Donald Trump's lawyers try to get hush-money case tossed as a mistrial when Stormy Daniels makes a brief mention of the word "condom" from the witness stand

Stormy Daniels testifies in Trump hush-money trial (AP)

Donald Trump's lawyers tried to  have his New York hush-money case declared a mistrial when former porn star Stormy Daniels mentioned on the witness stand a condom, or lack thereof, as part of her alleged sexual encounter with Trump during  a celebrity golf event near Lake Tahoe, NV. That's from a report at The New Republic (TNR) about Daniels' widely anticipated testimony yesterday. Judge Juan Merchan denied the motion for a mistrial.

Under the headline "Trump Desperately Tries to Toss Entire Case After Stormy Condom Detail; Stormy Daniels testified in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial and revealed some details about the night of the alleged sexual encounter," TNR's Hafiz Rashid reports;

Stormy Daniels’ testimony in Donald Trump’s hush-money trial Tuesday went too far and warrants a mistrial, his lawyers argued. Part of the culprit? A detail about condoms on the night of the alleged sexual encounter.

The adult film actress testified about her affair with Trump in 2006, including some salacious details, and according to Trump’s lawyer Todd Blanche, she told a story that was “way different” from her previous descriptions of her time with Trump.

According to Blanche, Daniels’ account of Trump not wearing a condom, of Daniels being blacked out, “the height of the two individuals,” the spacing in the room, and “the fact of the bodyguard not being in the room” were different from the consensual encounter Daniels described in news interviews in 2016.

“That’s not the story that we heard today,” Blanche said to Judge Juan Merchan, adding that Daniels’ testimony Tuesday was a “completely different story.”

“How can you unring the bell?” Blanche argued.

The prosecution disputed that Daniels' story on the stand was different from what she had stated on other occasions. Rashid writes:

Prosecutor Susan Hoffinger responded that Daniels’s testimony was “highly probative” of Trump’s intent, and said it’s “not true” that Daniels was telling a new story, since the actress had previously spoken about the lack of a condom.

“This is not new. This is not a new account,” Hoffinger said. “Their position that this is an entirely new story is not accurate.”

Merchan said that he did agree with Blanche’s account that some things should not have been said and that Daniels as a witness was a “little difficult to control,” but that a mistrial still wasn’t warranted. In fact, he told Blanche that Trump’s legal team should have made more objections to Daniels’stestimony.

“I will also note that I was surprised that there weren’t more objections” coming from the defense table, Merchan said, adding that the defense needs to take more responsibility.

“I do not believe we have reached the point that a mistrial is in order,” Merchan said, noting, “The more times a story has been changed,” the more opportunities Trump’s team would have to cross-examine Daniels.

Trump is being tried on 34 felony counts for allegedly falsifying business records with the intent to further an underlying crime by paying off Daniels to cover up their affair through his fixer, Michael Cohen, prior to the 2016 election. The details Daniels provided in court Tuesday of their sexual affair leave Trump with little room to reject her claims under penalty of perjury. He is subject to a gag order in the case that he has already violated 10 times to the tune of $10,000 in fines, and has been warned that the next violation will send him to jail.

TIME interview unmasks Donald Trump as an epic liar who knows zero about governing, but MAGA types think he would make a good president? Sheesh!

(Salon)

 

Part One

We long have known that Donald Trump is a liar of epic proportions; The Washington Post even has documented the number of times Trump made false or misleading statements during hi first term as president. (For the record, the number of times Trump made such statements over a four-year period was 30,573.) Thanks to last week's cover-story interview with TIME magazine, we now have insight on why Trump lies so often. 

Throughout the interview, TIME journalist Eric Cortellessa -- who obviously is much smarter than Trump and knows more about issues related to governance -- asks Trump about his plans for governing in a possible second term. In most instances, Trump gives an answer that might best be described as "fatuous" or "vapid." When Cortellessa presents a followup question with more specifics, Trump is lost, out of his element. At that point, the former president throws some bull feces against the wall, in hopes it will stick. Cortellessa then presents more facts, and Trump is exposed -- he cannot carry on a semi-intelligent conversation about matters that should be second nature for a serious presidential candidate.

