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Even Mitt Romney is opposed to this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna152420

 

that the president “made an enormous error” by not pressuring New York prosecutors to drop their case against Trump. (Presidents can pardon only in federal cases.)

"He should have fought like crazy to keep this prosecution from going forward,” Romney said, referring to Biden. “It was a win-win for Donald Trump.”

Pressed by Ruhle whether that is Biden’s job to pardon Trump, Romney said he believes that Biden should have taken a cue from former President Lyndon B. Johnson, saying that the president could have stepped in and urged New York prosecutors to drop the case.“I have been around for a while. If LBJ had been president, and he didn’t want something like this to happen, he’d have been all over that prosecutor saying, ‘You better not bring that forward or I’m gonna drive you out of office,’” he said.

This a pretty naive take, even for a fairly naive politician like Romney.

Biden isn't LBJ. No President in the modern party system has institutional power like LBJ had in Washington. And LBJ had it just in Washington! This is a New York State case, after all.

Bragg should be publicly shamed by the Democratic Party . I mean this is a guy who lets far worse crime go on a daily basis . Also you can issue a pardon on these charges and thus remove any incentive to bring the case to begin with

The President cannot pardon state crimes. How do some of y’all still not get this?

The governor of New York can

Should the other 34 defendants in Manhattan that have been charged by Bragg's DA office with felony counts for falsifying business records be granted pardons too?

https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/1796370294858490027

What Romney is saying is presidents should not  be charged for stuff like this .

At the very least if you are gonna, then you should require them to be allowed an auto appeal to the state Supreme Court or SCOTUS(depending on whether it’s a state or federal charge) and let them decide if they should get immunity for that particular charge

Yes.

Shame I couldn't survive 34 shots.

Even Mitt Romney is opposed to this:

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/rcna152420

 

that the president “made an enormous error” by not pressuring New York prosecutors to drop their case against Trump. (Presidents can pardon only in federal cases.)

"He should have fought like crazy to keep this prosecution from going forward,” Romney said, referring to Biden. “It was a win-win for Donald Trump.”

Pressed by Ruhle whether that is Biden’s job to pardon Trump, Romney said he believes that Biden should have taken a cue from former President Lyndon B. Johnson, saying that the president could have stepped in and urged New York prosecutors to drop the case.“I have been around for a while. If LBJ had been president, and he didn’t want something like this to happen, he’d have been all over that prosecutor saying, ‘You better not bring that forward or I’m gonna drive you out of office,’” he said.

This a pretty naive take, even for a fairly naive politician like Romney.

Biden isn't LBJ. No President in the modern party system has institutional power like LBJ had in Washington. And LBJ had it just in Washington! This is a New York State case, after all.

Bragg should be publicly shamed by the Democratic Party . I mean this is a guy who lets far worse crime go on a daily basis . Also you can issue a pardon on these charges and thus remove any incentive to bring the case to begin with

The President cannot pardon state crimes. How do some of y’all still not get this?

The governor of New York can

Should the other 34 defendants in Manhattan that have been charged by Bragg's DA office with felony counts for falsifying business records be granted pardons too?

https://twitter.com/jonfavs/status/1796370294858490027

These are the world's biggest batteries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_pumped-storage_hydroelectric_power_stations

The governor of New York could announce that she's an alien from Pluto too, and that's about as likely as her issuing a pardon for Trump in this case.

Turns out all the people in the Bronx who don’t know what a computer is were at that Trump rally!

[US state department falsified report absolving Israel on Gaza aid – ex-official]

US state department falsified report absolving Israel on Gaza aid – ex-official

[...]

Gilbert, a 20-year veteran of the state department who has worked in several war zones, said that report’s conclusion went against the overwhelming view of state department experts who were consulted on the report.

She said there was general agreement that while other factors impeded the flow of aid into Gaza at a time when famine has begun to take hold of its 2.3 million population – such as lack of security, caused by Hamas, Israeli military operations and the desperation of Palestinians to find food – it was clear that Israel was playing a role in limiting the amount of food and medical supplies crossing the border into Gaza.

