Civil Commotion

Donald Trump is using government lawyers to defend what is clearly a private, non-public lawsuit.

The Justice Department moved on Tuesday to replace President Trump’s private legal team with government lawyers to defend him against a defamation lawsuit by the author E. Jean Carroll, who has accused him of raping her in a Manhattan department store in the 1990s.

In a highly unusual legal move, lawyers for the Justice Department said in court papers that Mr. Trump was acting in his official capacity as president when he denied ever knowing Ms. Carroll and thus could be defended by government lawyers — in effect underwritten by taxpayer money.

This makes sense only if Trump’s interests, and the Federal government’s, are one and the same — if Trump’s denial was, in essence, an official act undertaken in his role as president.

This is nonsense. I am not especially surprised to learn that Trump likes the idea that the government is merely an extension of himself — but what on earth has happened to William Barr to make him agree?

According to Michael Cohen, Jerry Falwell, Jr., endorsed Donald Trump for the presidency to settle a debt — the suppression of racy photos.

In his book released today, Michael Cohen, the former fixer for U.S. President Donald Trump, ties for the first time the 2016 presidential endorsement of Trump by American evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr to Cohen’s own role in helping to keep racy “personal” photographs of the Falwells from becoming public.

That’s cheap in those circles, I guess.

Bernie Sanders joins the list of those who worry that Trump intends to remain in office, however the election goes.

Since I was talking about that eventuality — inevitability, probably — three years ago, I’m grateful to see that more and more Americans recognize the danger. Some miscellaneous thoughts about defending the country from Trump:

This Atlantic piece is a must-read.

When President Donald Trump canceled a visit to the Aisne-Marne American Cemetery near Paris in 2018, he blamed rain for the last-minute decision, saying that “the helicopter couldn’t fly” and that the Secret Service wouldn’t drive him there. Neither claim was true.

Trump rejected the idea of the visit because he feared his hair would become disheveled in the rain, and because he did not believe it important to honor American war dead, according to four people with firsthand knowledge of the discussion that day. In a conversation with senior staff members on the morning of the scheduled visit, Trump said, “Why should I go to that cemetery? It’s filled with losers.” In a separate conversation on the same trip, Trump referred to the more than 1,800 marines who lost their lives at Belleau Wood as “suckers” for getting killed.

Seriously: There is no more important business before the country than putting that pile of sewage out of office.

What do you know? The QAnon nonsense is poaching the susceptible from Christian nonsense.

Before the pandemic, [Pastor] Frailey knew a little bit about QAnon, but he hadn’t given such an easily debunked fringe theory much of his time. The posts he started seeing felt familiar, though: they reminded him of the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s and 1990s, when rumors of secret occult rituals tormenting children in day-care centers spread quickly among conservative religious believers who were already anxious about changes in family structures. “The pedophile stuff, the Satanic stuff, the eating babies—that’s all from the 1980s,” he says.

That conspiracy-fueled frenzy was propelled in part by credulous mainstream news coverage, and by false accusations and even convictions of day-care owners. But evangelicals, in particular, embraced the claims, tuning in to a wave of televangelists who promised to help viewers spot secret satanic symbols and rituals in the secular world.

If the panic was back with fresh branding as QAnon, it had a new ally in Facebook. And Frailey wasn’t sure where to turn for help. He posted in a private Facebook group for Oklahoma Baptist pastors, asking if anyone else was seeing what he was. The answer, repeatedly, was yes.

The pastors traded links. Frailey read everything he could about QAnon. He listened to every episode of the New York Times podcast series Rabbit Hole, on “what happens when our lives move online,” and devoured a story in the Atlantic that framed QAnon as a new religion infused with the language of Christianity. To Frailey, it felt more like a cult.

QAnon, like Christianity, simplifies and explains the world, and appeals to the same sort of person — the person dizzied by change and the sense of inexplicable diminution, the sense that the world has undergone a malevolent shift.

QAnon and Christianity explain and answer the same need, the same sense of disorientation and loss.