Welcome to the Trump-RFK Jr. quack-fest

 

Welcome to the Trump-RFK Jr. quack-fest Lucian K. Truscott IV Dec 14 Oh, boy, here we go with the Trump lie-o-rama on vaccines and healthcare. The New York Times reported this morning that Aaron Siri, identified as “Kennedy’s lawyer” has petitioned the FDA to revoke its approval of the polio and Hepatitis B vaccines. Siri is further identified as helping Kennedy “pick federal health officials for the incoming Trump administration.” In that capacity, Siri has been interviewing prospective hires by asking them their opinions on vaccines. Kennedy is said to want Siri to serve as the Health and Human Services Department general counsel, the top lawyer for the agency. Siri has sued to stop a requirement for children to get flu vaccines in New York City schools. He sued the state of Mississippi successfully to get a religious exemption from the state requirement that children be vaccinated to attend school. He sued in multiple states to stop requirements for the COVID vaccine. So, the guy who has filed repeated lawsuits to have vaccines withdrawn from use, and to stop requirements that vaccines be administered for school children, will be in charge of defending the FDA and HHS against such lawsuits in the future. That’s like inviting the fox inside the chicken house and providing the fox with a file with which to sharpen his teeth while he guards the chickens. You see, after nearly seven decades of saving lives and preventing paralysis with the polio vaccine alone, not to mention saving the lives of countless babies with the rubella vaccine and other vaccines regularly given infants, it will now be the correct thing in the Department of Health and Human Services to question whether vaccines have been effective in saving the lives of children. Because, of course, opinions are equal to facts and evidence in the utterly upside-down scientific world of the new Trump administration. Siri has filed petitions and lawsuits on behalf of a group of vaccine skeptics called the Informed Consent Action Network, which believes in something called “medical freedom.” “I love Aaron Siri,” Kennedy said recently on a podcast hosted by yet another vaccine skeptic. “There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.” Siri has either sued or filed petitions with the FDA to stop or suspend the use of 13 vaccines regularly given to children including vaccines that prevent tetanus, diphtheria, polio and hepatitis A, according to the Times. Trump, in his recent interview with Time Magazine for its cover story, said he wants Kennedy to “do some very serious testing” of vaccines. It goes without saying that all vaccines in use in the United States today have been tested again and again for safety and efficacy. “We’ll see the numbers,” Trump told Time, speaking of the prospective testing he wants Kennedy to do on vaccines. “A lot of people think a lot of different things. And at the end of the studies that we’re doing, and we’re going all out, we’re going to know what’s good and what’s not good. We will know for sure what’s good and what’s not good.” Trump was asked by Time if his administration could cancel some vaccines. Here is the sum total of his response: “It could if I think it’s dangerous, if I think they are not beneficial, but I don’t think it’s going to be very controversial in the end.” So, there it is, folks. Donald Trump is going to cut through all controversy that doesn’t exist in the medical community about vaccines that have been tested and proven safe, because he alone will make all future scientific medical determinations about what should be used and what shouldn’t. The standard for the FDA and the NIH and the Department of Health and Human Services will be what Donald Trump himself thinks is “good,” or “not good.” Allow me to interject some personal experience here as a kind of reality check. I recently went to the Gagnon Cardiac Institute of the Morristown, New Jersey hospital to have a stent inserted in one of the veins of my heart. This is not the first time I have undergone serious medical procedures. I had a heart bypass in 2010 and a spinal fusion in 1999. All those procedures had one thing in common: when you walk through the doors of an American hospital for surgery or for any other serious medical procedures or care, that is it. You’re in there to be treated with whatever they’ve got. You had the choice of which doctor to treat you and which hospital you want the procedure done, but after that, inside the hospital, you’re going to get whatever they’ve got. You don’t choose the drug to relax you. You don’t choose which needle to use for your drip. You don’t choose the equipment they will use, which probe they’re going to send up your femoral artery or which scalpel will cut into the muscles of your back or which clamp they’ll use to shut off the blood flow where they’re working. If you need something to speed up or slow down your metabolism during surgery, you don’t choose that drug. You don’t even choose the brand of the blood pressure cuff that’s on your arm or the method by which they monitor your heart rhythms and breathing. A hospital is not a marketplace. They don’t have racks of medical equipment like products in a Target store when you go into surgery. They don’t wake you up to ask you whether you’d like this anti-Afib drug or that one if your heart rhythm goes haywire. This whole thing of “medical freedom” is a fiction that ends when you get out of your car and walk into a hospital and ask the people in an emergency room to save your life. If you fucked up and listened to Bobby Kennedy and Aaron Siri or Donald Trump and decided not to get a COVID shot, and you’re in a critical care unit and you’re being hooked up to a ventilator because your lungs have ceased to function, they don’t ask you why you neglected to get vaccinated. They just treat you. They don’t ask you which heart drugs you want them to inject into your IV connection, or what brand of tube you want them to insert through your chest to drain your chest cavity of fluids. They just do it, and if you survive and several days later can walk out of the hospital, you thank them, you don’t argue with them about which drugs or procedures or equipment they used to save your life. We live in a country with the most expensive health care in the world, but because our federal government requires everything to be tested before it’s used, whatever they put into your body is safe. The FDA tests vaccines and drugs and medical equipment like ventilators and surgical gear like heart probes and whatever they shove up your ass to look around in your colon to make sure you don’t have cancer. The government has requirements that the hospitals you use meet certain cleanliness standards. That’s why the floors you’re pushed down on a gurney are shiny, and there isn’t any dust or germs that can blow up onto your body and get into your surgical suite and infect you when they open you up or stick a probe into you. We should be thanking our lucky stars that we have a Department of Health and Human Services and an FDA to keep us safe, and the National Institutes of Health to study diseases and cures and preventatives for disease. Donald Trump is appointing a person who has, during his lifetime, and during the lifetimes of his wives and his children, made use of our excellent hospitals and their excellent standards of care. He has benefitted from the vaccines that he was given after he was born and as a child when they were required for him to attend grade school and high school and college. To my knowledge, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. does not suffer from polio or hepatitis, despite the fact that he was a heroin user for 14 years of his life, a common vector for Hepatitis and other infections. Vaccines probably saved Kennedy’s life, but because he’s a privileged, narcissistic monster who, the evidence tells us, cares for himself but not for others who would benefit from the same vaccines that probably saved his life, this country is likely to enter a new level of the spread of disease and infection that could be avoided if the people of this country had not elected an equally privileged and narcissistic monster as their president. These monsters have already caused the deaths of women from bans on emergency care for problem pregnancies and other healthcare denials related to bans on abortion, all of which was done in the face of medical evidence of their necessity to save lives of women and newborns. Now Trump and his chosen crew of quacks will be in charge of the very federal departments that have successfully, until now at least, ensured the safety and efficacy of vaccines, drugs, medical equipment and hospitals, and they are set to drive our entire medical system into the same ditch they drove women’s reproductive healthcare. We have done this to ourselves. God help us.