“There is consensus among the humanitarian community on that. It is absolutely the opinion of the humanitarian subject matter experts in the state department, and not just in my bureau – people who look at this from the intelligence community and from other bureaus. I would be very hard pressed to think of anyone who has said [Israeli obstruction] is not an issue,” Gilbert said. “That’s why I object to that report saying that Israel is not blocking humanitarian assistance. That is patently false.”

The Guardian has approached the state department requesting comment on Gilbert’s remarks.

Gilbert was one of the experts consulted in drawing up the NSM-20 report, but she said it was taken out of their hands as it approached completion.

“Sometime at the end of April, the subject matter experts were taken off the report and we were told it would be edited at a higher level. So I did not know what was in the report until it came out,” she said. “But when the report came out, late on the Friday afternoon [on 10 May], I read it and I had to reread it. I had to go back and print out that section and read it, because I could not believe it stated so starkly that we assess that Israel is not blocking humanitarian assistance.

“Two hours after it was released, I sent an email to my front office and the team that is working on this, saying I will resign as a result of this,” Gilbert said.
[...]

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/30/stacy-gilbert-us-state-department-israel-gaza-aid

I’m curious how much the wagons are gonna circle and open fire on the “enemy” tomorrow.

They’re already circling — asked just now whether he respected the jury’s decision in this case, Byron Donald’s point-blank said “no, I don’t.”

Some guy named Vic Bajaj, a defense attorney, predicted, when asked, that it would be overturned on appeal.

We won’t know that until 2025 at the earliest, I think.

RI’s 2019 political quadrants thread redpilled me into believing “the CRT theory” of US party coalitions, which ER kind of paraphrased here.

Voter data breakdown from RI's 2019 political quadrants thread. The ideology breakdown of the crosstabs is what convinced me that Asians could vote to the left of Latinos in 2020 (and likely did given how big the 2016->2020 R swings were in many heavily Latino areas).

Breaking down different groups by quadrant:

Group	Liberal	Conservative	Communitarian	Libertarian
By Sex
Men	31.8	43.0	22.2	3.0
Women	38.3	24.4	34.5	2.8
By Race
White	31.9	36.2	29.1	2.8
Black	61.1	7.5	27.6	3.9
Hispanic	37.5	34.3	24.3	3.9
Asian	49.6	15.1	31.1	4.2
Native	29.5	39.3	29.5	1.6

The Hispanic crosstab is 34% conservative, 24% communitarian, and 4% libertarian. The Asian crosstab is 15% conservative, 31% communitarian, and 4% libertarian. The Hispanic crosstab is ideologically much closer to the Non-Hispanic White crosstab than to either the Black or Asian crosstabs; on both the liberal and conservative categories, the Asian crosstab falls in between the Hispanic and Black crosstabs. I wouldn't be surprised if the Asian crosstab was unintentionally filtered to be more D-friendly than actual election results might suggest, kind of like how Pew Research focuses on Asian respondents who are English proficient. But even then, it's unlikely that a hypothetical "more representative" Asian crosstab would be ideologically more similar to the Non-Hispanic White crosstab than the Hispanic crosstab was. This suggested to me that there is a greater proportion of "non-libleft" Hispanic voters that can be persuaded to vote R than there is for "non-libleft" Asian voters.

I don't think the "CRT explanation" of "proximity to whiteness" is a good explanation for Asians being/becoming more D than Latinos, even though Latino Americans are demonstrably more "(Anglo) white-adjacent" (i.e. closer to Europe and West Asia) on several salient cultural metrics than Asian Americans are, on religious and linguistic grounds alone (even though I don't think this is limited to that). This is a really bad way of looking at racial voting patterns and where different groups stand in US society.

If anything, I think it has more to do with differing occupational and industrial profiles of racial/ethnic groups, as well as global geopolitics. Latino Americans are more concentrated in fields where their Non-Hispanic White counterparts vote R, while the fields that Asian Americans are stereotyped of being concentrated in are known for having D voting (or at least D-trending) Whites. Asia is also more of a threat to US and Western economic hegemony due to the sheer size of China and India's economies- which is bound to have some downstream psychological effect on how Asian Americans are perceived even if immigration from Asia decelerates.

