On the menu today: What we won’t be talking about as much in the coming year, because at this point, it appears we will be spending an enormous amount of time covering the multiple trials of Donald Trump, who remains the person most likely to be the 2024 Republican presidential nominee. As Hugh Hewitt mentioned during our discussion this morning, Fulton County Superior Court judge Scott McAfee “has previously allowed video of court proceedings to air online, including on the YouTube channel that bears his name and title.” This means there’s a decent chance that the trial of the sprawling racketeering case that charges former president Donald Trump and 18 allies will be televised or streamed, and we are on course for the presidential-year equivalent of the O. J. Simpson trial. Those of us old enough to remember the year 1995 will recall how the saturation coverage of that trial effectively squeezed all kinds of other big events out of the news cycle.
We are set for a year of O. J.-style coverage of Trump from now until Election Day 2024. Who do you think benefits from that?
America’s Coming Year of Trials
In addition to the four criminal indictments discussed in yesterday’s Corner post, former president Donald Trump also faces yet another trial in a second defamation lawsuit from E. Jean Carroll beginning on January 15, 2024. He will spend an inordinate amount of time this coming year inside a courtroom.
And let’s not forget that there’s a chance that Hunter Biden will go to a criminal trial before Election Day 2024, although the editors of NR see the appointment of Delaware U.S. attorney David Weiss to be a special counsel as a move more likely to delay and obscure developments than to successfully prosecute the president’s son for crimes. As our Andy McCarthy writes, “Despite the evidence accumulated over the last five years, David Weiss never filed an indictment. That means the statute of limitations clock has continued to tick . . . tick . . . tick.”
The point is that an enormous amount of coverage of Donald Trump and President Biden over the coming year is going to be about those trials. I’m not saying that those trials aren’t newsworthy. But the more time, energy, and mental real estate that is devoted to those trials, the less there is to be devoted to other issues:
- As I have been emphasizing, the American electorate’s primary concern at this moment is the cost of living. The year-to-year inflation rate may have declined, but prices are still high, and Americans still feel squeezed. Grocery prices are still high. Gas prices are still high, the highest in ten months, and late summer is usually a time when gas prices decline from the midsummer highs. Mortgage rates hit the highest level in two decades last week. Think of this as my own little “Rich Men North of Richmond.” A whole lot of people in the Washington policy-making world believe the inflation crisis that began shortly after Biden took office, and that was at its worst in the summer of 2022, is solved and resolved. A lot of people who shape the discussions about the economy at the national level are wealthy enough to either not notice the high prices or to find them only a minimal irritant. The mentality that inflation is sufficiently tamed, prices are now “okay,” and the economy is “strong as hell,” as Biden put it last summer, is more commonly found among Democrats than Republicans, but you can find some of it on the right as well.
- The Center for Immigration Studies calculated that as of April, the Biden administration had released at least 2 million migrants who entered the country illegally, and an estimated 1.3 million more had crossed the border undetected on Biden’s watch. (Because they’re undetected, this is obviously an estimate.) The border is not secure, despite the constant assertions of Biden administration officials to the contrary.
- While crime and homelessness are primarily issues addressed by local and state governments, the vast grant-distributing power of the federal government has considerable influence over the policies enacted by states and localities. In the past year, the U.S. has witnessed the single-highest jump in homelessness since the government attempted to track the problem. “The data so far this year are up roughly 11 percent from 2022, a sharp jump that would represent by far the biggest recorded increase since the government started tracking comparable numbers in 2007.” While there has been a slight decline in the past year, a recent updated study of 37 U.S. cities concluded, “Violent crimes remain elevated compared to 2019, the year prior to the COVID pandemic and racial justice protests of 2020. There were 24 percent more homicides during the first half of 2023 than during the first half of 2019 in the study cities.”
- There is no getting around the fact that with Roe v. Wade overturned, abortion is now a powerful driving force in our politics, and so far, the pro-life side has suffered setback after setback in state-referendum fights. (Read Kathryn Jean Lopez and John McCormack on this.) A pro-life movement that had slowly but steadily reduced the number of abortions performed each year, based on a philosophy of incrementalism, is now on the verge of major setbacks because it keeps trying to enact sweeping changes that the voting public isn’t willing to accept.
And I realize I’m relieving into the wind whenever I bring up entitlements, but this week, the Committee for a Responsible Federal Budget released a new report concluding that in 2033, the Social Security retirement fund will become insolvent, and annual benefits will be cut by $17,400 for a typical newly retired dual-income couple. As the group points out, presidential campaigns are running around pledging to “not touch” Social Security and pretending that is the responsible option, which is akin to pledging to not touch a steering wheel when the vehicle is on a course to careen off a cliff. We can raise Social Security taxes, we can cut benefits for wealthier retirees through means testing, or we can get every future retiree to build up savings through individual retirement accounts. The report went on to elaborate:
The cuts would differ for couples at different income levels. A low-income, dual-income couple retiring in 2033 would see a $10,600 cut while a high-income, dual-income couple retiring in 2033 would see their annual benefits slashed by $23,000. Although the cut for a low-income couple would be smaller, it would represent a larger share of their income – and so senior poverty would rise significantly upon insolvency.
Importantly, the figures above are in current (nominal) dollars, consistent with ten-year budget scoring practices and how benefit cuts would be seen in real time. Adjusted for inflation, we estimate a typical dual-income couple would face a $14,000 cut, while low-income couples would face a $8,500 cut and high-income couples would face a $18,500 cut.
Again, the general philosophy of both Joe Biden and Donald Trump is that Social Security is doing just fine and that they’re being responsible by leaving the system as it is.
I know people’s instinct is that domestic policy is a bigger priority than foreign policy, but a lot of foreign-policy issues have a big impact on our lives here at home.
Dominic wrote about the suddenly stumbling Chinese economy in my absence, and our Michael Brendan Dougherty noted startling new figures about China’s demographics — not nearly enough babies being born, and a rapidly aging populace — even after Covid cut through its elderly like a hot knife through butter, not that the government’s fictitious official statistics would ever admit it. Funny thing: The number of babies born this year turns out to be roughly the number of 18-year-olds a country will have in 18 years. If you’ve got a strong military now, you may not have as strong a military in two decades, which gives you a slowly closing window for any ambitions of territorial acquisition — say, Taiwan.
We are in a race against hostile, aggressive states for advances in artificial intelligence, quantum computing, and hypersonic weapons. And, oh yeah, there is still this proxy war between NATO and Russia going on.
These are all powerful indictments of the incumbent president, and the Republican nominee ought to be in a strong position to persuade the country that it is time for a change.
But instead, we’re going to spend a lot of the coming year talking about Trump’s trials and his arguments that the 2020 election was stolen.
ADDENDUM: I don’t expect the world to change its mind based upon my newsletter, but yesterday, someone responded to what I wrote by insisting that the European Union has a larger GDP than the U.S. does. Not only did I put those numbers in the newsletter, I put in the links to the International Monetary Fund’s numbers. It’s not even close — $17.8 trillion to $26.8 trillion. This isn’t debatable, or close, or fuzzy math. The fact that the U.S. economy is significantly larger and outpacing that of the EU was discussed here in Foreign Policy, here in the Wall Street Journal, and here in the Financial Times. Way back in the Bush years, the two economies were roughly equivalent and there was a lot of chatter that Europe represented the economic future, and well . . . that turned out to be a combination of excessive hype and optimism about Europe, excessive pessimism about the U.S., the effects of the Great Recession, Covid, the Russian invasion of Ukraine, and a couple other factors.
The point is, you can’t just insist that the EU has a larger GDP when the facts and figures demonstrate the opposite!