GREG DOBBS

 

(Dobbs) Trump's Picks: Quite A Lineup If Trump's nominees are unfit, unsuited, or sometimes unhinged, the Senate ought to reject every last one of them. Greg Dobbs Dec 14 Donald Trump’s nominees for high-level positions are proving to be quite a lineup. He has put up a rogue’s list of allies to help him run America. Maybe to run it into the ground. Not all of them. Many of his nominees, although coming at issues from different directions than I would, are able and accomplished with no hint of major scandal defining them. But look at the controversial picks. Including the newest, Keri Lake. She ran two years ago for Arizona governor and lost. She ran this year for Arizona senator and lost. But as a strident election denier who has ceaselessly regurgitated propaganda about our elections being rigged— she’s as perfidious as Trump— she has never conceded defeat in either race, let alone Trump’s irrefutable 2020 loss. Yet Wednesday he endorsed her to lead the Voice of America, the agency that promotes America’s values to the rest of the world, particularly human rights. It is America’s counterbalance to propaganda from autocrats. If Lake gets the job, she will succeed a man who not only is a former correspondent for The Washington Post but also, before running VOA, was president of Freedom House, which supports and defends human rights advocates around the globe. Those are the qualifications the job deserves. Lake’s aren’t. But when Donald Trump posted about appointing her, he ended with a clue about the qualifications that matter to him: “Kari was a beloved News Anchor in Arizona, which supported me by record margins, for over 20 years.” Only the day before, he nominated a lawyer named Harmeet Dhillon to be the assistant attorney general in charge of the Justice Department’s civil rights division. It is an offensive choice because Dhillon has spent much of her career trying to reduce people’s rights, not reinforce them. As an official in the California Republican Party, she led efforts to banish corporate diversity and transgender rights. Now, if she gets the job at DOJ, hundreds of civil rights lawyers working there will have to follow her lead. If history is any guide, she will lead us down a rabbit hole. Dhillon also, by the way, has been another rabid election denier, which will put her in good company with her boss, attorney general designee Pam Bondi. But we’re not through. There’s RFK Jr., Trump’s pick to lead Health and Human Services, the mission of which is to protect and improve the health and welfare of every American. We already know about Kennedy dumping a dead bear in Central Park and strapping a whale’s head to the roof of his car, but those only make him wacky. His opinions about vaccines make him dangerous, because he blatantly spurns science. The latest outrage, as RFK chooses top aides, is that a chief advisor in the process— a lawyer named Aaron Siri— actually implored the government two years ago to revoke its approval— believe it or not— of the vaccine for polio. Evidently Siri and RFK aren’t aware that until polio vaccines came along— first the Salk vaccine, an inoculation in the 1950s, then the Sabin vaccine, essentially a dose of infused sugar in the early ‘60s— tens of thousands of Americans and half a million people worldwide were struck every year with polio, which crippled many, paralyzed more, and by destroying the muscles that help us breathe, killed the rest. Maybe they don’t remember because thanks to the vaccines, polio in the U.S. essentially was eradicated. But why worry about the facts? Just last month in a podcast, Kennedy praised his friend: “I love Aaron Siri. There’s nobody who’s been a greater asset to the medical freedom movement than him.” More keeps coming out too about Pete Hegseth, Trump’s designated secretary of defense. An interview was uncovered from back in June in which he was asked on a TV show about gays serving in the military and his answer was, “It’s just like everything else the Marxists and the leftists have done.” So apparently putting gays in uniform is a Marxist plot. That’s on top of Hegseth’s appearance on a podcast just two days after the election— before Trump tapped him for Defense— in which he insisted that women shouldn’t serve in combat: “I’m straight up just saying we should not have women in combat roles. It hasn’t made us more effective. Hasn’t made us more lethal. Has made fighting more complicated.” But now he’s fighting to lead the military and trying to woo some female senators, so now he’s claiming that his November comments were “misconstrued.” That’s rich. How do you misconstrue, “We should not have women in