This is the week that was.
The governor of South Dakota, Kristi Noem, boasts in a book about herself that two decades ago she took the family dog, reportedly a rambunctious 14-month-old wirehaired pointer named Cricket, to a gravel pit on the family farm and shot the pup. For good measure, Noem also shot and killed a goat she didn’t like. Both animals had clearly annoyed her.
Noem, angling to play second fiddle as vice president to her political idol, Donald J. Trump, drew a few headlines for these confessions.
“Politicians and dog experts vilify South Dakota governor after she writes about killing her dog,” said The Associated Press.
“South Dakota Gov. Kristi Noem stands by decision to kill dog, shared it in new book,” said CBS.
And my personal favorite in USA Today: “‘That was rough:’ Steve Bannon, Donald Trump Jr. criticize Kristi Noem for killing her dog.”
The two MAGA A-listers amplified:
“Kristi Noem, I think, is maybe a little too based,” Bannon added. “Shooting the puppy in the gravel.”
“Too based,” I’m informed, is slang for someone who maybe, just maybe, is a little too willing to speak their truth.
“That was not ideal,” Donald Trump Jr. responded. And both men laughed.
“Not ideal,” Trump Jr. said. “I read that and I’m like: ‘Who put that in the book?’ I was like ‘Your ghost writer must really not like you if they’re gonna include that one. That was rough.’ ”
But, if you are a puppy-shooting, right-wing governor, you never, ever admit a mistake. Blame the “fake news” Right?
No, really, right?
For Noem, the week that was continued into a second week. The headlines tumbled out. Including a new round of “what the hell was she thinking” when there were reports that she claimed she once met with the North Korean dictator, Kim Jong Un. She didn’t. She lied.
Noem’s vice presidential chances seem as dead as a dog in a, well, you can finish the sentence.
Fun fact: Noem’s book has its official release May 8, but Amazon has already discounted the $30 cover price 37%. If you are interested in a copy of the book I would advise waiting, it will get cheaper, rather like the story it tells.
This was the week that was.
For the first time in American history, which, if my math is correct, is quite a long time, a former president continued to stand trial involving felony charges that he allegedly falsified business records in order to distribute hush money to make sure his affair with a porn star didn’t interfere with his 2016 presidential campaign. Just months before the alleged affair occurred, Trump’s wife, Melania, had given birth to their son, Barron. But don’t get bogged down in details.
The best comment on that trial so far — this will be famous — came from Utah Republican Sen. Mitt Romney, who clearly is having trouble with the position of the defendant in this case.
“You don’t pay someone $130,000 not to have sex with you,” said Romney, a former LDS bishop.
Oh, the humanity.
Oh, the absurdity.
And since the defendant simply can’t keep his Big Mac hole shut, the judge in the so-called “hush money case” fined the former president $9,000 for violating an order that prohibits attacks on people involved in the case, you know, people like witnesses, for example.
So, taking stock: The first former president to be indicted — I forget how many counts there are in four separate cases — becomes the first former president to be fined for trying to threaten and intimidate witnesses in his porn star payoff case. Got it? And you thought “The Godfather” movies were really great.
Meanwhile the defendant attacked the judge — again.
This was the week that was, or perhaps the week after the week that was.
For the second time involving a case featuring the former president of the United States, the Supreme Court, to which the former guy appointed three of nine members, struggled mightily to avoid confronting the actual Trump case they were asked to consider.
You’ll recall a while back that the six Trumpy justices on the nation’s highest tribunal backflipped their way to a decision that a single state, in this case Colorado, even in the face of the clear language of the Constitution, simply could not prevent an insurrection-inciting former president from running and potentially winning the White House again. It was deemed essentially too messy by the justices to confront the real issue, the 14th Amendment language prohibiting an insurrectionist from holding high office. We had a Civil War around some of these issues, but the Supreme Court is meh.
That case, if you love historical footnotes, featured many references to Salmon P. – the “P” stands for Portland – Chase, a former senator, Treasury Secretary and Supreme Court chief justice. Chase, like all who make it to the highest tribunal, was a supremely ambitious man. He wanted to be president so badly he campaigned for the Free Soil ticket and sought the presidential nomination of the Republican Party and finally the Democratic Party. He never made it. A salmon swimming upstream.
Chase’s name came up in the Trump disqualification case because of a case he decided while sitting as a circuit judge. Chase’s ruling in 1869, as legal analyst James D. Zirin noted, “refused to vacate a criminal conviction because the trial judge had fought for the Confederacy.” Zirin pointed out that the ruling was hardly a grand precedent, particularly for a Supreme Court presented with a former president who actually instigated an real insurrection on January 6, 2021.
