Crypto News: Trump’s mothership of lies hits the rocks of reality

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Trump is indicted.
America's credit is slighted.
Labor unions are excited.

The Deluder-in-Chief. Illustration: Jessica Karl

I want you to think back to every single boss you've ever had. Were any of them particularly … difficult to please? Maybe they made you work through lunch. Or they roasted you on Slack. Or they asked you to write a PR statement from the perspective of a Malaysian sun bear. But what they probably didn't do is ask you to back up a fabricated a story about 5,000 dead people. That's not just bad boss behavior; it may be criminal behavior:

The Senior Campaign Advisor had informed the Defendant that his claims of a large number of dead voters in Georgia were untrue.

Former President Donald Trump — the defendant and toxic boss in question — didn't stop there. He doubled down and asked his campaign advisor, Jason Miller, to assert that ballots were stuffed in Georgia, when there was no evidence to support the claim. Jason grew increasingly frustrated with his boss's requests. It wasn't as though he could magically move mountains to help the president secure an election that he clearly lost. So Jason fired off this email:

When our research and campaign legal team can't back up any of the claims made by our Elite Strike Force Legal Team, you can see why we're 0-32 on our cases. I'll obviously hustle to help on all fronts, but it's tough to own any of this when it's all just conspiracy shit beamed down from the mothership.

If your own subordinate puts down in writing that you are cooking up conspiracy theories to try and protect your image and establish yourself as overlord of a presidential dictatorship, that's probably when you should call it quits and go home. Naturally, that's not what happened. And now Trump has been indicted not once, not twice, but three times. A charm, it is not.

"This is the big one," Noah Feldman writes: It's "the first time the Department of Justice has ever indicted a former president for subverting democracy by trying to steal an election he knew he had lost."

In a cruel twist of fate, whether Trump will be tried on these charges hinges on the 2024 election: "If Trump manages to win, he will dismiss the charges against him. But if Trump loses the election, he'll face the prospect of prison time," Noah writes. Right now, it's seeming like the former is an increasingly real possibility:

Compared to the charges leveled against Trump previously — relating to hush money payments to Stormy Daniels and his stockpile of classified documents in the bathroom — Special Counsel Jack Smith's charges are far more serious. Boiling down the 45-page indictment, here's what Noah says the former president is up against:

The claim: Trump was not deluded. He was aware of his defeat. His goal was to delude the rest of us.
The evidence: Many people in Trump's corner told him he lost the 2020 vote, from Vice President Mike Pence to cybersecurity experts to his own White House lawyers.
The act: Trump embarked on a campaign of lies, using his associates to pressure the Justice Department to make false statements and open a "sham" investigation into the election. He sought out election officials in several states — including Georgia, Michigan, Arizona and Wisconsin — to try and convince them to reverse the results of the election. They refused to help.

"Unfortunately, in all of the extensive US Code, there is no criminal prohibition specifically targeting an elected official's effort to use deceit and pressure to overturn an election result," Noah explains. So prosecutors had to get creative. They found three statutes that were broad enough to fit the bill: A charge of conspiracy to defraud the United States, a charge of obstructing a government proceeding, and a charge of conspiring to interfere with the right to vote. "In each of these statutes, a textualist statutory interpretation — the method now espoused by a majority of Supreme Court justices — would certainly include Trump's conduct," Noah says.

"All told, it puts Trump in a tight spot," Bloomberg's editorial board writes, and he may yet face state charges in Georgia. The lawsuits pending against the former president are stacking up, and some of the trials are expected to land smack dab in the middle of primaries:

Although Trump's odds of securing the GOP nomination appear strong, the editors argue that it's not too late for the party to change course: "Republicans should abandon Trump while they still can … any sane voter should now see that he has no business returning to the White House."

In case the aforementioned voters needed further evidence that Trump should have no business returning to the White House, here's a Reuters story about Fitch downgrading the US credit rating from AAA to AA+. It asserts that the surprise decision was made "due to fiscal concerns, a deterioration in U.S. governance, as well as political polarization reflected partly by the Jan. 6 insurrection." In other words, America's credit risk just went up not only because of normal stuff — the debt ceiling, fiscal deficits, elevated government debt, etc. — but because there was an attempted coup. Now the country looks rather naked amid its global competitors, an outcast in a sea of triple As:

Although Jonathan Levin says "investors have mostly received the latest downgrade news with a collective yawn," it highlights how much things have changed since the last time this happened. Twelve years ago, the S&P made a similar move, stripping the nation of its AAA rating. Warren Buffett and Alan Greenspan jumped in defense of America's creditworthiness, finding the decision to be preposterous. "In Omaha, the US is still AAA," Buffett told Fox Business, citing the Fed's ability to make the money printer go brrr. "In fact, if there were a AAAA rating, I'd give the US that."

But it's not 2011 anymore, Jonathan notes. "Today, such points would feel tone deaf because the American public has just lived through its worst inflation scare in four decades, and the effects are still lingering," he says. Using the money printer defense is not nearly as potent as it once was. "If anything, that's a sign that we should stop reaching for flimsy intellectual excuses and face our fiscal challenges head on," Jonathan concludes. Read the whole thing.

Despite all the hullabaloo about Brad Pitt on the picket line, Justin Fox says 2023 strike levels appear unlikely to top the labor activity we saw in 2018 and 2019, "numbers that themselves were far below those of an average year in the 1950s, 1960s or 1970s, when the workforce was much smaller."

A lot of the strikes you may have heard buzz about appear to be fizzing out, rather than boiling over. "Still, the narrative underlying most 'summer of strikes' media coverage — that private-sector unions in particular are feeling more confident and making more noise than they have in quite a while — is not incorrect," Justin argues. Part of that has to do with the data, he explains: "Much of the union action at the moment is at too small a scale to show up in the official strike statistics." Despite that fact, the current labor fights of actors and autoworkers — while eye-catching for their singularity — are not really enough to declare a raging union resurgence. Hot Strike Summer is officially a bummer.

Subway's $10 billion price tag isn't very appetizing. — Leticia Miranda

AI is helping doctors detect breast cancer. But will that save lives? — Lisa Jarvis

Putin's still pining for Africa, despite distractions in Ukraine. — James Stavridis

The White House's economic policies require a slow burn. — Claudia Sahm

Stocks sure are looking extra-bloated these days. — Nir Kaissar

Rishi Sunak's approach to climate change is radical, and not in a good way. — Lara Williams

The US is on a fast-track to a new supply-chain crisis. — Tim Culpan

Beijing faces biblical floods.

Justin and Sophie Trudeau are separating.

Taylor Swift's truck drivers got a big bonus.

Disney does away with DEI.

The Big Ten might be getting bigger.