combat roles?” We already know that Hegseth has been accused of drunkenness on the job and mismanaging the funds of a veterans organization he was running. And we know that he has been accused of sexual assault. Of course maybe that gave him a lift in Trump’s eyes, but not in his own mother’s, who once sent him an email in which she wrote, “I have no respect for any man that belittles, lies, cheats, sleeps around and uses women for his own power and ego. You are that man.” She now renounces it, but she can’t just close her eyes real tight and make it disappear. But we’re not through yet. We might get a man at the top of the FBI who keeps an enemies list. Last time we saw an enemies list, it was Richard Nixon’s. But now, Kash Patel has his, which he even published in his book (complete with a front cover endorsement from Donald Trump), and virtually every name on it is someone who has crossed Trump. Former Trump defense secretary Mark Esper calls Patel a liar after he put a hostage rescue operation at risk by making up information about the host country’s permission. Former Trump national security advisor John Bolton calls Patel a “threat” to our country and our constitution, predicting that as the director of the FBI, he would be the American equivalent to Joseph Stalin’s bloodthirsty secret police chief in the last century: “He would operate according to Lavrenty Beria’s reported comment to Joseph Stalin: ‘Show me the man, and I’ll show you the crime’.” We might get a woman at the top of the intelligence community who met with Bashar al-Assad and dismissed conclusions by the first Trump administration that Assad had used chemical weapons against his own people, saying, “I’m skeptical,” then two years later said on MSNBC, “Assad is not the enemy of the United States.” Remember, one of her main jobs would be to decide what to tell the president about overseas threats and what to ignore. For what it’s worth, Russia loves her, which ought to raise hackles on the backs of our necks. We might get a woman at the top of Homeland Security— which includes FEMA— whose own constituents in South Dakota argue that when almost 20 inches of rain fell over a few days this past summer and they suffered fatal floods, she never ordered evacuations, and held off deploying her own National Guard to prepare for the calamity and even to deal with its aftermath. According to the Sioux Falls Argus-Leader, governor Kristi Noem flew into the state for only a day during the disaster after speaking in Washington DC to the Faith and Freedom Coalition and appearing on Meet the Press, then flew out again to do another speech at a Lincoln Day dinner in Tennessee. And for the top of the Department of Education, we might get a woman accused of looking the other way as people in her World Wrestling Entertainment company allegedly sexually abused kids. But then again, maybe it doesn’t matter. As Trump told Time Magazine this week, he plans “a virtual closure” of the Department of Education. But we’re still not through. We might get a collection of ex-cons speaking for the United States of America. Last week Trump appointed Peter Navarro to be his senior counselor for trade. Navarro served time earlier this year for contempt of court in connection with the January 6th investigation. That would be Trump’s senior counselor. And he announced his choice as U.S. ambassador to France: Ivanka Trump’s father-in-law Charles Kushner, who served time for witness tampering and tax evasion. But the dirtiest piece of Kushner’s crime was, when his own brother-in-law was preparing to testify against him, he hired a prostitute to lure the brother-in-law to a motel and secretly recorded their sex, then sent the video to the brother-in-law’s wife, who is Kushner’s own sister. Even Chris Christie, who prosecuted the crime as U.S. Attorney, called it “one of the most loathsome, disgusting crimes that I prosecuted.” That would be our ambassador to France. Really?!? Trump couldn’t come up with someone without a criminal record? Of course he has one himself, so why would he care? Maybe Steve Bannon and Paul Manafort will discard their inmate numbers for a White House pass too. Some of Trump’s top picks are inexperienced in the missions they would lead. Some are incompetent. Some are conspiracy theorists. Some are accused in sex scandals. Some are ex-cons. Quite a lineup. In the confirmation process, this isn’t a case where the Senate ought to show its independence by rejecting one or two of Trump’s most extreme or inappropriate candidates for high-level posts. If these people are unfit, unsuited, or sometimes unhinged, it ought to reject every last one of them.

