The other day, as I was doing my daily reading, I came across climate scientists, debating whether or not we faced civilizational collapse. It was interesting, and I want to take a sec to give you my perspective, which is that of an economist slash top 50 thinkers guy, guru, whatever you want to call it etcetera.
Collapse. Think of a top spinning. How does it stop? It destabilizes. That’s the same model we should apply to us. So what destabilizes our human organizations, the largest of which is a civilization—leading to the loss of momentum, the breakdown, that ends in collapse?
And here, collapse isn’t a sci-fi film. Tomorrow, it’s the End of the World. The Roman Empire took centuries to fully collapse. The Soviet Union took decades to become what Russia is today. And so on. We’re talking about a process, that takes from decades to centuries, then, not a sudden sort of blockbuster film overnight melodrama. The tragedy of collapse is written across generations.
So. Destabilization. Long-term. What causes it?
The Future of the Economy
The economy. It’s the very first thing we should look at to think about this question.
And the economic picture before us is as clear as it is dire. What were we just discussing yesterday? How inflation is the primary destabilizer of modern polities. So what’s the future of the economy?
We’re in for a lost decade, plus. The global economy’s projected to stagnate for the next decade, but even beyond that, there are no real sources of easy growth left. We’ve made war on each other, pillaged the world, and destroyed the planet. Game over, at least for those models of “growth.” (And no, tools like AI won’t magically create “growth”—they’ll just create more phantom growth, gains making the ultra wealthy even wealthier, but costing us dearly at the median, taking jobs, eroding culture and society, breaking social bonds, fueling distrust, and so on.)
Now. What’s the main issue affecting the world today? There’s a “cost of living crisis,” as we economists call it, and that understates just how much pain people are feeling. They’re feeling the crunch profoundly and dearly. But framing it this way—a cost-of-living crisis—implies that it’s temporary, that it’ll pass someday soon. Will it, though?
The hard truth is: probably not.
Consider the following. It’s from a cutting edge study—one of the first times our central banks have studied the effects of climate change in a serious way. What did it find?
Food costs more because of climate change - and it will get worse
Rising temperatures are predicted to drive up food inflation by between 0.9 and 3.2 per cent a year by 2035, as crop yields suffer from extreme heat.
“You are already paying more and more for food due to global warming – and rising temperatures will drive food prices a lot higher in the next decade.
According to a study done in collaboration with the European Central Bank, by 2035, higher temperatures alone will be pushing up worldwide food prices by between 0.9 and 3.2 per cent every single year.
“There’s often a sense of shock and surprise at the magnitude of these impacts,” says Maximilian Kotz at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, referring to his discussions with economists while doing the study.”
All of that’s going to be, inevitably, an underestimate, because so far, everything about the mega-scale impacts of climate change has been severely underestimated. So let’s imagine now that food prices go up by 4%, 5%, a year, due to climate change. This study doesn’t really factor in corporate strategy, aka profit margins, and adding those in, that means that food goes up double that much, maybe.
Welcome to what I often call the greatest economic shock in modern history. Inflation isn’t going to magically go away. I know that you’re often told that it will, but—but those sorts of estimates and models, amazingly enough, are so obsolete that they don’t factor in the single biggest change in the world, which is climate change. It hardly takes a genius to see that droughts, crop failures, megafloods, and so forth are going to add up dearly, in terms of this basic.
Let’s shade that in in another way, to make it even sharper. Do you know what’s already becoming a luxury, mainly reserved for the ultra rich? Clean air. It’s now marketed as a selling point in high-end apartments in Manhattan, precisely because, I’d imagine, there are more and more days of ultra low quality air, since, for example Canada burns. I think those who don’t keep up with the science are severely underestimating where we’re headed, because we’re already in “uncharted territory.”
Combine the following with its economic and sociopolitical implications—and tell me if you don’t shudder.
The head of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies is sounding an alarm in the scientific community — albeit a nuanced one — over how unexpectedly significant 2023's warming was.
Why it matters: Scientists don't yet know why the world warmed by about 0.2°C (0.36°F) more than would have been expected during 2023, lasting into this year, climate scientist Gavin Schmidt wrote in the journal Nature on Tuesday.
