On the menu today: The news reports this morning reaffirm everything this newsletter told you yesterday — that special counsel Jack Smith’s case against Donald Trump involves a novel application of existing laws, and will hinge upon the prosecution’s ability to prove that Trump knew he was lying when he claimed the 2020 election had been stolen. Yesterday, a lot of progressives on social media really wanted everyone to believe that was ill-informed nonsense. Meanwhile, Twitter insists upon adopting a new identity as “X,” perhaps a signal that the changing user arrangements of social-media platforms deserve more scrutiny, as a whole bunch of the most popular social-media brands spend a lot of time and energy showing you stuff you didn’t choose to follow, and making it harder to see the stuff that you did choose to follow.
Even Mainstream Media See the Issues with the Smith Indictment
The usual suspects on Twitter — no, I’m not calling it “X,” more on that below — furiously denounced yesterday’s newsletter as an ignorant, ill-informed, desperate, and flailing Trump defense. And yet, if you read any of the mainstream-media coverage from news institutions that are about as far from knee-jerk defenders of Trump as you can get, you see sharp-eyed veteran journalists making the exact same points.
If you’re going to indict a former president, you want as close to a slam-dunk case as you can get, and you want the crime to be an act that anyone of any status would be indicted for in similar circumstances. You don’t want U.S. law enforcement dusting off some rarely used, long-forgotten statute and applying it in some way that it has never been applied before.
The New York Times’ David Leonhardt, this morning:
As for Trump’s broader effort to overturn the election result, no federal law specifically bars politicians from attempting to do so. Without such a law, Smith has relied on a novel approach. He has charged Trump with committing criminal fraud and violating conspiracy laws that were not written to prevent the overturning of an election result.
I’m not some lunatic. I’m just telling you what’s going on. You may like it or you may hate it, but that doesn’t change what is actually going on.
The whole case may boil down to whether or not prosecutors can prove that Trump knew what he was saying was false, as opposed to genuinely believing the lies he was telling were true.
Devlin Barrett and Josh Dawsey, writing in this morning’s Washington Post, in the lead story on that publication’s website as I write this newsletter:
Donald Trump’s trial for allegedly conspiring to overturn the results of the 2020 election may hinge on a long-debated aspect of the former president’s mind-set: How much, or if, he believes his own false claims.
A key part of these laws is that they revolve around a person’s intent. Intent is core to the notion of fraud: Only if somebody is knowingly trying to deceive others can he be committing a fraud. If he is spouting falsehoods that he genuinely believes, he isn’t participating in an illegal conspiracy. That’s why this case seems likely to revolve around Trump’s state of mind.
Sadie Gurman, writing in the Wall Street Journal this morning:
Trump’s lawyers already have begun to argue that while Trump was vocal in spreading falsehoods that he beat Biden, he believed what he was saying and was reinforced by advisers, and there was no criminal motive for his actions.
Hayes Brown, writing at MSNBC last week:
Even though he should have known otherwise, did Trump himself truly believe the election was stolen or was he deliberately lying to his base? The answer could affect many aspects of the sprawling, shifting web of schemes that are under investigation, from the millions of dollars that were solicited based on falsehoods about mass election fraud to the “fake electors” plot, by which Trump’s team sought to use fraudulent Electoral College votes to cast doubt on the election’s outcome.
The jury may conclude that Trump knew he was lying. Or it may conclude that Trump genuinely believed what he was saying, despite all the counterevidence, and that the prosecutor’s contention that Trump “knew that [his claims] were false” is unproven. I don’t have a crystal ball; I’m just saying that the case is likely to boil down to this point.
Why aren’t this morning’s news reports denounced as ignorant, ill-informed, desperate, and flailing Trump defenses? Why do I get so much grief for telling people something that #TheResistance doesn’t want to hear?
Oh. I guess I answered my own question.
Also in yesterday’s newsletter:
Now, from my perspective, the best defense for Trump is insanity, because he often asserts things that aren’t true and, as far as anyone can tell, absolutely, totally believes them.
Apparently, that is indeed the defense that the president’s legal team is strongly considering.
If they proceed to trial, Trump’s lawyers effectively could be asking a jury to believe that the former president was delusional — undermining special counsel Jack Smith’s core thesis that Trump “knowingly” sought to defraud the country. . . . Politically, however, the “delusion defense” would force Republicans into the uncomfortable position of defending a candidate who can’t be trusted to distinguish reality from conspiracy — and who now wants to be president again.
