Guess Who's Going To Prison?
Trump supporters large and small will be on the legally disabled list for the 2024 election, sidelining experienced MAGA talent
It’s true—I’ve been playing hooky from this Substack. In the last week or so, I went to a conference, spent a day at Nashville’s annual CountryMusicFest (and have the tee shirt to prove it), hit a research library, and visited a family member. Paying subscribers have had a week added to their accounts.
And if you are new to this Substack, please:
Trump advisor Steve Bannon at the Conservative Political Action Conference, March 3, 2023. Photo credit: Julia Nikhinson/Consolidate News Photos
The nation is highly focused on what punishment former President and presumptive GOP nominee Donald J. Trump draws when he faces Judge Juan Merchan in the so-called “hush money” case on July 11. There are three possibilities and four certainties. Trump might be sentenced to prison; or Merchan might give him the same time, but in home confinement and in an ankle bracelet. Trump could be sentenced to a period of probation, another version of non-freedom that generally includes weekly check-ins with a probation officer and drug tests (which could be interesting, given a recent Rolling Stone article by Noah Schachtman and Aswan Suebsaeng that the Trump White House was “awash in speed—and Xanax” and years of speculation that Trump himself can’t get along without Aderall.)
The certainties? That any of the above penalties will be accompanied by substantial fines; second, Trump will also have to post bond to remain free pending appeal. A third certainty is that, even if Trump is elected president he cannot pardon himself from a state conviction, making the 2026 New York gubernatorial election critical to enforcing any of these penalties. Finally, Trump will appeal the conviction, a process that can take anywhere from several months to several years, but will probably not be complete before the election. This last raises the prospect of a sitting president wearing an ankle bracelet in the White House, since experts say that the odds of overturning such an appeal are long.
But in case you are concerned that justice delayed is justice denied (for the rest of us, not for the POTUS with the mostest convictions), think again. Lots of Trumpers, people who played key roles in his only electoral victory, have gone to jail or are on what we might call the “legally disabled list.”
Let’s begin with Paul Manafort, who was convicted of bank and tax fraud, illegal foreign lobbying and witness tampering conspiracies in 2018, accepted a pleas deal, and then had it revoked because he lied to investigators. He served two years in prison, was remanded to home confinement in May 2020, and then was pardoned by Trump in December of that year. And Trump very much wanted him back for 2024. Campaign advisors told reporters at The Washington Post
that Trump was determined to hire Manafort, planning to hand him a substantial role at the convention because he appreciated the loyalty he had shown him even while in prison. Manafort was expected to be involved in organizing the convention committees and helping to manage the party’s platform process, according to people familiar with the planning.
But apparently Manafort, who has resumed his work as an international political and media consultant, would like to avoid the scrutiny (particularly, perhaps, of his work on a Chinese streaming platform called Doorways) that landed him in the slammer in the first place.
So, no Manafort. Also—no Steve Bannon! Convicted of contempt of Congress in 2022 for refusing to testify or provide requested documents to the House Select Committee investigating the January 6 attack on the Capitol, Bannon has run out his appeal and will begin serving his four-month sentence on July 11, 2024. Since Election Day is November 5, and seven plus four is eleven, it looks like Bannon will be back on the street just in time to plan the next attack on the Capitol. Although Bannon has insisted that his internet show, War Room, will “not be silenced,” he won’t be on it—and it is hard to imagine who could manage that nest of MAGA vipers, conspiracy theories, and lies as well as Steve Bannon. Expect that Trump platform to drop dramatically in viewership once Trump is wearing a jumpsuit.
Maybe Bannon and former White House advisor Peter Navarro can be cellies and talk about the old days over instant cocoa. And while we are discussing jail time, over 900 people have gone to jail for January 6—could the notion that MAGA violence is taken seriously by the authorities prevent a similar rogue militia from assembling again? While most are serving shorter terms, Proud Boy Enrique Tarrio is in for 22 years, plus three years of supervised release, the Oath Keepers’ Stewart Rhoades snagged 18 years, and other far-right militia leaders have been prosecuted as well.
The result? Membership in the Oath Keepers has declined precipitously, and while the more decentralized Proud Boys have not, their disillusionment with Trump’s failure to pardon rioters means that they have largely shifted their efforts to enforcing homophobia. As one analyst puts it,
Though the election may provide a larger platform for the Proud Boys and may broaden its focus, it is unclear how the group’s deepened horizontal structure will impact mobilization around the vote. Not all signs point to Proud Boys turning out in support of former President Trump in the same way they did in 2020. Many Proud Boys have felt betrayed by and disillusioned with Trump since his refusal to assist any Proud Boys convicted for their role in the Capitol riot. More recently, in the weeks before Trump’s arrest for falsifying business records, he called for demonstrations and prayer vigils to show opposition to the prosecution. Proud Boys participation in these demonstrations was negligible: a very small number of Proud Boys gathered on one occasion outside Mar-A-Lago, Trump’s private club residence in Palm Beach. Since then, public Proud Boys support for Trump has been essentially nonexistent[.]
Lastly, the most-indicted-for-J6 militia group, the Three Percenters, claims to be rebranding around running for office, not scaring the sh*t out of people. “Don’t wear full battle-rattle when going to Walmart,” a recent advisory suggested.