As the interview moves long, we realize that Trump is NOT a serious candidate. We do not find out explicitly why Trump isn't serious about being president. But it becomes clear when we consider the whole point of Cortellessa's interview -- he is not asking about the election or the campaign; he wants to know about Trump's plans for governing. And it soon becomes obvious that Trump does not plan to govern during a second term.

As Trump has said on multiple occasions, his plan is to make a second term about seeking retribution against his perceived political enemies -- the people he blames for his mounting legal problems. Why prepare for an interview about governing when you have no plans to govern? Our guess is that Trump is not even interested in governing -- carrying out the basic functions of the presidency -- so he comes across as an embarrassing empty vessel when a journalist who does care about the presidency grills him on the subject. 

In essence, Trump is revealed as the imposter candidate. We are left not knowing why he is seeking the job, but it surely is not because he wants to do the work of being president. He proves that he is unqualified and disqualified (under the U.S. Constitution's insurrection clause, even though the US. Supreme let him off the hook in a case where the Colorado Supreme Court had correctly blocked him from appearing on the state's ballot due to Trump's actions related to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol, which resulted in death and bloodshed.

How bad, and clueless, does Trump come across in the TIME nterview? CNN provides a top-notch analysis under the headline "Trump’s bombardment of dishonesty: Fact-checking 32 of his false claims to TIME."This is not the first time the network and its website have prepared such a report. In February 2024, they published a piece titled "Trump's speech at CPAC 2024 was packed with lies, indicating he knowingly deceives his MAGA crowds because he assumes they won't use critical thinking." As the headline suggests, it is an analysis of all the lies Trump laid on an audience of right-wing influencers at the annual CPAC gathering.

Covering Trump's dishonest public utterances has become routine business for CNN reporters and editors, so they know the drill. What did they come up with in their fact check on Trump's interview  with TIME? Let's take a look at the piece, written by Daniel Dale:

Donald Trump's obsession with Nazis is getting worse, not better, and a weekend gala in Florida suggests the GOP is ready to march with their Hitleresque leader

(Playground.com)

 

Donald Trump long has held an obsession with Nazis (see here, here, and here.) Trump's words in a speech over the weekend during an event at Mar-a-Lago indicate his fascination with Adolph Hitler is getting worse, not better. For one thing, Trump's fellow Republicans seem happy to join him in exulting the glories of Nazism. This is a man and a party that some Americans think are fit to run our country? If MAGA types don't wake up and pay attention to what Trump and other Republicans actually say and do, we are going to wake up one day with brown shirts marching down Pennsylvania Avenue.

How alarming is Trump's infatuation with Nazis? CNN's Dean Obeidallah, an attorney and multimedia journalist, examines that question under the headline  "The latest example of Trump’s seeming obsession with Nazism." Obeidallah writes:

At the Republican National Committee’s annual retreat this weekend, former President Donald Trump took the stage to a recording of the national anthem sung by the “J6 Prison Choir,” whose members were incarcerated for taking part in a violent effort to keep Trump in power following his loss in the 2020 election.

It’s not the first time Trump has kicked off an event by playing this song that celebrates the January 6, 2021, attackers. Every time he does, it should disgust patriotic Americans. But that wasn’t even the most offensive thing Trump did at Saturday’s private luncheon for donors, which was held at his Mar-a-Lago club.

Remember when presidential candidates were able to keep foul language out of their speeches while managing to minimize admiring glances toward the specter of Hitler? Trump is helping to ensure those days, when candidates showed at least a smidgen of dignity and class, are long gone. Obeidallah writes, noting that Trump's celebration of Jan.6 thugs was not the only repulsive part of his  act:

Trump launched into a profanity-laced tirade in which he declared — despicably — that President Joe Biden was running a “Gestapo administration,” invoking the name of the notorious Nazi political police, infamous (as the Holocaust Encyclopedia explains) for “organized deportations of Jews from across Europe to ghettos, concentration camps, killing sites, and killing centers.”

Trump’s reprehensible remark, made to a room packed with individuals who had donated $40,000 or more to the Republican National Committee, was part of a 90-minute harangue in which he groused indignantly over having been charged with 88 felonies across four different jurisdictions — something he often does publicly and loudly. Prosecutors at his current trial underway in New York City allege that the former president was at the center of what they have called an elaborate “election fraud” that involved covering up the payment of hush money to adult film actress Stormy Daniels. Trump denies the allegations.