Trump nominee Tulsi Gabbard cozies up to America's enemies

 

Trump nominee Tulsi Gabbard cozies up to America's enemies

Gabbard, Donald Trump’s pick to be director of national intelligence, has been called “Russia’s girlfriend” and parrots Kremlin talking points.

By  Mona Charen

 

  Dec 13, 2024, 12:01pm CST

 

Glance through any post-election voter interview and you will inevitably find someone who mentions “America first” when explaining his or her vote. They understand the term in varying ways, but the throughline is the belief that Donald Trump is a strong leader who will steadfastly pursue America’s national interests.

Sorry, but that is deluded. Even by the strongman standard, Trump is not securing America. His nominees are not just unqualified; they are anti-qualified. If he were attempting to sabotage America’s interests, it’s hard to see how he would do things differently.

Someone who cared about America’s security would never dream of nominating a weekend TV host with no relevant experience in running large organizations to serve as secretary of defense, far less someone who has an alcohol problem, white nationalist sympathies and a history of sexual misconduct. Many Republican senators are minimizing the credible accusations against Peter Hegseth, so perhaps a primer is in order about why character matters.

It matters for all officials if you care about honest, responsible government (an antique taste perhaps). For those in sensitive national security posts though, good character is more than desirable; it’s essential. If a defense secretary is drunk during a crisis, lives can be lost. And if he has a history of sexual assault, it’s possible, even likely, that there may be more unreported episodes out there that could be exploited by an enemy to blackmail him.

The choice of Tulsi Gabbard for director of national intelligence is even less explicable. Her appalling judgment comes into sharp focus this week with the fall of Bashar al-Assad.

Gabbard’s outstanding trait has been warmth toward dictators. In 2017, she traveled to Syria and met with Assad not once but twice. Like so many political pilgrims, Gabbard saw what she wanted to see, not the reality staring her in the face. In 2017, she had every reason to know that Assad had not only used chemical weapons against the Syrian people but had welcomed Russian assistance in his civil war, and that Iranian-allied troops and Russian fighters had conducted operations against American interests in the region.

Gabbard embraces conspiracy theories

No one knows what Assad and Gabbard discussed in their two hours together, but soon after she emerged, Gabbard was expressing skepticism that Assad had really used poison gas, and by the time of her 2020 presidential run, she was citing full-on conspiracy sites that claimed the chemical attacks were false flag operations designed to bring the United States into the war.

Her credulousness — if that’s what it is — looks particularly obscene this week, as stories are coming out about the grotesque human rights abuses committed by Assad in Sednaya prison and at other places around Syria. Within hours of Assad’s departure, people swarmed the prisons in hopes of finding loved ones alive. At Sednaya, they forced open the doors of the prison morgue and found bodies in conditions reminiscent of the Holocaust or the Cambodian genocide.

The New York Times reported some of the grisly details: “One woman shrieked at what she found. Most of the bodies were emaciated, the skin hanging off their bones. The shoulders of one man was covered in the scars of puncture wounds. Another had a thick red scar around his neck — a rope burn, the examiners believed. Yet another man was missing his eyes.”

