of our libraries? Why must the future of AI slicken and impoverish our vision of history, or even just of historical film? I try hard to imagine who the audience for On This Day is supposed to be. Is it the curious but time-strapped student eager to slurp down a quick digest of historical facts in preparation for a test? Is it the film student curious to explore the creative possibilities of new transformative tech? Is it an ordinary person, looking for entertainment, education, diversion, intimacy with the figures of the past? In each case, this seems more and more unlikely. But what if this series is not designed for an already existing audience but for an audience that the show itself and all the other experimenters in the field of AI cinema wish to bring into being? Who would that be? This would be a viewer who both knows and expects less. It would be someone whose experience and understanding of film does not stretch back even as far as Darren Aronofsky’s 16mm era. It would be somebody who would not perceive the sheer gaping absence at the center of this project as an absence at all. When I imagine the creation of that type of viewer, then, and only then, do I at last feel myself present at the making of history.

Trump Ramblings on Epstein Take Revealing Turn as MAGA Fury Boils Over
New Republic • 4 weeks ago

Trump Ramblings on Epstein Take Revealing Turn as MAGA Fury Boils Over

After British police arrested the former Prince Andrew in connection with revelations involving Jeffrey Epstein, a reporter asked Donald Trump directly if anyone will face accountability in the United States. Trump rambled and rambled, insisting he had been “totally exonerated.” That’s not true, but regardless, Trump could not explain why accountability is happening in other countries but not in ours. He also had nothing whatsoever to say about whether his Justice Department will ever seek accountability for any elites implicated in the scandal. Meanwhile, MAGA figures are raging over the latest Epstein file revelations and demanding exactly the accountability that is not forthcoming from DOJ. We talked to Nicole Hemmer, author of good books about the conservative movement and about the right-wing media. She explains why Trump has not been exonerated, how the latest in this scandal is causing MAGA to crack up, what all this reveals about supposed Trump-MAGA hatred of “elites,” and what the prospects are for genuine accountability. Listen to this episode here. A transcript is here.

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