Just how gross, and warped, were Trump's words and actions? Obeidallah tries to sort it out:

It’s hard to catalog all the ways in which likening the current administration to the brutal Gestapo is so deeply offensive and so off the mark, including the casual use of language that invokes Nazis – something Trump does all too often.

For one thing, it trivializes the history of the Holocaust and the perpetrators of the unspeakable crimes carried out by Adolf Hitler and his followers. For another, there is not a scintilla of evidence that the current administration harbors authoritarian tendencies. But, as is so often the case with Trump, he tarnishes the object of his scorn with the failings that he himself could reasonably be accused of. (Psychologists, I believe, call that "projection.")

It was Trump, after all, who has said that he would be a dictator on “day one” of his administration. It is Trump whose actions and statements increasingly seem to invoke authoritarianism as the presidential campaign marches on. And the fact is, there is one major-party presidential candidate who repeatedly has invoked Nazi language — and it’s not Biden.

In December, Trump caused a firestorm when he parroted language used by Hitler by describing migrants as “poisoning the blood” of the United States. The previous month, Trump described his political opponents as “vermin,” which concerned many given that dehumanizing term has antisemitic connotations and was employed in Nazi rhetoric. Scholars of the Holocaust have pointed to Hitler’s manifesto Mein Kampf and his speeches in which he called for racial purity and said German blood was being “poisoned” by Jews.

Trump hasn’t apologized for using such language. Instead, in December, he told supporters at a rally in Iowa, “I never read Mein Kampf. Trump then added that Hitler used the term “poisoning the blood” of the country “in a much different way.” He then repeated the same dangerous rhetoric about migrants, saying, “They’re destroying the blood of the country. They’re destroying the fabric of our country, and we’re going to have to get them out.”

Perhaps the worst part was that other Republicans at the gala event did not seem to have a problem with Trump echoing "the good old days" of Hitler. In fact, they seemed eager to join in and march right behind him. That one of our two major political parties has become enthralled with a Nazi fantasizer and his compliant acolytes suggests we might be in for some dark days if the electorate does not wake up and take the 2024 presidential election seriously? The reality? We only have one functioning party that is capable of leading, and that is the Democrats. That means, whether you lean left or right, Joe Biden is the only realistic choice for president. A vote for anyone else, is a vote for Trump and the chaos and worldwide instability he seems anxious to bring, according to his own words and actions. In short, Trump already has proven he cannot run the White House, so why would anyone think he deserves a second chance? Given what we now know about Trump's personal issues with drug abuse, it should raise even more concerns about his fitness for office.

The GOP gala over the weekend provided more evidence that the postmodern Republican Party has become little more than a glorified dumpster fire. Obeidallah spells out the disturbing reality:

Was there an uproar among the big GOP donors at Saturday’s event over Trump deploying the word “Gestapo” or over his Nazi-like language at a time when we are seeing an alarming spike in antisemitism across the United States? Have Republican leaders denounced this rhetoric? Not that I’ve seen, and I don’t expect to hear them publicly criticize their presumptive presidential nominee and undisputed leader of their party. Not if past is prologue.

Interestingly, Trump’s celebration of those who waged the January 6 attack conjures up Hitler’s tactics after his own attempted coup in 1923 known as the Beer Hall Putsch — a thwarted attempt by the would-be dictator and his followers to violently overthrow the government of the German state of Bavaria.

Hitler would publicly honor those killed in that failed attempt to seize power by making them martyrs for the cause and celebrating them publicly as heroes. Hitler became chancellor of Germany 10 years later in 1933, where one of the first orders of business was the formation of the Gestapo, the German secret police, under the leadership of his loyal aide Hermann Göring.

At the GOP event Saturday, Trump offered anyone who would donate $1 million a chance to speak at the podium. Reportedly, three people took Trump up on his offer. One of those donors claimed that God chose Trump to lead the country.

And while the former president was speaking Saturday, the RNC co-chair, his daughter-in-law Lara Trump, presented Trump with a plaque commemorating the success on the Billboard music charts of the song by the January 6 attackers. Last week, TIME magazine published an interview in which Trump once again praised the January 6 attackers, some of whom brutally beat up police officers, as “patriots” and vowed that if re-elected he would consider pardoning those still in jail for that attack.