Some of the women prisoners were found with toddlers in their cells, doubtless the result of prison guards raping them. Rape and torture were routine in the prison Amnesty International labeled a “human slaughterhouse.” Human rights groups vary in their estimates of the number of Syrians murdered by their designer-clothes-clad, Bentley-driving dictator, but the range is between 13,000 and 30,000 dead at Sednaya alone since the uprising against Assad began in 2011. The total of all Syrians killed since 2011 in the civil war is estimated to be 620,000, with 12 million refugees.

Gabbard demonstrated similar credulousness about Russia and Putin, mouthing so many Kremlin talking points that Russian TV hosts referred to her as “Russia’s girlfriend.” She repeated the propaganda that the United States and NATO were responsible for Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, tweeting in 2022 that “This war and suffering could have easily been avoided if Biden Admin/NATO had simply acknowledged Russia’s legitimate security concerns.” She has denounced Volodymyr Zelenskyy as corrupt and repeated the baseless smear (originated in the Kremlin) that the United States was operating biological weapons laboratories in Ukraine and was responsible for sabotaging the Nord Stream gas pipeline.

There is something wrong with Gabbard. The pull of conspiracism — particularly anti-American conspiracism — seems to be her overriding mental frame. In this, she and Trump (and RFK Jr. and so many others) are united. If she were merely a member of Congress, her tropism toward murderous dictators would be disturbing, but as head of America’s intelligence community, it’s utterly insane. This is the furthest thing from America First.

 

PUBLIC NOTICE

 

A toxic brew of money and threats is perverting the courts

Alex Jones and Elon Musk are using MAGA tactics to intimidate judges.

Lisa Needham Dec 13

 

Earlier this week, The Onion’s bid to buy Alex Jones’s Infowars fell apart in a manner that was as perplexing as it was depressing. At the same time, Elon Musk was attacking a Chancery Court judge who ruled he couldn’t have his absurdly bloated Tesla pay package of $56 billion.

These cases aren’t just similar because they involve two of the more repugnant people in the current media landscape. They’re also both symptoms of a judicial system that is in no way able to deal with right-wingers who have access to mountains of cash and rabid followers they can sic on judges.

Back in November, The Onion — also known as “America’s Finest News Source” — won a bankruptcy auction for Infowars and announced a plan to turn it into a “very funny, very stupid” website instead of the misinformation and vitriol-filled hellscape it was under Jones. Infowars was on the auction block because Jones owed the families of victims of the 2012 Sandy Hook shooting nearly $1.5 billion in default judgments for his relentless promotion of the conspiracy theory that the shooting was staged by “crisis actors.”

How Alex Jones dodged accountability again Liz Dye · Jun 17 Read full story

Rather than pay, Jones filed bankruptcy for three of his shell companies, trying to force the Sandy Hook plaintiffs to accept $10 million, or roughly 0.6 percent of what they were awarded. He then dragged the families through bankruptcy court for two years — after having spent three years fighting the initial lawsuits — but was ultimately required to sell Infowars and other assets via bankruptcy auction to satisfy creditors.

Enter The Onion, whose bid was undertaken with the cooperation of the Sandy Hook families.

The Onion’s cash bid of $1.75 million was less than the cash offered by the only other bidder, First United American Companies (FUAC), which bid $3.5 million. Normally, a bankruptcy trustee would be required to accept the highest bid because the job of a trustee is to maximize the recovery for creditors. Here, though, things were more complex than simply awarding Infowars to the highest bidder.

First, the Sandy Hook families agreed to forgo some of the damages they were entitled to as a way to increase the value of The Onion’s bid. Additionally, the other bidder, FUAC, is the company that runs Jones’s grifty online supplement store. But neither of these things seemed to matter to US Bankruptcy Judge Christopher Lopez, who on Tuesday threw out The Onion’s bid, saying the auction left money on the table for the families and that the bankruptcy trustee was required to “scratch and claw and get everything you can for them.”

With this, Lopez essentially told families who backed The Onion deal that they couldn’t have the deal they wanted. Instead, they may be forced to accept Jones’s weird and complicated sham deal where he gets to sell to a friendly party he’s already affiliated with, one that almost certainly would allow Jones to continue operating Infowars.

If this seems the very opposite of fair and a terrible result for families Jones has victimized, that’s because it is. Lopez’s decision leaves the families in the limbo they’ve been in for years, particularly because he declined to actually rule. Instead, he said he didn’t want another auction and told the bankruptcy trustee to return in 30 days with a plan. It’s a triumph of form over function, of procedural niceties over actual fairness.