Update:  so apparently when there’s an out of state felony conviction, eligibility to vote in Florida depends on whether he would be eligible to vote in the state where the conviction occurred.  NY only bars felons from voting while they are in prison.  So Trump would be eligible to vote in Florida unless he is in prison in NY at that time.

What are some underrated political trends, in your opinion?

I'll probably write a more substantial answer to this later, but for now I'll just quotepost my shallow-dive into the Economist 2024 election demographic crosstabs tool, which was apparently based on a recent(ish) YouGov online survey.

From this very surface level crosstab analysis, it seems like the model assumes voters of Non-Christian, Non-Jewish faiths will vote similarly to each other and will swing uniformly. I'm too lazy to check, but I'm guessing this uniform R swing probably isn't adjusted for age bracket. We also see a large assumed D swing among Mormons of all racial backgrounds, and probably a large assumed R swing among POC evangelicals in general (I see no reason why this would be limited to those who are college-educated Asian men born in the 90s).

The model also seems to think that the alleged R swing among Muslim voters (at least in Texas) will be strongest among racial crosstabs that have grown the fastest in recent years due to accelerating immigration from developing countries.

This ProgMod thread prompted me to write an effortpost response to this

RI’s 2019 political quadrants thread redpilled me into believing “the CRT theory” of US party coalitions, which ER kind of paraphrased here.

Voter data breakdown from RI's 2019 political quadrants thread. The ideology breakdown of the crosstabs is what convinced me that Asians could vote to the left of Latinos in 2020 (and likely did given how big the 2016->2020 R swings were in many heavily Latino areas).

Breaking down different groups by quadrant:

Group	Liberal	Conservative	Communitarian	Libertarian
By Sex
Men	31.8	43.0	22.2	3.0
Women	38.3	24.4	34.5	2.8
By Race
White	31.9	36.2	29.1	2.8
Black	61.1	7.5	27.6	3.9
Hispanic	37.5	34.3	24.3	3.9
Asian	49.6	15.1	31.1	4.2
Native	29.5	39.3	29.5	1.6

The Hispanic crosstab is 34% conservative, 24% communitarian, and 4% libertarian. The Asian crosstab is 15% conservative, 31% communitarian, and 4% libertarian. The Hispanic crosstab is ideologically much closer to the Non-Hispanic White crosstab than to either the Black or Asian crosstabs; on both the liberal and conservative categories, the Asian crosstab falls in between the Hispanic and Black crosstabs. I wouldn't be surprised if the Asian crosstab was unintentionally filtered to be more D-friendly than actual election results might suggest, kind of like how Pew Research focuses on Asian respondents who are English proficient. But even then, it's unlikely that a hypothetical "more representative" Asian crosstab would be ideologically more similar to the Non-Hispanic White crosstab than the Hispanic crosstab was. This suggested to me that there is a greater proportion of "non-libleft" Hispanic voters that can be persuaded to vote R than there is for "non-libleft" Asian voters.

I don't think the "CRT explanation" of "proximity to whiteness" is a good explanation for Asians being/becoming more D than Latinos, even though Latino Americans are demonstrably more "(Anglo) white-adjacent" (i.e. closer to Europe and West Asia) on several salient cultural metrics than Asian Americans are, on religious and linguistic grounds alone (even though I don't think this is limited to that). This is a really bad way of looking at racial voting patterns and where different groups stand in US society.

If anything, I think it has more to do with differing occupational and industrial profiles of racial/ethnic groups, as well as global geopolitics. Latino Americans are more concentrated in fields where their Non-Hispanic White counterparts vote R, while the fields that Asian Americans are stereotyped of being concentrated in are known for having D voting (or at least D-trending) Whites. Asia is also more of a threat to US and Western economic hegemony due to the sheer size of China and India's economies- which is bound to have some downstream psychological effect on how Asian Americans are perceived even if immigration from Asia decelerates.