All this leaves me asking myself once again which is the presidential candidate who loves democracy and our Constitution, and which is seeking to pull us backward into dark and dangerous times.

The Access Hollywood tape rises from the ether at New York hush-money trial, serving as a reminder that Trump is grossly unqualified to be president, and his followers are drunk on some mighty powerful Kool-Aid

Donald Trump on Access Hollywood tape (NBC)

The video that should have ended Donald Trump's political career came back to bite him last week when it was raised at his New York hush-money trial. The topic didn't bite Trump hard enough because he's still standing as a major political figure, and he's conducting a 2024 presidential campaign that threatens to end American democracy and throw the country, and the world, into chaos and instability.

The video in question caught Trump bragging about grabbing women in private parts of their bodies on Access Hollywood, It apparently has not had its full effect because chunks of the American electorate are too weak minded or have such shaky ethics that they are willing to forgive most any outrage that Trump commits. The infamous video serves as a reminder that Trump is an overgrown toddler -- who treats others with disrespect, dishonesty, and a disregard for the law (in this instance, Trump was caught on tape engaging in schoolboy braggadocio about committing sexual assault.) Now that the tape has come up in the hush-money case, which involves Trump's alleged extramarital adventures with a porn star, it could hang over the presidential election  until early November and swing the election against him.

Zachary B. Wolf, senior political writer at CNN, examines the possible impact of the Access Hollywood tape under the headline "The moment Trump defied gravity is coming back to haunt him." Wolf writes:

Being elected president shortly after surviving the publication of the leaked Access Hollywood tape in 2016 is the moment in which Donald Trump defied political gravity.

A politician was heard on tape saying truly disgusting things about women and yet was still elevated by voters to the nation's highest office. Trump’s ability to survive that embarrassing episode echoes in his re-ascendance to the Republican presidential nomination for a third time, despite losing the 2020 election and then trying to overturn the results.

It’s easy to forget how dumbfounding it was to hear Trump on that tape for the first time and how many Republicans who called on him to drop out of the presidential race back then now support him.

If the embarrassing tape somehow represents Trump’s greatest triumph, it is also something that continues to haunt him, as it became the focus of his hush-money criminal trial in New York last Friday.

The Access Hollywood tape came up in the hush-money trial during the testimony of former Trump press secretary Hope Hicks. She was unable, or unwilling, to sugarcoat just how damning the tape was for Trump's political future. Now, we know, via trial evidence, that Trump was determined to pay off former porn star Stormy Daniels, to buy her silence regarding an article in the National Enquirer that threatened to torpedo Trump's political hopes. because it likely would have come on the heels of the Access Hollywood video. In short, Trump was willing to pay a porn star in order to minimize the impact of a video in which he brags about committing sexual assault. Does anyone with functioning brain cells really believe such an individual is fit to serve in the White House? This is a guy who simply does not have the dignity and self-control to stay out of sex-related imbroglios -- not to mention all kinds of other dubious activities that form the basis for the other three pending criminal cases against him. Wolf writes:

Trump’s 2016 victory in the Electoral College seems only more improbable in the retelling. Hicks, his former close aide, told jurors about what must have been the unbelievably awkward moment she read a transcript of the Access Hollywood tape – in which he brags about being able to grope women – to her boss.

“This was a crisis,” she said of the tape's impact on the campaign. It’s sordid stuff, and the outlines were generally known even without Hicks’ testimony on Friday. The judge in the case ruled at the start of the trial that the tape itself can’t be played in court, but it has been described.

It is worth revisiting the earthquake the Access Hollywood tape set off in the 2016 campaign. When the video came out, it left many people speechless.

The tape was recorded in 2005, and it was leaked to The Washington Post, which published the video on October 7, 2016, a little more than a month before Election Day. Trump is heard talking about trying, unsuccessfully, to “move on” an unnamed, married woman, and then crassly talks about his uncontrollable desire to kiss an actress he is about to meet with then Access Hollywood host Billy Bush.

“When you’re a star, they let you do it,” he told Bush. “You can do anything. Grab ‘em by the p****.”

