Donald Trump, a man renowned for craving adulation and approval, has this week been confronted with the disdain of Manhattanites called as prospective jurors in his New York criminal trial for allegedly falsifying business records to cover up a hush-money payment to porn star Stormy Daniels. No wonder he’s apparently trying to sleep through the proceedings.
While no jurors were selected on Monday — with dozens excused after indicating they could not be fair and impartial in weighing the 34 felony charges against Trump — seven made the cut on Tuesday. (The court will need 18 people to qualify in all: 12 jurors and six alternates.) However, more were dismissed after questions arose about content they had shared on social media that disparaged the former president, and Trump himself was not spared from hearing what they had posted.
One potential juror ruled out on Tuesday was a man who recently shared an AI-generated video of Trump saying “I’m dumb as fuck,” according to reporter Josh Kovensky of Talking Points Memo. The man had evidently tried to conceal his opinion of Trump during earlier questioning, per The New York Times, and protested that the video was only something he “reposted,” but Judge Juan Merchan dismissed him.
At another point, tweeted Tyler McBrien of Lawfare, the judge read a meme into the record that seemingly disqualified the would-be juror who shared it. The joke referenced the Thai youth soccer team dramatically rescued after they were trapped in a flooded cave system for more than two weeks in the summer of 2018, when Trump was still in office: “Trump invites the Thai boys to the White House, and the boys request to return to their cave.”
Some of the internet material brought before the court sparked debates as to whether it actually proved bias. Trump lawyer Todd Blanche argued that a video of a New York street party around the time of the 2020 election shared on Facebook by a prospective juror obviously showed a celebration of Trump’s loss to Joe Biden. The woman claimed it was a spontaneous gathering. Trump reportedly muttered something in her direction and drew a warning from Merchan against intimidation tactics. While the judge denied Blanche’s motion to strike the juror for cause, according to MSNBC host Katie Phang, it’s not clear if she was ultimately seated on the jury.
At least one juror missed their chance to deliberate on Trump’s case due to his explicit political disagreements with the presumptive 2024 GOP nominee for president. “Good news!! Trump lost his battle on his unlawful travel ban!!! Get him out, and lock him up,” they wrote on a social media account when the administration suffered a legal setback in upholding executive orders preventing entry into the U.S. by individuals from several countries with majority-Muslim populations.
But jurors didn’t have to spell out their specific grievances with Trump to earn objections from Blanche, who said many had digital footprints that contradicted their claims that they could be fair and objective in the trial. He even went so far as to bring up a meme posted eight years ago by the husband of a potential juror, which depicted former President Barack Obama next to Trump, with the caption: “I don’t think this is what they meant by Orange is the new Black.”
Merchan apologized if anyone in court was offended by the joke but seemed disinclined to consider the social media habits of jurors’ family members. Nevertheless, as several journalists noted, Trump could be seen studying a printout of the meme. “He does not look amused at all,” the Times reported.
War Is Peace: Trump’s Regime-Change Reversal
As American and Israeli rockets fly into Tehran, with the stated goal of regime change, anyone who bought into the self-evidently absurd idea of “Donald the Dove” ending America’s forever wars ought to be suffering from a bloody form of buyer’s remorse.
It was always bullshit. But that’s what the Trump team was selling hard. Take human ghoul Stephen Miller’s tweet days before the election: “Kamala = WWIII. Trump = Peace.”
The Trump team reads George Orwell’s 1984 like an owner’s manual and so of course “war is peace.” Their undermining of NATO and the dismantling of American alliances in favor of a “might makes right” foreign policy executed by a sycophantic kakistocracy is a guarantee of more war amid autocratic power grabs worldwide, with a side order of corrupt crony capitalism to profit from the chaos.
If you voted for Trump and believed him, this is on you. And that includes self-styled Palestinian peace activists who thought that Biden and Harris were the worst of all possible worlds and stayed home. We will no doubt see protests for the innocent lives lost in these strikes — but I’d have a lot more time for those folks if they were also seen protesting the estimated 20,000 to 30,000 Iranian lives snuffed out by murderous mullahs in the last few months alone.
The Islamic Republic of Iran has been despotic and dangerous from its inception. The Iranian people have been oppressed and denied basic freedoms for decades. But this is an extreme example of a war of choice. The American military strikes against Iran’s nuclear weapons facility last year were justified because Iran cannot be trusted with a nuclear weapon. That is true. But the much trumpeted total obliteration of those facilities is apparently not true — or so goes the justification for this war. And don’t forget that it was Trump who pulled the U.S. out of an Obama-era deal to stop Iran from developing weapons — arguing absurdly that the imperfect anti-nuke deal needed to be blown up to stop Iran from developing a bomb. Iran’s subsequent progress toward a bomb then created the rationale toward these strikes. This is a self-inflicted state of emergency. Peace is war and war is peace.
Pity the willful dupes in Congress who deluded themselves into thinking that Trump deserved the Nobel Peace Prize. They’ll probably rationalize that he would’ve been peaceful if he got the honor. Now it will be read as a cautionary tale for not sucking up. The chairman of the Board of Peace is now bored of peace. While Rand Paul remains admirably consistent, it’s Lindsey Graham who is pirouetting around the Senate floor while the Gimp Speaker Mike Johnson is unable to speak for the basic constitutional principles of separation of powers let alone authorization to go to war.
If you’re feeling shell-shocked trying to keep up with Operation Epstein Distraction, get ready for the inevitable next crisis — regime change without a plan for replacement. This is what the Trump administration did in Venezuela — kidnapping the socialist dictator Maduro but keeping his regime in place in exchange for crude oil access. The opposition is still in exile and its leader María Corina Machado gave her Nobel Peace Prize to Trump in exchange for exactly nothing.
One of the clear lessons of history is that if you don’t win the peace, you don’t win the war. The Saudis and their Sunni allies will back the U.S. and Iran because they hate the Shia Iranians (who, incidentally, are not Arabs), but beyond removing the Iranian regime, the plans for replacement and stabilization seem TBD — and with Trump’s inability to stay focused on anything beyond his immediate self-interest, solid plans are unlikely to emerge. Maybe a leader will come from the underground opposition; maybe it will be the Shah’s son, who has been living in the U.S. waiting for a restoration like many members of the diaspora. The upside is that Iran has a distinguished history and an accomplished Persian culture: The Islamists don’t represent the entirety of the people of Iran and never have.
But the path ahead will be messy at best. It will require concerted effort and civil commitment, not just an open call for private investment from Mar-a-Lago members. If the United States is now kidnapping and killing dictators without direct provocation, it establishes a dangerous precedent which will come back to bite us after demolishing our moral authority in the world.
It is the unexpected effects, the cascades of consequence where we cannot always plan ahead, that cause most responsible statesmen to try to keep the peace. But Trump has the carelessness of a rich-boy bully who can always buy or bluster his way out of trouble. He’s a con man who has found his ultimate mark in his followers, who fool themselves into thinking that a reflexive liar is the one man with the courage to tell the truth.
Perhaps the most prominent example is the vice president himself — a bright guy who not that long ago compared Trump to Hitler and a deadly narcotic but then convinced himself that careerism demanded an abrupt conversion. After all, he endorsed Trump less than two years ago with this very serious column headlined “Trump’s Best Foreign Policy? Not Starting Any Wars,” explaining, “He has my support in 2024 because I know he won’t recklessly send Americans to fight overseas.”