But dealing with the clear facts of January 6 was just too on point for our Supreme Court, so the justices invented an approach to effectively ignore a key provision to the Constitution they are sworn to uphold.
Oh, and there is this: The wife of one of the justices actively participated in the planning of that January 6 coup, but that justice — Clarence Thomas — opined on the case nevertheless, upholding the rights of the insurrectionist. You don’t have to be right, apparently, but you do have to have power.
These politicians in robes are fixing to do the same thing with a second Trump case on the question of whether a former president has immunity from prosecution for crimes allegedly committed while president. The smart money is on a ruling of no absolute immunity, but a ruling containing just enough delay so as to remove the prospect of any legal consideration of an insurrectionist running for president before the November election.
No man is above the law, but if you know the right people …
Remember when conservative politicians used to rage against “activist” judges who made things up to arrive at a desired political outcome? Yup. I remember that, too.
This was the week that was.
Let’s end on high note. Time magazine is out with a big story about the former president’s plans once he’s back in the White House. The author of the piece, Eric Cortellessa, who did two lengthy interviews with the former president, said Trump would, among other things, “gut the U.S. civil service, deploy the National Guard to American cities as he sees fit, close the White House pandemic-preparedness office and staff his Administration with acolytes who back his false assertion that the 2020 election was stolen.”
There is more, lots more: concentration camps for migrants, a prosecution of Joe Biden, a federal takeover of education (so much for local control), an abandonment of NATO, and tariffs to make your inflation worries seem like so much background noise.
You really should read the whole article if only to see in one place how deranged and deluded the Grand Old Party of Lincoln has become under its indicted leader-king.
“Time included the full transcripts and a piece fact-checking Trump’s assertions,” historian Heather Cox Richardson wrote. “The transcripts reflect the former president’s scattershot language that makes little logical sense but conveys impressions by repeating key phrases and advancing a narrative of grievance. The fact-checking reveals that narrative is based largely on fantasy.”
That was our week.
More attention, generally speaking, was paid to a poor 14-month-old puppy shot dead in a South Dakota gravel pit by a once rising star of the MAGA world than to a mad would-be king in a New York courtroom. But somehow it all fits together.
Shooting a dog apparently is the “red line” no right-wing politician should cross. Flaying the Constitution, on the other hand, is the party platform.
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Additional Reading:
A few other items of interest …
Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony at 200
The birthday of the fabulous Ninth.
“The composer insisted upon conducting the symphony from a conductor’s stand. The official conductor at the concert, Michael Umlauf, had instructed the musicians – a Viennese orchestra and choir – to ignore Beethoven, who was completely deaf and who theoretically could not be relied upon to keep time.
“The performance was interrupted several times by rapturous applause from the approximately 2,000 attendees, but Beethoven could not hear the reaction. According to eyewitnesses, the composer “threw himself back and forth like a madman” and fell several bars behind in his “conducting.'”
Political Hell-Raiser Coming in Paperback
My good friends at the University of Oklahoma Press are planning on issuing my book on the legendary (and still controversial) Senator Burton K. Wheeler of Montana in a paperback edition later this summer.
I could not be happier.
The book, my first, was nominated for the Western Writers of America Spur Award, and tells the story of Wheeler’s life from his Quaker roots in Massachusetts to the rough and tumble mining town of Butte, Montana where he settled. Wheeler won a Senate seat in 1922 and served until 1947, 24-years of big battles and bigger controversy, including fights with Franklin Roosevelt over packing the Supreme Court and American foreign policy prior to World War II.
Wheeler was a Democrat, but his political and personal friendships ranged over the ideological spectrum – Louis Brandeis, Norman Thomas, Robert LaFollette and Harry Truman.
Never dull, Wheeler was always in trouble.
Here’s the link to the most recent OU Press catalogue. Lots of good stuff here.
The Wolves of K Street review: how lobbying swallowed Washington
A new book on the fourth branch of DC government – lobbying.
“Brody Mullins, a Wall Street Journal investigative reporter and Pulitzer prize winner, and his brother, Luke Mullins, a contributor at Politico, deliver a graduate seminar on how lobbying emerged and became a behemoth, an adjunct of government itself, taking its collective name from the street north of the White House where many of its biggest earners sit.
“Smoothly written, meticulously researched, The Wolves of K Street informs and mesmerizes.”
From The Guardian.
And … more on money and politics
I was delighted to be interviewed recently for an NPR podcast series called “Landslide.” The whole series, produced by Ben Bradford, is well worth your time if you care to delve into the long history of how the conservative American right began to transform in the 1970s into the party that gave us Donald Trump.
The segment I participated in deals with political money. You can listen here.
More soon. Thanks for reading. Stay in touch.