Women went to the polls and voted for Trump after hearing this? Men who supposedly care about women supported Trump then, and still support him now, despite hearing those ghastly words?  It makes you wonder if many on the far right have sold what's left of their souls to enjoy the status of entering MAGA World. Is there really that much status to it? As Wolf writes, fallout from the tape was immediate and seemingly sincere. In fact the language on the tape was so gross that even Trump apologized, perhaps a first for him:

Multiple Republicans who today are completely behind Trump, like Sen. Mike Lee of Utah, called on him in 2016 to immediately step down. The perception inside Trump’s inner circle was that most Republican lawmakers wanted him off the ticket, former New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie later wrote in a memoir.

Then-House Speaker Paul Ryan said he was “sickened.” And then-Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus thought Trump should either resign or would lose in a landslide, according to Christie and then-Trump aide Steve Bannon.

Even Trump’s wife, Melania, who rarely issues public statements, expressed her disgust with the words on the tape, although she would later write it off as “boy talk.”

Things were so grim back then that Trump issued what is probably the only apology of his political career in a straight-to-camera video posted on Twitter, now X, in which he admits the tape is real and takes responsibility.

“I said it. I was wrong. And I apologize,” Trump said, although he made it clear he would not leave the race. Being exposed to people on the campaign trail had changed him, Trump said, before trying to draw an equivalence between his words and allegations against former President Bill Clinton.

I’ve written before about how rare it is to hear such a thing from Trump.

Hillary Clinton, Trump's opponent in 2016, wound up dealing with her own set of peculiar problems, and it has never been fully clear how they came about:

Trump’s Democratic rival in 2016, Hillary Clinton, faced her own unwanted surprises, the most important of which was former FBI Director James Comey’s announcement that July that she was “careless” in handling classified data on email.

Worse for Clinton, on October 28 of that year, a little more than a week before Election Day, Comey told Congress the FBI was reviewing emails related to Clinton’s personal server found on the laptop of Anthony Weiner, a disgraced former congressman married to her top aide.

Clinton would go on to get the vote of a larger number of people, but Trump, surprising even himself, would get the White House.

How did the Access Hollywood tape rise from the dust in the hush-money case. Wolf has details:

Now, the Access Hollywood tape is back. A key to prosecutors’ case against Trump is their allegation that he and his former fixer Michael Cohen agreed to pay off adult-film star Stormy Daniels to influence the 2016 presidential election.

Trump had to tamp down on any allegations of impropriety, such as having an alleged affair with a porn star while his wife was pregnant. That led to the hush money Cohen paid to Daniels.

Cohen served time in federal prison for violating campaign finance law with the payments. The crime Trump is accused of is falsifying business records related to his reimbursement of Cohen after the election.

Meanwhile, Trump came up with some outlandish excuses in an apparent effort to draw attention away from his words that were caught on tape:

Trump has since questioned whether it was his voice on the tape, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Martin reported for The New York Times in 2017. More recently, Trump was asked in May 2023 about the tape by CNN’s Kaitlan Collins. He tried to parse the words in the tape.

“I said, ‘women let you,’” he told Collins. “I didn’t say ‘grab,’” he said, misquoting the tape.  Trump's attempt at obfuscation did not fly very well in TV land.

This was Trump resorting to his No. 1 tactic -- lying -- when trying to extricate himself from trouble that a wiser man (or woman) would have easily avoided. Supporters actually think an inveterate liar is fit to serve as president. If that's the case, it makes you wonder about the MAGAs' own honesty -- or lack thereof.

The tape, Wolf writes, helped Republicans fall deeper into the pit that Donald Trump dug for them:

Bannon would later tell former CBS journalist Charlie Rose that the Access Hollywood  moment was important because it separated Republicans into those who would be loyal to Trump versus those who were part of the mainstream. Christie lost out on a Cabinet position in Trump’s administration due to his revulsion of the tape, Bannon told Rose.(We should note that Steve Bannon doesn't even seem to know how take a shower, so perhaps we should not take his words too seriously.)

In the years since, loyalty to Trump has become an increasingly important marker among Republicans as Trump beat back a deep field of presidential primary challengers.

Perceived loyalty to Trump could become a de facto requirement for many federal workers if he wins in 2024 and carries through with a plan to reclassify a large portion of the federal bureaucracy as political appointees, according a recent report by CNN’s investigative team.