Zoom in: Schmidt outlines all the known players on the climate stage during 2023, from El Niño to changes in marine shipping emissions, along with increasing greenhouse gases.
None of them can explain the enduring spike in global air and ocean temperatures that began last year.
He calls it "an unprecedented knowledge gap," noting that if the anomaly does not diminish by August, as suggested by past El Niño events, "the world will be in uncharted territory."
Notably, his predecessor at GISS, James Hansen, published a paper last year arguing we are already in just such a situation.
So here we have inflation for two of the most basic of basics—air and food. I haven’t mentioned water, though as you can imagine, the situation’s not so different, perhaps even more dire, because as a world, we’re running out of it, essentially.
I’m not kidding, then, when I say this is the greatest shock in modern history, maybe all of history. The basics are poised to get more and more expensive. In a kind of weird modern day take on Les Miserables, and if it appears we might reach the point of “let them eat cake,” you’re not far off the mark, at least in many higher risk places and locales. What does a civilization where the basics—food, air, and water, and everything that’s made from them, which is everything, period—are poised to dramatically rise in price, and have already begun to, becoming increasingly unaffordable…what would you call the situation it faces?
Is that an early warning sign of collapse? If not, shouldn’t it be?
How Societies Destabilize
Yesterday, we discussed how inflation is the great destroyer of modern democracy. Maybe more than that, if we look back in history—the great destroyer of stability, period. Let’s confine ourselves to just the modern era—and examples like Weimar Germany becoming Nazi Germany thanks to hyperinflation are all too clear.
What’s happening today? Amazingly, Trump is poised to win the Presidency again—after, despite, it all, criminal charges, a coup attempt, abuse of power, the whole nine yards. Why? Ask people, and they’ll tell you: they think the economy sucks, and inflation’s killing them. Like I said: the great destroyer.
Now imagine what a world of perma-heatflation—long-term inflation induced by climate change, for all the basics, and all the stuff made from the basics, and here you can ask yourself what’s not made from air, water, and food, as a basic input—imagine what that world looks like politically. It’s not pretty, is it?
We’ve had a cost of living crisis for a little less than half a decade—and economic stagnation for about two. And it’s the number one reason that democracy’s in such dire shape that it’s halved in the last twenty years. In Europe, that little bout of a cost of living crisis has been enough to send the far right surging, even in mature social democracies, once held up as beacons of stability by the world.
The great destroyer. Inflation isn’t really just “inflation.” It wrecks people’s lives, fast and hard, as we’ve found out the hard way in recent years. But previous bouts of inflation have…ended. Because we had the tools to end them. With various adjustments to things like interest rates. I won’t get into why, but now? We don’t have the tools to end this wave of inflation. Can you tell me how to raise more crops or suddenly increase the supply of clean water by 50% or give people clean air on a burning planet? We have no idea, literally none, how to accomplish those things, and so this coming wave of inflation is likely to be…
The Flickering of Civilization, or Why the World is Going Crazy
Permanent. Permanent’s a dangerous word to use, in the economic context. Nothing lasts forever. But this? This one well might. It’s emphatically possible that the prices of food, air, and water, become sharply, permanently higher. After all, even the price we pay now, at the pump or grocery store, is artificial, propped up by vast subsidies.
So what happens if prices just go up and up…forever? 20 years. 30. 50. What happens if the “equilibrium price”, as we economists call it, of food, water, and air, on a planet that’s two degrees hotter…is…double what it is today. Triple.
You can see the problem, but let me spell it out for you. People’s living standards go on cratering. Their well-being goes on imploding. They react in frustration, despair, and trauma, all of which becomes rage and anger. They blame institutions for it, perhaps rightly. They lose faith in orthodox politics and its parties. Instead, they turn to demagogues, peddling wacko conspiracy theories, transforming their anger and rage into hate and spite.
Then the world begins to seriously unravel. And we’re already at that point, more or less, or approaching it. If Trump gets re-elected? Kiss the world, even as we know it today, this bleak one, goodbye. Everything destabilizes that much more. You get the point.