“Trump 2024: He can’t distinguish fantasy from reality” will make a heck of a campaign slogan.
X Marks the Spot
Was there a single user of Twitter who looked at the social-media platform and said, “Well, this whole system looks fine and is operating in tiptop shape; the only real problem that I can see is the name and the little bird logo”?
Apparently, Elon Musk felt this way. Did the marketing team argue this would boost the social-media network’s popularity with Generation X? Was it meant as some sort of cross-promotion of the new X-Men movies, or of yet another X-Files reboot? Or does this all mean “ten,” and Musk just wanted to emulate the way we count Super Bowls?
Twitter management really feels that the company will literally be better off as “Brand X”?
Hey, could we get an edit button so we can fix typos, because it’s always the tweet with a misspelling that goes viral? Nah? Still too much to ask, huh?
A little while ago, while talking about the widespread suspicions of “shadowbanning,” a friend and I wondered what it would be like to have a social-media platform that pursued the revolutionary concept of allowing you to follow who you wanted to follow, and didn’t try to get you to follow people you didn’t want to follow. This isn’t just a Twitter — er, “X” phenomenon. Twitter/X users now have a “for you” column that is full of posts from people they did not choose to follow, often from many hours ago. Facebook is always offering you “reels” from people you don’t follow. Instagram is always giving us “suggested for you” reels. It’s a similar story with YouTube and its “shorts.” These are all ham-handed attempts to emulate TikTok, and they are a problem separate from the increasingly ubiquitous advertising on these platforms.
Why are we scrolling through so much clutter to get to the stuff that we chose to follow? Why are these platforms constantly hectoring us to follow people we don’t want to follow, and making it harder to find the posts from the people we do want to follow? If a newspaper followed the same approach, certain front-page news would be hidden in the back pages in the smallest possible type, the crossword, comics pages, and horoscope would be on the front page, and everything else would constantly move around from section to section with no warning, rhyme, or reason. And once you read an article, it would be infuriatingly difficult to find it again.
Apparently, these “trust us, you’ll love this” recommendations are based on the all-seeing, all-knowing keen judgment of the algorithm, even though I’ll bet you’ve had all kinds of recommendations to follow people you have no interest in following. The algorithm is like that annoying friend who insists you have to try anchovies, no matter how many times you’ve explained that you’ve tried them before and don’t like them.
This is not how social-media platforms pitched themselves to the public during their formative years. The message back then was, “We can connect you to the world.” And then, year by year, the social-media platforms realized all kinds of people, including bad people, wanted to connect with each other. Bit by bit, the managers of these platforms started setting limits, even though almost none of those managers had ever run anything like a publication before, and never wanted the job of being an editor. These limits were often ad hoc and based upon vague criteria, and they were often applied inconsistently from one user to the next.
And even today, there are some serious questions about who’s really calling the shots over what’s appropriate for a social-media platform and what’s out of bounds. As we saw in the recent messages from the Biden administration officials to Facebook, there was a troubling obedience to government officials’ requests to take down information, even humor and satire, if it was perceived to undermine faith in vaccines or could spread beliefs that the Covid-19 virus was manmade. In theory, it wasn’t government censorship of American citizens’ speech, it was just a series of increasingly frequent and sweeping requests. In practice, it was indistinguishable from allowing Biden administration officials to decide what kinds of comments and posts were permitted to go up.
The practice of shadowbanning and the now-revealed de facto censorship indicate that those running social-media platforms are not, in fact, all that interested in connecting you to the world, or at least connecting you to parts of the world that they deem unacceptable. They want you to connect to their approved parts of the world — those “recommendations” and “for you” posts that you keep ignoring. It’s all so annoying, such a drastic and user-unfriendly alteration of the previous setup, that you want to just cross it all out, with a big X. . . .
Oh, now I get it! That’s why it’s called X!
ADDENDUM: In case you missed it yesterday, former president Barack Obama, at a private lunch with President Biden earlier this summer, voiced concerns about Donald Trump’s political strengths. While Trump would undoubtedly be an underdog in a rematch, both national and key swing-state polling show him hanging around, in circumstances where he ought to be utterly unelectable. You have to wonder just how confident Obama is about Biden’s ability to beat Trump in a rematch — even though Trump is facing three indictments and counting.