Will the arisen Access Hollywood tape wind up haunting Trump and his campaign. All sentient beings, in the U.S. and around the world, should hope so. Trump and his ridiculous MAGA movement are a pox on America's body politic, and they need to be wiped from our radar permanently. Wolf summarizes:

If the tape is evidence of Trump’s ability to defy political gravity, it has also contributed to his humbling in other areas.

A deposition in which he was asked about the tape was played for jurors who later found him liable for sexually abusing E. Jean Carroll, a former magazine columnist, in a New York department store in the 1990s. Juries ordered Trump to pay more than $80 million for defaming her, although he has appealed those decisions.

Donald Trump still can't plainly state that he will accept the 2024 election results, suggesting another Jan. 6-style bloodbath probably is in our future

Will Donald Trump cause another Jan. 6? (NBC)

 

What if a presidential candidate is asked this straightforward question: "Will you accept the results if the vote count shows you lost?" The answer should be a simple "yes." But Donald Trump, now in his third presidential campaign, still can't seem to give that simple answer. In a piece at The New Republic, Hafiz Rashid writes that this says a lot about Trump as a person -- and none of it is good. What does it tell us about the presumptive Republican Party nominee?

(1) He's a sore loser;

(2) He puts his own grievances, which might have no basis in fact, over the good of the country;

(3) He doesn't trust American institutions, including the electoral system, which has no history of producing fraudulent results -- certainly not in the past 60-plus years. (The 1960 election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon produced signs of possible vote fraud that tended to favor Kennedy in Illinois. An investigation produced evidence of voting irregularities, but they were determined not to be significant enough to change the outcome -- and Kennedy was declared the winner.)

(4) Trump thinks that he, and he alone, can determine whether a nationwide election was "honest," by his standards -- whatever they are;

(5) Trump's comments suggest that an election can only be "honest" if he wins;

(6) Trump has hinted that he is willing to put the country through another Jan. 6-style nightmare if he does not like the way the 2024 election turns out?

Under the headline "Trump Explains Exactly What He’d Do if He Loses the Next Election; Donald Trump is revealing the truth about who he is," Rashid writes:

Donald Trump still can’t give a straight answer on whether he’d accept the results if he loses the election.

In an interview with the Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel Wednesday -- on a day off from his hush-money trial in New York -- the former president said he’d only accept a loss in November’s presidential election “if everything’s honest.”

How would Trump, one of the candidates, make that determination. He suggests that he alone would make it, and he only would be happy with a result where he wins. Is this more evidence that Trump is a malignant narcissist, perhaps with a touch of histrionic personality disorder? Our best guess is "yes." Rashid writes:

“If everything’s honest, I’d gladly accept the results,” Trump said. “If it’s not, you have to fight for the right of the country. But if everything’s honest, which we anticipate it will be—a lot of changes have been made over the last few years—but if everything’s honest, I will absolutely accept the results.”

Does that sound convincing to you? It sounds like B.S. to me. Here is how Rashid views Trump's equivocations:

That’s a big caveat, leaving him plenty of wiggle room to claim “dishonesty!” if Joe Biden gets more votes. Trump has never said that he’d accept election results where he didn’t win. In 2016, he complained of a “rigged election” in August, which he would repeat often on the campaign trail, and then just weeks before November’s election, he again claimed he’d accept the results “if I win.”

In 2020, Trump didn’t concede in his loss to Biden and fought the results every step of the way, from his lawyers attempting fake elector schemes to arguably inciting an insurrection at the Capitol building on the day the country’s election results were certified. Trump’s refusal to acknowledge his election loss spawned what is known as the Big Lie: that he was the legitimate winner in 2020 and the election was stolen from him. Many of his faithful supporters still believe it in earnest. 

Trump’s historical and recent comments do not bode well for November. He has hinted at another insurrection attempt if he loses, and he still hasn’t faced consequences for his last attempt, thanks to the Supreme Court. The far right has signaled its willingness to react with violence, including even some politicians. Whether Trump wins or loses, the scenarios don’t look good.

The exit of two Black attorneys in Austin indicates the efforts of Alabama's Balch & Bingham law firm to build a beachhead in Texas are on the verge of collapsing

Kimano A. Edwards and Ikenna Okoro

Two prominent African-American attorneys have left the Austin, TX, office of the Birmingham-based Balch & Bingham law firm, according to a report at banbalch.com, which which operates under the banner of the CDLU public charity and advocacy group.

