Abbreviated Pundit Roundup: Nikki Haley falls in line and endorses Trump

Abbreviated Pundit Roundup is a long-running series published every morning that collects essential political discussion and analysis around the internet.

We begin today with David Frum of The Atlantic noting that yesterday’s formal endorsement of the shoe salesman for president by Nikki Haley is no indicator of who her supporters may vote for this coming November.

Most of her supporters voted for Haley as a way to stop Trump. Haley’s announcement today that she intends to vote for Trump won’t raise their opinion of him, it will only lower their opinion of her. When she says, as she said again today, that she wished Donald Trump would “reach out” to her voters, she’s speaking words that may sound like English, but make no sense. The only way Donald Trump could reach out to Trump-skeptical Republicans is by pleading guilty to the many criminal charges against him and vowing to devote the rest of his life to restitution for the victims of his many civil frauds.

It’s neither surprising nor disappointing  that Haley has aligned herself with Trump after inveighing so fiercely against his utter unfitness for office. His rivals always do. Ted Cruz did it after Donald Trump insulted his wife and accused his father of involvement in the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Marco Rubio did it after Trump’s relentless mockery of his height, character, and intellect. Compared to those gross self-humiliations, it’s a relatively small thing to submit to a candidate who merely called you a “birdbrain,” scored xenophobic points off your name, and implied that your military-deployed husband had gone overseas to run away from you.

Haley is making a calculation about 2028. Perhaps it will work out for her. I doubt it, but who knows? The question before those who once backed her is more immediate.

Hannah Knowles of The Washington Post reports about Trump’s heightened violent political rhetoric with claims on Truth Social and in a fundraising e-mail that the Justice Department and President Joe Biden were plotting to assassinate him during the 2022 FBI search for classified documents at Mar-a-Lago.

Donald Trump on Tuesday falsely claimed in a campaign fundraising email that President Biden was “locked & loaded ready to take me out” during a 2022 search of his Mar-a-Lago estate for classified documents, an extraordinary distortion of a standard FBI policy on the use of deadly force during such operations.

Trump appeared to be referring to a law enforcement document, released Tuesday in court filings in the classified documents case, that describes the FBI’s plans for a court-authorized search on Aug. 8, 2022, at Mar-a-Lago, his Florida residence and private club. FBI agents recovered classified material from Trump’s time in the White House — which the former president is now charged with illegally retaining. One page in the document includes a “policy statement” on the use of deadly force, which says officers may resort to lethal force only when the subject of such force poses an “imminent danger of death or serious physical injury” to an officer or another person.

Trump, the presumptive GOP nominee for president, and some of his allies suggested Tuesday that this was evidence that Biden’s Justice Department was prepared to fatally shoot him. In fact, Trump was not at his Florida property the day of the search. FBI agents specifically sought to avoid a confrontation with Trump, choosing a day when Trump would not be at the property and giving the Secret Service a heads-up, The Washington Post previously reported.

Amid further revelations of U.S. Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito propensity to fly flags in curious ways, Dahlia Lithwick of Slate attempts to form an action plan to counter what she calls an “imperial judiciary.”

It’s easy to be furious at Samuel Alito, who has recently racked up yet another petty personal grievance display over, of all things, flags. Last week saw the earthquake report that his wife flew a flag upside down—signaling either that the country is in danger or that the election was stolen—in the days after the Jan 6 attack on the capitol. This week,  the New York Times further reports that Alito was flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house this past summer. That flag is not merely another January 6 signifier but also rooted in John Locke’s “appeal to heaven,” meaning “a responsibility to rebel, even use violence, to overthrow unjust rule.” [...]

...We have a judicial enterprise that rules over us with absolutely no one ruling over them. Nobody should be all that surprised that Sen. Dick Durbin has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will not launch a probe into Alito’s recent conduct. The Senate has also been trying to unearth the financing for Thomas’s quarter million dollar salt-of-the-earth RV amid other ethics violations, and Leonard Leo has declined to comply with subpoenas related to it. Yes, the Senate should be acting to resolve this problem, but that seems to have largely stalled at “asking them to recuse.”

So just to review, this isn’t really a Sam Alito problem, or a Clarence Thomas problem, or a John Roberts problem—but it also isn’t even a Senate-Dems-who-can’t-muster-the-energy-to-close-the-deal problem.

No, I have come to conclude is that this is an us problem. Because rather than hurling ourselves headlong into the “Alito Must Recuse” brick wall of “yeah, no,” we need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle to a discussion of the courts. Not just Sam Alito or Clarence Thomas who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happens to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight and why that is deeply dangerous. Moreso, why justices who were placed on the court to behave as well-compensated partisan politicians would do so in public as well as on paper. Until we do that, Justice Alito will continue to fly around the world giving speeches about his triumph in Dobbs and that Clarence Thomas will keep taking gifts and failing to disclose them. That won’t be the end of the Supreme Court story, it will just be the start of it.

Norman Eisen and Michael Podhorzer write for MSNBC that the U.S. Supreme Court delay with the presidential immunity case gets more outrageous by the day.

The truth is we should have already had or been close to a verdict in the federal prosecution brought by special counsel Jack Smith. That case concerns the conspiracy Trump allegedly orchestrated to manipulate the results of the 2020 presidential election, which culminated in the Jan. 6 insurrection. The Washington case had been set to begin in early March, and Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg had expressed openness to postponing the New York case so the Washington one could go first. With the federal trial estimated to last eight to 12 weeks, it would most likely be done or wrapping up by now.

