Driving the Day
Must Read Stories
Former President Trump’s arraignment draws media frenzy, but few protestors, as fears of widespread chaos fail to materialize
- Washington Post: Waiting, whistling and trampling: The Trump spectacle feeds on itself: It started before dawn on Tuesday. Police officers stood at every corner outside the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse. Satellite trucks glimmered in the darkness. Across the street, about 150 journalists, professional line-sitters and others summoned by the Taskrabbit app queued up in the quiet, waiting overnight for tickets to gain access to yet another line, to eventually, maybe, get inside the courtroom that afternoon. Pizza boxes and coffee cups lay abandoned at their feet. As the morning sun crept over the courthouse, protesters and counterprotesters and the political voyeurs of New York left home and descended on the same one-block radius in Lower Manhattan, all of them here to mark the arraignment of Donald Trump — the first time ever that a former president surrendered to be criminally charged.
- New York Times: Trump’s calls to protest fall on weary, wary ears: In Lower Manhattan on Tuesday morning, near the courthouse where Donald J. Trump was to be arraigned, Dion Cini, a Trump merchandise entrepreneur from Brooklyn and frequent presence at Trump rallies, waved an enormous flag that read TRUMP OR DEATH. “We’re living in history right now,” he told a scrum of mostly European reporters. But the crowd — for a demonstration convened by the New York Young Republican Club, where Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene would soon speak — was overwhelmingly made up of journalists. Trump supporters were so outnumbered that anyone in Make America Great Again attire was quickly swarmed by cameras.
- ABC: Trump NYC protests: Small group of former president’s supporters, foes face off over criminal case: Supporters and foes of former President Donald Trump faced off in a park in lower Manhattan near the courthouse where Trump was arraigned Tuesday afternoon on criminal charges. A small but boisterous group from both ends of the Trump spectrum filed into Collect Pond Park hours before the 76-year-old Trump showed up at New York Criminal Court to surrender to authorities and remained vocal outside the courthouse through his nearly hourlong court appearance. Backers of the nation’s 45th president held signs reading “Trump or Death,” while adversaries countered with signs saying “Lock him up” and “IndicAted” — a reference to how Trump misspelled indicted in a post on his social media platform Truth Social.
- USA Today: Four reasons extremist Trump supporters aren’t protesting his indictment – yet: In the days since a Manhattan grand jury voted to indict former President Donald Trump, experts who monitor extremism have watched to see whether the historic news sparks a protest movement that mirrors the Jan. 6 insurrection. It has not. While hundreds of supporters showed up in Florida on Monday to cheer Trump’s short drive to his private jet before today’s arraignment, public demonstrations have not descended into civil unrest. At least not yet. A protest in Manhattan on Tuesday morning, where Trump was due to surrender to the district attorney, appeared to feature more reporters than protestors — a pattern that has played out across the country in the last couple of weeks.
As the nation focuses on Trump’s indictment, Georgia looks to hold him accountable for his attempt to subvert democracy in 2020
- Washington Post: Trump’s legal drama could soon continue in Georgia: Donald Trump’s appearance in a Manhattan courtroom Tuesday marked a historic moment in American history — the first time a former or sitting U.S. president has been indicted on criminal charges. But Trump’s legal peril is far from over among those closely watching the proceedings were state and local officials in Georgia, where Fulton County District Attorney Fani T. Willis (D) is expected to announce in coming weeks whether she will file charges in connection to efforts by Trump and his allies to overturn the state’s 2020 presidential election results.
- Atlanta Journal-Constitution: As he fights NYC charges, Trump calls for Fulton ‘fake case’ to be dropped: Hours after pleading not guilty to 34 felony counts in Manhattan, former President Donald Trump railed against the criminal investigation in Fulton County, which could ensnare him in a separate legal saga in the weeks ahead. In remarks to supporters at his Mar-a-Lago estate late Tuesday, Trump called Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis, who is Black, a “racist.” And he insisted that his leaked Jan. 2, 2021, phone call to Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger, during which he urged the fellow Republican to “find” 11,780 votes, was “perfect.” “Nobody said, ‘sir, you shouldn’t say that,’” Trump said, adding that many lawyers were on the call. No one “hung up in disgust because of something I inappropriately said. Because nothing was said wrong.”
