Donald Trump’s One Weird Trick to Win the GOP Primary

Donald Trump has been indicted twice this year: once in April for hush-money payments sent during the 2016 election and again in June for mishandling of classified documents. Rather than make him a political pariah, the charges could send him straight to the Republican presidential nomination.

Republican consultants and activists believe that the indictments have energized Trump’s supporters, and even people who had until now been undecided, The Messenger reported Monday. The outlet looked specifically at Iowa, which is anticipated to set the stage for the rest of the Republican race.

Previously, many Iowans had backed Florida Governor Ron DeSantis or South Carolina Senator Tim Scott. But since the indictments, voters have rallied around Trump.

“The majority of Republicans here are for Trump after this frickin’ legal lynching. That’s all it is,” state resident Merle Miller told The Messenger. “People here take the indictment personally.”

Trump has capitalized on the indictments, using them to stoke outrage—and rake in donations. His campaign announced in mid-June that it had raised $6.6 million in the week after his second indictment, in which the Department of Justice alleged that he had stored highly sensitive documents relating to national security in a bathroom. He raised more than double that in the days after he was indicted in April.

The former president has also surged in the polls since the second indictment. An NBC poll released on June 25 found that Trump had 51 percent support, a substantial lead over DeSantis, the current runner-up.

It is, of course, still nearly a year until the Iowa caucuses. Any number of things could change by then. But it’s safe to say that Trump has not been hurt by the indictments nearly as much as some expected.

Despite the Supreme Court overturning his original plan to relieve up to $20,000 of student debt for up to 43 million people, President Joe Biden is already pursuing a new route to get it done.

On Friday, the president announced his plans to pursue a new plan under the Higher Education Act, or HEA, which allows him to direct the education secretary to “compromise, waive, or release loans under certain circumstances.”

While Biden’s previous plan invoked the Heroes Act to forgive debt, he is now relying on an act that was already pushed by Senators Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, Chuck Schumer, and others previously as a sound vessel to forgive billions in debt.

Scholars have argued the 1965 HEA, which gives the secretary of education the authority to collect debts, gives them the power to forgive the debts as well.

“This path is legally sound,” Biden said Friday. “It’s going to take longer, but in my view, it’s the best path that remains to provide for as many borrowers as possible with debt relief.”

The former president’s legal problems continue to grow. On Friday, reports began to circulate that Donald Trump would soon be facing even more charges—as many as 45—relating to his mishandling of classified documents. These charges would be in addition to the 37-count indictment that was brought against Trump earlier this month. Per The Independent, the Department of Justice “has made preparations to bring what is known as a “superseding indictment”—a second set of charges against an already-indicted defendant that could include more serious crimes.” It’s unclear if these charges will be brought in Florida, where Trump is currently facing trial for the documents case, or in another location. It’s possible that special prosecutor Jack Smith and his team could bring them somewhere else as a hedge, given that Aileen Cannon, the judge overseeing the Florida case, is widely believed to be in the tank for the man who appointed her to her current station.

As bad as dozens of federal charges would be—45 new counts would bring the entire menu of state and federal charges Trump is currently facing to over 100 charges—Trump is now facing another serious threat. According to The Independent, Smith’s team is “ready to bring charges against several of the attorneys who have worked for [Trump], including those who aided the ex-president in his push to ignore the will of voters and remain in the White House despite having lost the 2020 election.” One of those lawyers is Rudy Giuliani.

Giuliani has been one of Trump’s most slavish loyalists—he was also one of the biggest proponents of the lie that the 2020 election was stolen. Giuliani’s legal exposure is incredibly serious, and there are now signs that he may be about to flip on Trump.

Giuliani recently met with Smith in what is known as a “proffer.” These meetings sometimes, but not always, result in cooperation agreements. “They are a method by which white-collar defense lawyers seek to probe what the prosecutor’s interest is in the client and to see if they can assuage any suspicions by the prosecution that the client has committed crimes,” per The Daily Beast’s Shan Wu.

It’s unlikely that Giuliani has flipped on Trump—the meeting between him and Justice Department attorneys was likely preliminary in nature. Still, Giuliani was very involved in the plot to overturn the 2020 election and, as such, faces extreme legal risk. It’s not unthinkable that he would try to reach a deal with prosecutors in exchange for testifying against his former boss. In any case, Donald Trump should be very afraid.

The Supreme Court had a banner week: overturning affirmative action, ruling that it’s OK to discriminate against gay people, and blocking President Biden’s plan to relieve up to 43 million Americans from crippling debt.

But that apparently wasn’t enough: The Supreme Court made a number of smaller, but still abhorrent, decisions as well.