As their lives fall apart, people turn to demagogues, and demagogues aren’t interesting in solving their actual problems, just finding scapegoats to blame, and cottoning up frenzies and panics of hate. The vicious circle accelerates. This path leads, in the end, to something much like world war. At best, little bubbles of isolated nations, in a world that’s more or less authoritarian, and if you think I exaggerate, remember we’re already at just 20% democracy left.
What happens in that kind of world? Not much good does, and that’s the point. People, being less free, constrained to live in the ways fanatics and lunatics want, don’t devote their lives to science, art, literature, justice, beauty, goodness, truth, or at least not as much as otherwise. The fascist-authoritarian mission of cleansing society of the impure, or starting this war, or conquering that neighbor, or demonizing that social group and taking their personhood away—it becomes everything, the point and purpose of a society. Manias, frenzies, panics are all that’s left, which is what destabilization is. So potential, possibility, progress—all these grow swiftly suffocated in the authoritarian era we’re now facing, and seem to be entering.
So. Are we in the early stages of civilizational collapse? I think that question’s probably a little much for a lot of people to handle, so let’s turn it on its head. If a civilization was in serious and real trouble, what would you expect to see? Economic decline—today, the majority of people in ours are getting poorer, so check. Rising prices—in ours, the basics are skyrocketing, and are set to continue to, so check. Growing instability, sociopolitically—in ours, people are giving up on the belief that orthodox institutions, from political parties to corporations to international agencies, can give them better lives, and turning to fanaticism en masse, so check. A situation of resources shortages, running on empty—we’re hitting the wall of climate change, and so far, mostly twiddling thumbs, so check.
Maybe your answer differs from mine. Good, discuss away in the comments. Me? I’d say: if these aren’t early warning signs, then we’ve gone blind.
There is no particular mystery to unravel around the political views of Elon Musk, the billionaire technology and social media executive. He is — and for some time, has been — on the far right wing of American politics. He is an enthusiastic purveyor of far-right conspiracy theories, using his platform on the website X to spread a worldview that is as extreme as it is untethered from reality.
Musk is especially preoccupied with the racial makeup of the country and the alleged deficiency of nonwhites in important positions. He blames the recent problems at Boeing, for example, on its efforts to diversify its work force, despite easily accessible and widely publicized accounts of a dangerous culture of cost-cutting and profit-seeking at the company.
“Experts and critics say that Boeing’s woes have been years in the making,” reported CNN in January, “some pointing to the result of a shift in corporate culture that started at the top and put profits ahead of the safety and engineering prowess for which it was once praised, placing not only its future, but the passengers on its planes, at grave risk.”
Is diversity the problem at Boeing, or is it a shortsighted obsession with maximizing shareholder value at the expense of quality and safety? Musk, a wealthy shareholder in various companies — including his own, Tesla, which is being sued by Equal Employment Opportunity Commission for allegedly allowing racist abuse of some of its Black employees — says it’s diversity.
“It will take an airplane crashing and killing hundreds of people for them to change this crazy policy of DIE,” Musk wrote in January, deliberately misspelling the acronym D.E.I., meaning diversity, equity and inclusion.
Musk’s current obsession, as Greg Sargent observes in The New Republic, is the “great replacement,” a far-right conspiracy theory that liberal elites in the United States are deliberately opening the southern border to nonwhite immigration from Mexico, South and Central America in order to replace the nation’s white majority and secure permanent control of its political institutions.
On X, Musk recently pinned a post to a slickly produced video that purports to expose a “Democrat open borders plan to entrench single-party rule,” in which Democrats shepherd millions of people into the United States and “keep them in the country at all costs.” Musk says, “This is actually happening!” The video had, at the time of this writing, well over 50 million views.
Musk is far from the first person to push the “great replacement” theory. It was featured in ads released by Representative Elise Stefanik of New York, a top Republican in the House. “Radical Democrats are planning their most aggressive move yet: a PERMANENT ELECTION INSURRECTION,” said one version of the advertisement. “Their plan to grant amnesty to 11 MILLION illegal immigrants will overthrow our current electorate and create a permanent liberal majority in Washington.”