- WSB-TV: In exclusive interview, Fulton DA dismisses Trump comments as ‘ridiculous’ after calling her racist: Former President Donald Trump accused Fulton County District Attorney Fani Willis of being a racist and of pursuing her investigation into him as a way to interfere with the 2024 election. Trump made those comments just hours after his arraignment on 34 felony counts in New York City. Here in Fulton County, District Attorney Fani Willis’ own investigation continues and she told Channel Action News in an exclusive interview on Wednesday that she doesn’t care what Trump thinks. “People have that right to say whatever they choose to say as long as it does not rise to the level of threats against myself, against my staff, or against my family,” Willis said.
In The States
WISCONSIN: Liberal candidate Janet Protasiewicz wins state’s closely watched and highly funded Supreme Court race
- Washington Post: Liberals win control of Wisconsin Supreme Court ahead of abortion case: Liberals claimed control of Wisconsin’s high court in an election Tuesday, giving them a one-vote majority on a body that in the coming years will likely consider the state’s abortion ban, its gerrymandered legislative districts and its voting rules for the 2024 presidential election. Milwaukee County Judge Janet Protasiewicz’s victory over former state Supreme Court justice Daniel Kelly will end 15 years of conservative control of the Wisconsin Supreme Court. She could face ethical questions when the court takes up politically charged cases because she campaigned heavily on abortion rights and repeatedly called the state’s election maps “rigged.” Protasiewicz beat Kelly by 11 points, 55.5 percent to 45.5 percent, according to the Associated Press. About 1.8 million people voted, nearly 40 percent of the state’s eligible voters, which was high given that court elections rarely see turnout of more than 30 percent.
- Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: With high voter mobilization and record-breaking spending on Supreme Court race, high turnout is predicted in Wisconsin spring 2023 election: There’s an election Tuesday and Wisconsin loves to vote. The state consistently ranks among states with the highest voter turnout in the country, though off-year spring elections don’t usually generate the turnout that other elections do. But with groups across the state reporting millions of voter contacts, spending in the Supreme Court election eclipsing $40 million raising and the balance of the court at stake in the election, experts anticipate near-record turnout for a spring election. “For a spring election, we’ve had wildly record-breaking ad spending and voter mobilization, voter contacts by both parties,” said Charles Franklin, director of the Marquette Law School Poll. “There’s a limit to how much those things can boost turnout, but all the ingredients are there.” More than 400,000 people in Wisconsin had already voted absentee as of Monday, according to data from the Wisconsin Elections Commission. Wisconsin usually sees less than a million votes cast overall in off-year spring elections without a presidential primary. There are two outliers: the 2019 April election that saw 1.2 million ballots cast and the 2011 April election that saw 1.5 million.
TEXAS: A Voting Rights Act lawsuit against Texas county’s new redistricted maps is tentatively set for an August trial.
- Houston Chronicle: Judge allows voting rights lawsuit against Galveston County to move forward: A lawsuit accusing Galveston County elected officials of violating the Voting Rights Act when establishing a redistricting map can move to trial, after a federal judge recently denied the county’s request to dismiss most of the claims against it. Judge Jeffrey Brown of the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas in Galveston last week ruled the U.S. Department of Justice and other plaintiffs against Galveston County have standing to proceed to trial because they have a plausible racial gerrymandering and vote dilution claim, among other arguments, according to court records. A trial tentatively is set for Aug. 7 in the case against the county. The U.S. Department of Justice led a host of plaintiffs in March 2022 when it sued Galveston County over its new redistricting map, accusing Republican county officials of violating the Voting Rights Act when they carved up the commissioner court precincts into four majority-white districts. The lawsuit accuses the county of violating Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, which broadly bars racially discriminatory voting practices, including those that minimize the voting strength of racial minority groups.
NORTH CAROLINA: North Carolina lawmaker signals party switch with big impact.