The most recent moves leave Balch with only two attorneys in Texas, a sign that the firm's efforts to build a major presence in the Lone Star State are on the verge of collapse.

Balch & Bingham has been losing lawyers for months in the wake of scandals involving several clients, including Atlanta-based Southern Company, the nation's second largest utility, and its subsidiary, Alabama Power  K.B. Forbes, publisher of Ban Balch and CEO of the CDLU, reports under the headline "African Americans Flee Balch & Bingham; Austin Office Left with Two Attorneys. Forbes writes:

The death spiral continues.

After much fanfare two years ago, two African American attorneys have left the embattled and alleged racist law firm, Balch & Bingham.

Kimano A. Edwards and Ikenna Okoro, two rising attorneys (pictured above) have dumped Balch.

Both appear to have joined Balch in August of 2022, and lasted about 18 months.

Edwards has joined Morgan & Morgan in Jacksonville, while Okoro left Balch’s Austin, Texas office.

Joining Okoro’s exit out of Austin is Balch Partner Bryan J. Moore who was hired in June of 2022.

Moore’s exit was in the past month and has now left Balch with only two attorneys in Texas, an utter collapse of the once prestigious silk-stocking law firm in the Lone Star State.

TIME interview made Donald Trump's plans for a possible second term a hot topic, but it's hard to know what they are when he doesn't know them himself

Donald Trump fires up the faithful (AP)

Thanks to a cover-story interview in TIME magazine, Donald Trump's plans for a possible second term have been a popular topic of political discussion this week. But Timothy Noah, reporting at The New Republic (TNR), says it's hard to get a grip on Trump's plans when the candidate himself doesn't know what they are. 

Like so many issues surrounding Trump, this one is a mix of the comic and the absurd. The TNR headline sets the proper tone: "What Would Trump Do in a Second Term? Even He Has No Clue; Seriously. He was asked this question by TIME magazine, and responded with waffling, gibberish, and not a single mention of legislation." Noah gets into the spirit of things when he writes:

TIME magazine has just published a cover story about what Donald Trump will do if he wins the presidency. It’s an important question, and staff writer Eric Cortellessa, with whom I’ve worked in the past, is as smart, tough, and hardworking a reporter as any you’ll find.

But Cortellessa doesn’t get the goods here, because there are no goods to get. We have very little idea what Trump will do as president because Trump himself has very little idea.

Don’t get me wrong. I fear a Trump presidency as much as the next person, and the few things we do know are pretty ghastly. Trump intends to direct Justice Department prosecutions from the Oval Office, and he won’t rule out firing any U.S. attorney who refuses to comply. (“It depends on the situation, honestly,” he told Cortellessa.) Trump intends to use the National Guard and the military to round up undocumented immigrants en masse, in the latter case, in violation of the Posse Comitatus Act. (“These aren’t civilians,” he said. “These are people that aren’t legally in our country.” He probably meant “citizens,” but the statute makes no distinction between citizens and non-citizens.) Trump intends to slap a 10 percent tariff on all foreign imports. (“It may be more than that. It may be a derivative of that.”) Trump was coy with Cortellessa about whether he’ll gut the civil service by reimposing his Schedule F executive order (“Civil service is both very good and very bad”), but it seems pretty clear he’ll fire any civil servants he doesn’t like. Did you go to jail for your part in the insurrection of January 6, 2020? Then January 20 could be your lucky day, because when Cortellessa asked Trump whether he’s considering a blanket pardon, Trump answered, “Yes, absolutely.”

Trump might sound decisive, but Noah says that is mostly a facade. In fact, he writes, when it comes to Trump and policy, "there is no there there":

But Trump doesn’t have a program in any conventional sense of the word. In the interview, he failed to describe a single piece of legislation he’ll ask Congress to pass, presumably because he finds distasteful the idea of asking Congress (or anyone) for anything. (Trump’s “team,” Cortellessa notes, has mentioned two bills: an immigration bill and an extension of the 2017 tax cut.) Campaign aides told Cortellessa that Trump will contest the 1974 Impoundment Control Act so that Trump can withhold appropriated funds, but we have no idea what funds Trump will choose to impound illegally. We know Trump intends to expand executive power, but to what end we don’t know. There’s an “issues” tab on Trump’s campaign website, but it’s mostly there to puff what Trump did as president and to crap on what Joe Biden has done as president, with only the vaguest discussion of what Trump will do in a second term. I doubt Trump has read it.