The “great replacement” was part of the centerpiece of Tucker Carlson’s message to viewers during his time on Fox News. It is touted by a number of anti-immigrant, white nationalist and white supremacist groups. It was featured prominently at the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Va., in 2017, where neo-Nazis chanted “Jews will not replace us.” And it has inspired at least four separate mass shootings, including the 2018 Tree of Life synagogue shooting in Pittsburgh (11 killed), the 2019 Christchurch shootings in New Zealand (51 killed), the El Paso shooting the same year (23 killed) and the 2022 supermarket shooting in Buffalo (10 killed).
It should go without saying that the “great replacement” is idiotic. There is no “open border.” There is no effort to “replace” the white population of the United States. Racial diversity is not a plot against the nation’s political institutions. And the underlying assumption of the “great replacement” — that, until recently, the United States was a racially and culturally homogenous nation — is nonsense.
But beyond this obvious critique lies a more subtle problem with the “great replacement” conceit. It rests as much on a racial understanding of political identity as it does a racial understanding of national identity.
As Musk and his like-minded paranoiacs see it, nonwhite voters would necessarily be Democrats. With each new “illegal,” the Democratic Party gets a new vote. But there’s nothing about immigration status or melanin content that demands liberal politics. And in fact, there’s growing evidence of a rightward drift among nonwhite voters, particularly those of Hispanic origin. If nonwhite voters are up for grabs — if their partisan identities are more contingent than fixed — then it’s also true that Republicans and conservatives can simply compete for their allegiance the way they would for members of any other group.
There lies the rub. To compete for voters is to believe in one of the fundamental truths of democracy: that there’s no such thing as a permanent majority. Just the opposite, in fact. Majorities in a democratic country are variable and fluid for the simple reason that individuals themselves are variable and fluid. They contradict themselves. They contain multitudes. They have different and competing values and interests that fall in and out of salience depending on the situation or political context. Your opponent may have assembled a majority to beat you, but you can — in the next election — assemble a different majority to win for yourself. The only constant is that nothing is settled or set in place.
To believe that the “great replacement” is true is to reject the dynamism of democratic society. It is to believe, instead, in a zero-sum world of immutable identities and the hierarchies that necessarily follow. There is no hope for persuasion — no hope for politics, even — if people can be only one thing.
It’s no surprise, then, that the rise of “great replacement” theory has happened in tandem with the Republican Party’s turn toward authoritarianism in the personage of Donald Trump. If there’s no persuasion, then the only thing that’s left is domination and the imperative, then, to dominate others before they can dominate you.
The Senate passed the appropriations bill shortly after midnight on Saturday morning, and President Joe Biden signed it Saturday afternoon. In his statement after he signed the bill, Biden was clear: “Congress’s work isn’t finished,” he said. “The House must pass the bipartisan national security supplemental to advance our national security interests. And Congress must pass the bipartisan border security agreement—the toughest and fairest reforms in decades—to ensure we have the policies and funding needed to secure the border. It’s time to get this done.”
House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) has refused to bring forward the national security supplemental bill to fund Ukraine, Israel, the Indo-Pacific, and humanitarian aid to Gaza. He has also refused to bring forward the border security measure hammered out in the Senate after House Republicans demanded it and passed there on February 13. Johnson is doing the bidding of former president Trump, who opposes aid to Ukraine and border security measures.
Congress is on break and will not return to Washington, D.C., until the second week in April.
By then, political calculations may well have changed.
MAGA Republicans appear to be in trouble.
The House recessed on Friday for two weeks in utter disarray. On ABC News’s This Week, former representative Ken Buck (R-CO), who left Congress Friday, complained that House Republicans were focusing “on messaging bills that get us nowhere” rather than addressing the country’s problems. He called Congress “dysfunctional.”
On Friday, NBC announced it was hiring former Republican National Committee (RNC) chair Ronna McDaniel as a political analyst. Today the main political story in the U.S. was the ferocious backlash to that decision. McDaniel not only defended Trump, attacked the press, and gaslit reporters, she also participated in the effort to overturn the 2020 presidential election.
In an interview with Kristen Welker this morning on NBC’s Meet the Press—Welker was quick to point out that the interview had been arranged long before she learned of the hiring— McDaniel explained away her support for Trump’s promise to pardon those convicted for their participation in the January 6, 2021, attack on the U.S. Capitol by saying, “When you’re the RNC Chair, you kind of take one for the whole team.”