The court also spent the week deciding several cases to hear next term. One, US v. Rahimi, involves the question of whether a law barring people subject to domestic violence restraining orders from accessing guns violates the Second Amendment, a case that could allow domestic abusers to acquire and carry weapons. Women are five times more likely to die at the hands of a domestic abuser if the abuser has access to a gun. And the threats are all the more relevant in a country plagued with mass shootings. In almost half of shootings in which four or more people were killed, the shooter had shot an intimate partner or family member.

While the court decided to take up the question of whether to arm domestic abusers with these numbers, it also chose to deny hearing the appeal of a Black Mississippi man on death row who alleges that his conviction was the result of racist jury selection. In 2019, the court heard a similar case involving another Mississippi man, Curtis Flowers, who has since been exonerated. Flowers was on death row himself for almost 23 years, until the Supreme Court itself vacated the murder conviction he faced.

“The State’s relentless, determined effort to rid the jury of black individuals strongly suggests that the State wanted to try Flowers before a jury with as few black jurors as possible, and ideally before an all-white jury,” wrote Justice Brett Kavanaugh. Now the court isn’t interesting in hearing another potential case of Mississippi racial jury stacking.

“Because this Court refuses to intervene, a Black man will be put to death in the State of Mississippi based on the decision of a jury that was plausibly selected based on race,” Sotomayor wrote, alongside Justices Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson. “The result is that Flowers will be toothless in the very State where it appears to be still so needed,” she added.

Finally, the court also refused to hear a pair of cases surrounding qualified immunity, which protects police officers from liability when they kill someone. In one, Lombardo v. City of St. Louis, the court would have ruled on whether police officers who held a hand- and leg-cuffed homeless man face down on the floor of a small holding cell and pushed into his back, killing him, would be entitled to qualified immunity. The preceding court, the Eight Circuit Court of Appeals, ruled the city and police department weren’t liable because the victim, Nicholas Gilbert, apparently did not have the right “to be free of such force.”

Officers say Gilbert was resisting arrest. Justice Sonia Sotomayor, in her dissent, said she would have vacated the Eighth Circuit’s ruling and asked the lower court to address the question “without assuming that Gilbert’s final movements were those of a dangerously noncompliant person posing a threat, rather than of a dying man struggling to breathe while adequately restrained by handcuffs and leg shackles and surrounded by six officers in a secure cell.”

In the other case, N.S. vs. Kansas City Board of Police Commissioners, the same Eighth Circuit court ruled that a Kansas City police officer who shot in the back of the head and killed an allegedly unarmed, nonviolent Black man, who was peacefully surrendering, was shielded by qualified immunity.

That’s where things stand as the Supreme Court term ends: 43 million people forced into crippling debt; at least 24 million LGBTQ people now vulnerable to even more discrimination; wealthy, well-connected families still free to buy their kids into college; and a loud affirmation that so-called “bad apple” cops are free to be kings of the crop.

On Friday, the Indiana Supreme Court ruled that the state’s abortion ban is constitutional, clearing the way for a ban passed by Republicans last year to take effect. The ban was the first in the nation to be passed in the aftermath of the United States Supreme Court overturning Roe v. Wade.

Indiana’s highest court superseded a county judge who ruled that the ban likely violates the Indiana Constitution. The previous ruling had stopped the ban, and left residents able to obtain abortions up to 20 weeks.

But with the state court’s ruling, that injunction is now gone.

The court wrote that while the state constitution “protects a woman’s right to an abortion that is necessary to protect her life or to protect her from a serious health risk,” the “General Assembly otherwise retains broad legislative discretion for determining whether and the extent to which to prohibit abortions.”

If the ban proceeds as planned, it will shut down all seven abortion clinics in the state and outlaw virtually all abortions. The ban only includes exceptions for abortions in cases of rape or incest before 10 weeks post-fertilization, to protect the life of the mother, or if a fetus is diagnosed with a lethal condition.

Any doctor who performs an abortion outside of those restrictive provisions would lose their medical license. Some Republicans like State Senator Mike Young have complained the bill’s enforcement provisions against doctors are not strict enough.

The abortion ban still faces another legal challenge on grounds that it violates people’s religious beliefs; the Supreme Court has left the argument to be considered by the state’s Court of Appeals for now. While a county judge has granted an injunction vis-à-vis that case, it reportedly only applies to the specific plaintiffs in the case.

The ban’s upholding comes after a 10-year-old Ohio rape victim traveled to Indiana for an abortion after Ohio banned abortions at the first detectable “fetal heartbeat.”