However, the most important missing person for Trump 2024 is the Former Guy’s daughter, Ivanka, who announced in November 2022 that she would not participate in the 2024 campaign. Ivanka has cited motherhood as the reason, but it is also possible that the large number of people around “my father” who have either indictment persuaded her to sit this one out. Or maybe, as perhaps the one Trump sibling most like Dad, she just doesn’t want her brand associated with failure.
Whatever the reason, this is a serious loss for the campaign: Ivanka is the only member of Trump’s immediate family, and certainly the only Republican woman, who acts and speaks like a normal human being. Her 2016 speech at the GOP nominating convention was credited as the only moment that Trump was “humanized,” i.e., made to seem like a caring and sympathetic person.
Which he isn’t, so that tells you what a good political operative Ivanka is. As Caroline Simon of the Daily Pennsylvanian described her in April 2017,
She’s painted herself as a polished, professional woman, balancing her high-powered career with her family responsibilities. Her advocacy for women in the workforce — which she has continued during her father’s presidency — has often stood at odds with President Donald Trump himself, who has been lambasted for making offensive comments about women.
Ivanka’s repeated trips to the affluent suburbs surrounding Philadelphia in the weeks before the 2016 election could easily have produced the fewer than 50,000 votes (less than 1% of the total vote count) that Trump needed to win Pennsylvania that year. And while Trump lost many of those white women in 2020 (having, among other things, done less than nothing for women and become even more offensive), I can’t see anyone associated with the campaign capable of getting them back, particularly in a post-Dobbs, post-E. Jean Carroll civil judgement for rape, world.
So, as we look forward to July 11, and speculation about the effect that Trump’s conviction and potential penalties will have on the election increases (we are already seeing some softening in his numbers, while 20% of GOP voters in battleground states now oppose his re-election), remember this: it isn’t just Trump’s reputation that has taken a hit. Critical players who engineered his surprise victory in 2016 have also gone missing.
And some of them—Ivanka Trump, Steve Bannon, and the vast network of extremists willing to intimidate Americans on the ground—may be irreplaceable.
What I’m watching:
The second tranche of Bridgerton, season 3, of course, which—to avoid dawdling, sheer boredom, and relying on party porn to keep us interested—has gotten a bit more feminist. Will poor Pen, so close to happiness, have to give up writing to capture her beloved Colin? At least the show-runners are asking the question!
Have you noticed:
That there are even more unasked-for graphic pictures showing up in X feeds than there were? I was off for about six months, and upon my return, a picture popped up in my feed that looked like a little apricot. Eventually, being a lesbian, I figured out it was a shaved female pudendum. I think these pics must be ads: I subscribed to Premium (again—in fact, way back when I earned my blue check), which is ad-free, and they went away. It’s totally worth the money to eliminate.
Short takes:
Mifepristone is still available to end an early stage pregnancy, for now. But don’t get complacent, Paul Waldman warns at The Cross Section. “The Supreme Court ruled that the doctors had no standing to sue, which of course they didn’t,” Waldman writes (then why did the Court grant cert?) You may recall that the specious litigants were a group of medical professionals who asserted that they might have to deal with a chemical abortion that went south, even though a mif termination carries about as much risk as having a tooth pulled. “But,” Waldman continues, the decision does not show that the Court has stopped being political: “the fact that it was a unanimous decision shows that this suit was so dangerous to the antiabortion cause that even Samuel Alito and Clarence Thomas — who would be happy to see any woman who gets an abortion paraded through the streets while townsfolk pelt her with rotten fruit while shouting “Shame! Shame!”—didn’t want to touch it so close to an election.” (June 14, 2024)
SCOTUS also sez you can haz bump stocks, a cheap little add-on that turns a semi-automatic weapon into—a fully automatic weapon! A predictable 6-3, the majority ruled that Congress did not write them into the 1934 law (which I write about in my first book, War on Crime: Gangsters, G-Men and the Politics of Mass Culture, Rutgers University Press, 1998) banning the sale of machine guns. Bump stocks did not exist then, so in the conservative majority’s view, Congress would have had to amend the 1934 law. But it’s dumb, since technology changes over time, and you can’t change a law every time some brainiac thinks up a new way to kill dozens of people in seconds. What is really at stake, as Samuel Alito articulated in a separate concurrence, is executive action short-circuiting legislative action, something that could be useful in a potential Trump II, if they are consistent and Democrats win majorities in both Houses. But it is thin gruel. There are currently over half a million bump stocks in circulation. (June 14, 2024)
You know the old saw, “Fake it `til you make it?” A number of Wells Fargo employees may have taken it too literally. As Hannah Levitt reports at Bloomberg, surveillance software revealed that these employees weren’t working, and the company fired them. About a dozen workers in the wealth- and investment-management unit, were fired, in Wells Fargo’s words, “after review of allegations involving simulation of keyboard activity creating impression of active work.” According to Levitt, “Devices and software to imitate employee activity, sometimes known as `mouse movers’ or `mouse jigglers,’ took off during the pandemic-spurred work-from-home era, with people swapping tips for using them on social-media sites Reddit and TikTok. Such gadgets are available on Amazon.com for less than $20.” Moral of the story? Don’t invest at Wells Fargo: who knows what could happen to your money as those mice jiggle and move for no reason! (June 13, 2024)