That statement encapsulated Trump Republicans. In a democracy, the “team” is supposed to be the whole country. But Trump Republicans like McDaniel were willing to overthrow American democracy so long as it kept them in power.
That position is increasingly unpopular. Former representative Liz Cheney (R-WY) wrote on social media: “Ronna facilitated Trump’s corrupt fake elector plot & his effort to pressure [Michigan] officials not to certify the legitimate election outcome. She spread his lies & called 1/6 ‘legitimate political discourse.’ That’s not ‘taking one for the team.’ It’s enabling criminality & depravity.”
McDaniel wants to be welcomed back into mainstream political discourse, but it appears that the window for such a makeover might have closed.
In the wake of Trump’s takeover of the RNC, mainstream Republicans are backing away from the party. Today, Senator Lisa Murkowski (R-AK) said she could not “get behind Donald Trump” and expressed “regret that our party is seemingly becoming a party of Donald Trump.” She did not rule out leaving the Republican Party.
In Politico today, a piece on Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, by Adam Wren also isolated Trump from the pre-2016 Republican Party. Pence appears to be trying to reclaim the mantle of that earlier incarnation of the party, backed as he is by right-wing billionaire Harlan Crow (who has funded Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas over the years) and the Koch network. Wren’s piece says Pence is focusing these days on “a nonprofit policy shop aimed at advancing conservative ideals.” Wren suggested that Pence’s public split from Trump is “the latest sign that Trumpism is now permanently and irrevocably divorced from its initial marriage of convenience with…Reaganism.”
Trump appears to believe his power over his base means he doesn’t need the established Republicans. But that power came from Trump’s aura of invincibility, which is now in very real crisis thanks to Trump’s growing money troubles. Tomorrow is the deadline for him to produce either the cash or a bond to cover the $454 million he owes to the people of the state of New York in fines and disgorgement of ill-gotten gains for fraud.
Trump does not appear to have the necessary cash and has been unable to get a bond. He claims a bond of such size is “unprecedented, and practically impossible for ANY Company, including one as successful as mine," and that "[t]he Bonding Companies have never heard of such a bond, of this size, before, nor do they have the ability to post such a bond, even if they wanted to.” But Louis Jacobson of PolitiFact corrected the record: it is not uncommon for companies in civil litigation cases to post bonds of more than $1 billion.
Trump made his political career on his image as a successful and fabulously wealthy businessman. Today, “Don Poorleone” trended on X (formerly Twitter).
The backlash to McDaniel’s hiring at NBC also suggests a media shift against news designed to grab eyeballs, the sort of media that has fed the MAGA movement. According to Mike Allen of Axios, NBC executives unanimously supported hiring McDaniel. A memo from Carrie Budoff Brown, who is in charge of the political coverage at NBC News, said McDaniel would help the outlet examine “the diverse perspectives of American voters.” This appears to mean she would appeal to Trump voters, bringing more viewers to the platform.
But former Meet the Press anchor Chuck Todd took a strong stand against adding McDaniel to a news organization, noting her “credibility issues” and that “many of our professional dealings with the RNC over the last six years have been met with gaslighting [and] character assassination.”
This pushback against news media as entertainment recalls the 1890s, when American newspapers were highly partisan and gravitated toward more and more sensational headlines and exaggerated stories to increase sales. That publication model led to a circulation war between Joseph Pulitzer’s New York World and William Randolph Hearst’s New York Journal that is widely—and almost certainly inaccurately—blamed for pushing the United States into war with Spain in 1898.
More accurate, though, is that the sensationalism of what was known as “yellow journalism” created a backlash that gave rise to new investigative journalism designed to move away from partisanship and explain clearly to readers what was happening in American politics and economics. In 1893, McClure’s Magazine appeared, offering in-depth examinations of the workings of corporations and city governments and launching a new era of reform.