None of this should surprise anybody. Trump has never demonstrated much relish for being president; to him, it’s merely the heavy price one pays for the narcissistic thrill of holding Nuremberg-style political rallies. Trump never expected to win in 2016. In 2020 he couldn’t accept that he’d lost, and even at this late date Trump told Cortellessa he “wouldn’t feel good about” hiring someone to his campaign staff who thinks Biden won. The only reason Trump is running for president again is to show that he can win, and if he doesn’t win he will once again refuse to acknowledge losing.

This is a man who was incapable, during the 2020 election, of articulating what he intended to do if granted a second term. Asked that question by Peter Baker of The New York Times, Trump said:

But so I think, I think it would be, I think it would be very, very, I think we’d have a very, very solid, we would continue what we’re doing, we’d solidify what we’ve done, and we have other things on our plate that we want to get done.”

Good grief, that paragraph makes it sound like Trump really does have dementia, as has been reported at a number of news sites.  Being leader of the dysfunctional Republican Party Noah writes, does not help Trump become a model of clarity:

The GOP, you may recall, didn’t bother to produce a party platform in 2020, quite obviously because Trump and his handlers had no clue what it should say. Instead, the Republican National Committee produced a vaguely Stalinist statement saying its positions would be whatever Trump decided them to be at some future date. Trump has now had four years to think about it and he still doesn’t know what he wants to do if re-elected president. Trump’s daughter-in-law Lara, who is now co-chair of the Republican National Committee, was asked last month whether there will be a party platform in 2024. Her reply was a vague, “Yeah, I think so.” That sounds to me like a soft “no.”

I’m not saying Trump will do nothing if elected. The Heritage Foundation, among others, has stepped in to fill the void with its Project 2025 Mandate for Leadership, which delivers to Heritage’s corporate and other wealthy donors the promise of tax cuts and stymied regulation. Mandate calls for a regressive tax code with two marginal rates at 15 and 30 percent, a reduction of the corporate tax from 21 percent to 18 percent, and a reduction of the top capital gains rate from 20 percent to 15 percent. As for regulation, Mandate (echoing Steve Bannon) calls for “deconstructing the centralized administrative state,” code for “gum up the regulatory gears.” Trump will do everything he can to enact these policies, because (except on trade) he always does the business lobby’s bidding.

But even with his highly ideological staff and the Heritage Foundation pulling the marionette strings, Trump won’t likely get much done—not if his first administration is any guide.

Trump's history of "not getting stuff done" looks particularly bleak -- you might say embarrassing -- when viewed beside Joe Biden's accomplishments as president. In fairness to Trump, Biden has the advantage, as a Democrat, of leading a political party that actually is functional. Noah writes:

The Washington Monthly has posted a highly detailed series of essays (and a “presidential accomplishments index”) comparing Trump and Biden based entirely on the quantity of things they got done, setting aside the question of whether they were good or bad. It isn’t even close. In 14 out of 22 categories Biden accomplished more than Trump. Trump accomplished more than Biden in only three categories—taxes, courts, and social issues—all very much to the bad, of course. (The prospect that with a second term Trump may end up appointing more than half the Supreme Court is reason enough to race to the polls to vote Democratic.) Trump tied Biden in five categories—immigration, veterans, work and family, crime, and cannabis—but except for immigration, none of these represents a policy Trump is running on in 2024.

It’s been noted that Trump, if elected, will enter the White House with more yes-men (and yes-women), a more compliant Republican caucus in Congress, and greater experience at navigating Washington. That’s all true. He will also enter the White House with more of a taste for retribution. He will do his best to undermine democracy, but to what end (apart from personal aggrandizement) is mostly unknown. Trump will improvise, contemptibly, because his instincts are contemptible. But there won’t be much of a plan. That would be good news were it not the case that it’s bound to be worse than we imagine. Trump doesn’t do pleasant surprises. He wouldn’t know how.