The reason that didn’t happen is that a majority on the court decided to delay the administration of justice by considering Trump’s outrageous presidential immunity argument. Trump argues that because he was president at the time of the alleged crimes, he is immune from prosecution in the case. But he doesn’t stop there: His lawyers have presented a shocking theory of presidential power that would render him immune even if he ordered SEAL Team Six to assassinate his political rivals (barring first being impeached and convicted, something that has never happened in American history). [….]

In Trump v. Anderson, the case deciding whether Trump could remain on Colorado’s ballot as a presidential candidate despite the constitutional limits on insurrectionists’ holding office, the Supreme Court ruled in Trump’s favor just 25 days after oral arguments and just 61 days after he petitioned the court for review. It did so even though Trump remained on the ballot pending a decision. Tuesday marked 26 days after the court heard oral arguments, 99 days and counting since he appealed the unanimous D.C. Circuit ruling against him and 162 days and counting since the Justice Department originally asked it to take up the case. Yet there is no sign of a decision. 

Some of us have seen this movie before. In the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis, the Fed engaged in “quantitative easing” — loosely speaking, printing a lot of money in an attempt to boost a weak economy — and there were many people insisting that this would lead to runaway inflation. When huge inflation failed to materialize — when theoretical models saying that money-printing wouldn’t be inflationary in an economy with very low interest rates passed the reality test with flying colors — some people refused to accept what was (or actually wasn’t) happening.

Instead, they became “inflation truthers,” insisting that the benign numbers were fake. [...]

The first and most innocent version of disinflation denial — one common among the general public, and not especially connected to partisanship — involves confounding the level of prices with inflation, the rate of change in prices. [...]

Less innocent is the widespread urban legend that official measures of inflation leave out essential goods like food and gasoline, and therefore don’t reflect the true cost of living. I see this legend in my email all the time.

Rachel Cunliffe of The New Statesman says that Conservative MP’s are angry that British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak blindsided them by calling for new elections on July 4.

Bafflement. That is the mood among many Conservative MPs and campaigners at the news Rishi Sunak has called an election for 4 July.

To say Westminster did not see this coming was an understatement – and not just because the day began with a warning from the Deputy Prime Minister that Brits should start stockpiling food (hardly a strong message with which to kick off a campaign). Up until this morning, No 10 had sent very strong signals that an election would not be called until the autumn. While Labour’s campaign team has hammered home the message that the party needed to be ready for an election at any time, Tory MPs were repeatedly told that the PM would “stick to the plan” and wait until the economic situation improved in August.

Now all that has changed – and there is widespread fury. Fury from MPs who are standing down or look likely to lose their seats, who thought they had months left to make a difference in their constituencies or to their pet causes. Fury from candidates whose campaigns are far from ready. Fury from local associations who haven’t even selected their candidates yet. Fury from special advisers and activists at holidays they had been assured could be booked suddenly having to be cancelled. Fury from parliamentary aides – often young and poorly paid – who face being out of a job in a matter of weeks with no warning. One texted to tell me the decision was “cruel”; another described it as “heartbreaking”. Purely on a logistics front, the announcement has been handled in the worst possible way.

A six week election campaign? Must be nice.

Jessica Elgot of the Guardian explains some of the possible reasons for PM Sunak’s call for early elections.

...The decline in inflation was smaller than expected and, privately, Treasury figures have no hope of an early interest rate cut. No one in No 10 truly believes that people have started to feel the effects in their weekly shop yet. And irregular migration is not falling: arrivals on small boats are up nearly a quarter compared with the same period last year.

A key plank of a November election campaign would have been further tax cuts. But Sunak and Jeremy Hunt, the chancellor, are staring into an empty cupboard. Government insiders believe that a key reason behind Wednesday’s call was a warning from the International Monetary Fund of a looming £30bn hole in the public finances.

In public, the government rejected the IMF’s argument that there was no room for a third cut in national insurance and instead the Treasury should consider unpopular measures such as cuts to public spending or scrapping the triple lock on the state pension.

There are other, smaller advantages to a summer election. It avoids a clash with the US election in November and the chaos that any stray comment from Donald Trump could have thrown into the grid, if the US and UK had run parallel campaigns.

Finally today, Nahal Toosi of POLITICO files an interesting report on the current tenure of former Hewlett-Packard CEO and 2010 California gubernatorial candidate Meg Whitman as US ambassador to Kenya.

The Kenyan leader will be in Washington on Wednesday and Thursday, in part for a sure-to-be glamorous state visit hosted by the White House — a rare chance for an African country to grab the U.S. national spotlight. Ahead of that he’s been spending time in Atlanta, home to many key companies and a strong Black middle and upper class. As he’s been greeted by a range of dignitaries, Whitman has been by his side.

Her presence could fuel questions about what lies ahead for her. A Cabinet post, perhaps? The 67-year-old chuckles at the idea but doesn’t rule it out.

“I never dreamed I would be the ambassador to Kenya,” Whitman told me in an interview. “I don’t know. Maybe I’ll retire. I’ve said that three times, and I’ve never done it. But we’ll see what happens.” [...]

Wealthy, politically appointed ambassadors often land in cushy posts in Europe, but Biden aides suggested Kenya would be a better fit for Whitman. A major reason was that Kenya is an African tech hub with significant business potential, and the Biden administration wanted more emphasis on commercial prospects in Africa. Whitman decided it was worth a shot.

Have the best possible day everyone!