Three years later, publisher Adolph Ochs bought the New York Times and put up New York City’s first electric sign to advertise, in nearly 2,700 individual lights of red, white, blue, and green, that it would push back against yellow journalism by publishing “ALL THE NEWS THAT’S FIT TO PRINT.” Ochs added that motto to the masthead. With his determination to provide nonpartisan news without sensationalism, in just under 40 years, Ochs took over the paper from just over 20,000 readers to more than 465,000, and turned the New York Times into a newspaper of record.
In that era that looks so much like our own, the national mood had changed.
Eric Kleefeld@EricKleefeld
1h
Mike Lindell with Steve Bannon for Holy Week, claims more people are coming to Christ: “And to celebrate, Steve … we are doing our biblical pillows here…” at 2 for $25.
Well, ladies and germs, the court just extended their “deadline” for Trump to come up with the money for ten more days.
I think they’ve finally beaten out of me even the gumption enough to be disappointed anymore.
Everyone say it with me, and maybe we can produce a kind of group cathartic acceptance- “Donald Trump is above the law.”
Well it keeps getting better and better, today Trump compared hisself to Jesus. That nutbag thinks he's in charge of a Christian church......sadly we have too many stupid people completely devoid of any religious knowledge who can't wait to worship him. Apparently they are not truly sure of who they want to hate (they all have a list) and he will help them identify the prey.
I'm heart broken.
This morning The Boeing Company announced that the chief of Boeing’s commercial airplane division, Stan Deal, is leaving immediately. Chief executive officer Dave Calhoun is stepping down at the end of the year. Chair of the board Larry Kellner will not stand for reelection.
On January 5 a door plug blew off a Boeing 737 Max jetliner operated by Alaska Airlines while it was in flight. The United States Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) immediately grounded about 170 similar Boeing planes operated by U.S. airlines or in U.S. territory until they could be inspected. “The FAA’s first priority is keeping the flying public safe,” it said, and added: “The safety of the flying public, not speed, will determine the timeline for returning the Boeing 737-9 MAX to service.”
Last year an FAA investigation “observed a disconnect between Boeing’s senior management and other members of the organization on safety culture,” with employees worrying about retaliation for reporting safety issues. After the door plug blew off, an FAA audit of different aspects of the production process released two weeks ago found that Boeing failed 33 of 89 product audits. On March 9, Spencer S. Hsu, Ian Duncan, and Lori Aratani of the Washington Post reported that the Justice Department had opened a criminal investigation into the door plug failure.
Today, Boeing announced a change in leadership.
Also today, Acting Secretary of Labor Julie Su reminded readers of Teen Vogue, on the anniversary of the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory Fire that killed 147 garment workers in New York City after their employer had locked the exits, of how that tragedy prompted the federal government to create “programs that generations of Americans have relied on for economic security and dignity, including a nationwide minimum wage, health and safety regulations, restrictions on child labor, and more.”
Each generation “has a duty to take the baton of progress from those who came before us,” Su said. She noted that industries whose workforces are mostly women or immigrants have historically often broken the law, exposing workers to dangerous conditions and withholding pay.
This problem persists in the present, and she reported that the Department of Labor is working to address it. For example, after three injuries at a plant outside Chicago, including the December 2022 death of a 29-year-old sanitation worker, the U.S. Department of Labor fined the company $2.8 million. And, earlier this year, the department recovered more than $1 million for 165 workers whose employer had cheated them of overtime pay, the largest settlement ever for California garment workers.
The U.S. Department of Energy today announced it has selected 33 projects from more than 20 states that will be awarded up to $6 billion to jump-start the elimination of carbon dioxide emissions from industries that are hard to adapt to green technologies. The projects will match federal monies to invest more than $20 billion toward commercial-scale decarbonization solutions for cement and concrete, chemicals and refining, metals including iron and steel, pulp and paper mills, and so on. The projects are funded by the Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and Inflation Reduction Act, and will create tens of thousands of jobs. The Department of Energy estimates that the funded projects will cut carbon emissions by an average of 77%.
All of these news items today—airplane safety, worker protection, and technologies to address climate change—reflect a government designed to protect the American people. The nonpartisan civil servants staffing the agencies responsible for that protection are the ones that MAGA Republicans call the Deep State and Trump has vowed to replace with his own loyalists.
For his part, as he faced cases in two different New York courts, Trump’s focus today was on the rule of law. He does not appear to be a fan of it.