- Washington Post: N.C. Democrats demand lawmaker resign amid reports she’s changing parties: Democrats in North Carolina are calling on a state lawmaker to resign after reports surfaced that Rep. Tricia Cotham (D) would switch parties to the GOP. The move, which Democrats described as a “deceit” and “betrayal,” would hand state Republicans a veto-proof supermajority in the state’s legislature, giving them greater power over issues like abortion and elections. The reported change comes in the middle of the legislative session during which Gov. Roy Cooper (D) signed into law bipartisan legislation expanding Medicaid and tried to use his veto to stop a Republican bill expanding gun access. Cooper called the move “disappointing.” “Rep. Cotham’s votes on women’s reproductive freedom, election laws, LGBTQ rights and strong public schools will determine the direction of the state we love,” Cooper said in a statement to The Washington Post. “It’s hard to believe she would abandon these long held principles and she should still vote the way she has always said she would vote when these issues arise, regardless of party affiliation.”
What Experts Are Saying
Jeffrey Engel, founding director of the Center for Presidential History at Southern Methodist University: “called the indictment this week from a New York grand jury ‘the appetizer to their main course still to come.’ ‘That main course, literally, is democracy at stake and who we are as a nation,’ he said.” Fortune
Marc Elias, founder of Democracy Docket: “While the New York Times, NPR and MSNBC described Trump’s indictment as a “test” for our democracy, I came to realize that it is the culmination of repeated “insults” to our democracy. The problem with the word “test” is that it suggests a singular event — the first indictment and trial of a former U.S. president. However, the behavior that led our country to this moment was not one event. It was the constant, day-in and day-out insults to our democracy. The other problem with the word “test” is it suggests that it is something we can pass or fail. The insults from Trump and his allies have subjected democracy to accumulated damage that is not nearly so binary… While headlines and pundits focused on Trump’s criminal charges, GOP state lawmakers continued their regular cadence of insults aimed at our voting systems.” Democracy Docket
Dennis Aftergut, a former federal prosecutor, and Austin Sarat, William Nelson Cromwell Professor of Jurisprudence and Political Science at Amherst College: “In Dominion’s evidence to date, we see how powerfully the business motives of Fox led to the broadcast of lies that delighted their audience so the network could maintain and build its profits even at the expense of truth… As a result, Fox hosts constantly reinforced Trump’s Big Lie that the 2020 presidential election had been stolen. And so a vicious cycle kicked in: Squelch the facts that turn off the audience and elevate the lies that reinforce their belief in a political conspiracy. No matter that the effect is to undermine the legitimacy of elections and the U.S. government.” Salon Op-Ed
Headlines
The MAGA Movement And The Ongoing Threat To Elections
Business Insider: There was little love in New York for Trump, but at home at Mar-a-Lago in Florida, the MAGA faithful rallied around him
Rolling Stone: QAnon Believers Think Trump’s Indictment Will (Somehow) Lead to Mass Arrest of Democrats
Atlantic: The Humiliation of Donald Trump
Trump Investigations
Guardian: Trump’s indictment is about more than hush money – it’s a question of democracy
CBS: Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg says “thorough investigation” led to Trump indictment
January 6 And The 2020 Election
AP: Jury in defamation suit against Fox won’t hear about Jan. 6
NBC: Jan. 6 rioter who said he was following Trump’s ‘marching orders’ and wanted to arrest Biden and Pelosi is found guilty
CNN: Federal appeals court denies Trump’s emergency bid to stop ex-aides from testifying in Jan. 6 probe
Fox 12 Oregon: Portland woman sentenced for role in Jan. 6 Capitol attack
Orange County Register: Panorama City man convicted for role in Jan. 6 Capitol riot
New York Times: Pence Won’t Appeal Ruling Forcing Testimony to Jan. 6 Grand Jury, Aide Says
CNN: National security officials tell special counsel Trump was repeatedly warned he did not have the authority to seize voting machines
Opinion
New York Times: What You Need to Know About the Trump Charges
The Hill: Trump’s criminal court proceedings must be televised
Washington Post: Fox is not a news network but a propaganda outlet
New York Times: Trump’s Day of Martyrdom Didn’t Go Quite as He Expected
Los Angeles Times: Three takeaways from Trump’s historic arrest and arraignment
In the States
Fox 5 Las Vegas: Bill introduced to allow prisoners to absentee vote
Mississippi Today: Legislature restores no voting rights during 2023 session
WTHR 13: Indiana Senate backs bill tightening mail voter rules