Now, the question is how much more the families can endure. They spent years being attacked by Jones and his listeners, followed by years of litigation. Besides the fight in bankruptcy court, Jones is also appealing the underlying judgments themselves, saying his free speech rights were violated. Earlier this month, a Connecticut appellate court upheld most of the verdict against Jones, but he’s vowed to take that to the state supreme court. Despite declaring bankruptcy and whining that he’s broke, Jones seems to have ample funds available to weaponize the courts against the families. All the while, Jones has complained that the cases were rigged against him and called the Connecticut judge a tyrant. During the Texas case, another Infowars host showed a picture of that judge in flames.

But when it comes to ample funds, Jones can’t hold a candle to Elon Musk.

Trump plots to steal Congress's budget authority Liz Dye · Dec 11 Read full story

Besides Musk’s courtroom efforts to eliminate the National Labor Relations Board and his lawfare on organizations that report on how X has turned into a Nazi cesspool under his ownership, he’s also been relentlessly litigating against some shareholders who argued that the $56 billion Tesla granted him in 2018 was improper, because the board members who gave him that staggering sum were not independent from him. In fact, the group that put together the compensation package included Tesla’s general counsel, who just happened to be Musk’s former divorce attorney and someone who loves Musk so much he cried during a deposition in the case.

Delaware Chancery Court Chancellor Kathaleen St. J. McCormick has now twice ruled against Musk, leading Musk to go on X and accuse her of “absolute corruption” and to call her “totally crazy” and a “radical far left activist cosplaying as a judge.”

Musk’s fans have joined in, calling her insane. Several dozen law professors and lawyers have asked the Delaware State Bar Association to defend McCormick, in part because the Delaware Judges’ Code of Judicial Conduct prohibits her from speaking out about the attacks.

In the future, Musk likely won’t have to deal with McCormick anyway. He’s reincorporated both Tesla and SpaceX in Texas. That state has a new business court with judges appointed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott and will likely be highly favorable to Musk. 

Trump helped normalize attacks on judges

Deep pockets have allowed both Jones and Musk to drag out cases and to go scorched earth against any opponents they face. To be fair, that’s always been the case for rich litigants. But the constant attacks on judges that rule against them — attacks that seem to come with no real consequences — are a product of the Donald Trump era.

It isn’t just that Trump was able to exploit the weaknesses in the judicial system for long enough to win the 2024 election, a victory that all but ensures he will never suffer any consequences for his actions, no matter how criminal. It’s also that Trump ushered in a new age and created a permission structure where any adverse ruling from a judge is grounds for personal attacks and cries of corruption.

Even before being elected president in 2016, Trump attacked the federal judge, Gonzalo Curiel, who was handling the Trump University fraud case. Trump said Curiel was being unfair because he is Mexican and was mad Trump was campaigning on building the wall. Back then, those comments were shocking enough that even other Republicans criticized Trump. As time went on, though, they fell in line and started mimicking Trump’s behavior.

 

The J. Edgar Hoover precedent for weaponizing the FBI Aaron Rupar and Thor Benson · Dec 9 Read full story

In 2023, Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik filed an ethics complaint against New York state judge Arthur Engoron, who presided over Trump’s business fraud case, saying Engoron was biased. Stefanik also joined in on Trump’s attacks on Engoron’s law clerk.

After Trump was convicted earlier this year of 34 felony counts for falsification of business records, GOP Sen. Ted Budd said Judge Juan Merchan’s jury instructions were unconstitutional and “I would put nothing past him at this point.” Matt Gaetz called the verdict “the corrupt result of a corrupt trial, a corrupt judge, and a corrupt DA.” Ted Cruz whined that Merchan "should have worn a Biden campaign hat while he sat on the bench."

Trump’s anonymous supporters often take another tack and actively threaten judges, a practice that increased dramatically after Trump lost the 2020 election. Reuters found serious threats against federal judges went from 220 in 2020 to 457 in 2023. After Judge Lewis Kaplan oversaw E. Jean Carroll’s defamation suit against Trump, a poster on a pro-Trump site called for him to be hung for treason.

The only way for judges to steer clear of the ire of people like Jones, Musk, and Trump — and their supporters — is to rule in their favor. Any other outcome is deemed rigged and corrupt. This combination of wealth and the ability to deploy conspiracy-minded violent followers is unprecedented and increasingly dangerous, and the courts aren’t equipped to deal with it. But if we don’t figure it out soon, there won’t be much of a judicial system left for the rest of us.