March 25 was the deadline for Trump to produce a bond to cover the $454 million he owes to the people of the state of New York for fraud. But before New York attorney general Letitia James could begin to seize his assets this morning, a New York appeals court threw him a lifeline, cutting the size of the required bond to $175 million and giving him 10 more days to post it. The order also paused the enforcement of many of the penalties Judge Arthur Engoron had imposed. So, for the time being, Trump and his sons can continue to do business in New York, although their businesses remain under the supervision of an independent monitor.
The court’s order does not change Engoron’s judgment in the case. It simply puts the execution of that judgment on hold as Trump appeals it, which he must do on time.
In a different courtroom today, Judge Juan Merchan rejected further delaying tactics by Trump’s lawyers and set April 15 as the date for jury selection in the criminal case of election interference. This is the case in which Trump is charged with 34 counts of falsifying business records to hide payments to people with damaging information about him before the 2016 election. This scheme gave Trump “an illegal edge in a razor-thin race,” as legal reporter Adam Klasfeld of Just Security put it.
Trump has said he will appeal.
Last week, Brian Beutler of Off Message noted that “Trump is scarcely running a presidential campaign…. [H]is efforts are overwhelmingly fixed on evading justice or mooting judgments he’s already lost by any means necessary. He’d ideally like to prevail in these efforts before the election, but the task will become much easier if he’s able to win or steal the presidency despite the legal peril.”
Trump appeared angry today at a press conference after Judge Merchan set a date for the start of the election interference case. He blamed President Joe Biden for his legal troubles, although the case is in New York. He insisted that holding him accountable for his behavior is itself “election interference.”
In a statement, the Biden camp replied: “Donald Trump is weak and desperate—both as a man and a candidate for President…. His campaign can’t raise money, he is uninterested in campaigning outside his country club, and every time he opens his mouth, he pushes moderate and suburban voters away with his dangerous agenda.
“America deserves better than a feeble, confused, and tired Donald Trump.”
Former President Donald Trump got a lucky break on Monday, when a New York appeals court reduced the bond he owes in the $464 million civil fraud case to just $175 million — and gave him an extra 10 days to come up with the money before state Attorney General Letitia James can begin seizing his assets to pay what he owes.
The decision in the case, in which Trump was found liable for inflating property values to manipulate the Trump Organization's tax burden and loan interest terms, came just hours before James would have been able to seize his properties, which by some accounts, she was gearing up to do with his Westchester assets.
Trump is by no means in the clear, but many political and legal experts argued on X that he received treatment more favorable than any normal civil defendant could expect.
"Yet again, @realDonaldTrump gets special treatment with his own private system of justice," wrote Michael Steele, former chair of the Republican National Committee. "The NY Appeals Court has decided to give Trump more time to pay less money by reducing his bond from $454M to $175 and giving him 10 days to get the money. This makes absolutely no sense."
"Kalief Browder allegedly stole a backpack, was unable to post a $3000 bond, spent 800 days in solitary confinement," wrote artist IrishRyGirl. "Donald Trump, ripped off the NY tax payers of millions of dollars, gets bond reduced and gets to walk free.. sounds about white wealthy privilege."
"Boy, that appeals court really bailed out fake billionaire trump from having to face accountability today, giving him 10 more days and a 50% 'discount' on the bond," posted Democratic PAC adviser Majid Madellan, more commonly known by the name Brooklyn Dad Defiant. "What a f---ing bull---- ruling."
"The NY appellate court’s unexplained reduction from $454M to $175M in the bond Trump must post in 10 days to secure the judgment pending appeal is a travesty of justice," wrote retired Harvard Law professor Laurence Tribe. "Let’s hope public disgust with this preferential treatment will come back to bite Trump politically."
"BREAKING: NY’s justice system," wrote Tristan Snell, a former New York prosecutor who handled the Trump University case. "Appellate judges hand Trump a gift, cut bond down to $175 million, give him 10 extra days; Imagine a basketball team down by 40 points, and with 1:00 left in the game, refs give the losing team 5 more minutes — and lower the hoop from 10ft to 6ft."
Westchester assets.
