As I’ve said a few times, when I was hunting for Lee Chatfield, I found Kenneth Chesebro.

There is a transcript in the mostly sealed Appendix I to Jack Smith’s immunity brief that must be Chesebro’s. Several passages describing events in which Chesebro was involved cite a transcript, spanning from roughly GA 97 to GA 103, that appears between Lee Chatfield and probable Pat Cipollone transcripts (GA 55-56 is someone whose name appears alphabetically between Bowers and Cannon; this may be Trump campaign staffer Michael Brown).

On December 16, [Chesebro] traveled to Washington with a group of private attorneys who had done work for the defendant’s Campaign in Wisconsin for a photo opportunity with the defendant in the Oval Office.315

[snip]

Later that morning, [Chesebro] worked with another attorney for the defendant, who contacted a U.S. Senator to ask him to obtain the fraudulent Wisconsin and Michigan documents from the U.S. Representative’s office and hand-deliver them to the Vice President.408

315 Documentary evidence, Presidential Daily Diary, GA 100-101

408 Documentary evidence, GA 55-56, GA 102-103, Chris Hodgson [Compare to full transcript]

That would mean that this section, which suggests the co-conspirators deliberately lied to fake electors, is sourced partly to Chesebro too (GA 517-518 is part of an at least 6-page section describing the fake elector involvement of someone whose name appears alphabetically between Raffensperger and Scavino, which hypothetically could be Mike Roman, but nothing marks it as necessarily him).

In practice, the fraudulent elector plan played out somewhat differently in each targeted state. In general, the co-conspirators deceived the defendant’s elector nominees in the same way that the defendant and [Eastman] deceived [Ronna McDaniel] by falsely claiming that their electoral votes would be used only if ongoing litigation were resolved in the defendant’s favor.282

282 Documentary evidence, GA 97-98, GA 517-518.

It’s not terribly surprising that Jack Smith got an interview with Chesebro. After all, Chesebro made a great show of cooperating in various state investigations — at a minimum, Georgia, Nevada, Wisconsin, and Michigan, as CNN laid out last December. But as CNN also reported, the veracity of his testimony came into question by February, when CNN caught Chesebro covering up a Twitter account he had.

So Jack Smith appears to have gotten an interview with Chesebro, but Chesebro may not be terribly reliable.

Perhaps for that reason, there are a great many things involving Chesebro that are not sourced to that transcript. Chesebro’s plotting about the fake electors plot, for example, is always sourced to the documents themselves.

More interestingly, this passage — describing that Chesebro followed Trump’s public instructions to go to DC, but also describing that he collected copies of the fake Michigan and Wisconsin elector certificates and handed them off to Congressman Mike Kelly — is sourced entirely to documentary evidence.

Meanwhile, [Chesebro] who had traveled to Washington as directed by the defendant’s public messages, obtained duplicate originals of the fraudulent certificates signed by the defendant’s fraudulent electors in Michigan and Wisconsin, which they believed had not been delivered by mail to the President of the Senate or Archivist.389 [Chesebro] received these duplicates from Campaign staff and surrogates, who flew them to Washington at private expense.390 He then hand-delivered them to staffers for a U.S. Representative at the Capitol as part of a plan to deliver them to Pence for use in the certification proceeding.391

Similarly, the description of Chesebro’s participation in the mob is sourced exclusively to documentary evidence.

Among these was [Chesebro] who had attended the defendant’s speech from the Washington Monument, marched with the crowd to the Capitol, and breached the restricted area surrounding the building.449

There’s a problem with Chesebro’s testimony on this point, of course: If he ferried fake elector certificates, then he wasn’t responding to Trump’s public tweeting about January 6. He was responding to the instructions of other plotters.

Which makes the way Smith sourced this passage, describing a December 16 meeting with Trump that Reince Priebus also attended, more interesting.

On December 16, [Chesebro] traveled to Washington with a group of private attorneys who had done work for the defendant’s Campaign in Wisconsin for a photo opportunity with the defendant in the Oval Office.315 During the encounter, the defendant complained about Wisconsin Supreme Court Justice [Brian Hagedorn] who two days earlier had cast the deciding vote in rejecting the defendant’s election challenge in the state.316 As the group was leaving, the defendant spoke directly—and privately—to [Chesebro]. 317 As late as early January, the conspirators attempted to keep the full nature of the fraudulent elector plan secret. On January 3, for instance, in a private text message exchange, [Boris Epshteyn] wrote to [Chesebro] “Careful with your texts on text groups. No reason to text things about electors to anyone but [Eastman] and me.” [Chesebro] responded, “K,” and followed up, “I’m probably a bit paranoid haha.” [Epshteyn] wrote, “A valuable trait!”318

315 Documentary evidence plus Chesebro

316 Probably Reince Priebus

317 Probably Reince Priebus

318 Documentary evidence

That is, Smith relies on Chesebro for the claim that this meeting was a photo op. But he doesn’t include Chesebro’s claims about what he said privately to Trump; he relies solely on what is likely Reince Priebus witnessing, but not participating in, that conversation.

Rather than describing what Chesebro claimed he and Trump said to each other, Smith relies on what Chesebro told another lawyer (likely Jim Troupis), afterwards. As soon as Chesebro saw Trump’s tweet announcing the January 6 rally, he texted someone else and boasted that “we” had a “unique understanding” of Trump’s December 19 Tweet calling people to DC.

The defendant first publicly turned his sights toward January 6 in the early morning hours of December 19. At 1:42 a.m., the defendant posted on Twitter a copy of a report falsely alleging fraud and wrote, ““. . . Statistically impossible to have lost the 2020 Election. Big protest in D.C. on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”319 When [Chesebro] learned about the Tweet, he sent a link about it to another of the Wisconsin attorneys who had met with the defendant in the Oval Office on December 16 and wrote, “Wow. Based on 3 days ago, I think we have unique understanding of this.”320

319 Trump tweet

320 Documentary evidence

Chesebro has testified about the December 16 meeting. TPM got his testimony to Michigan prosecutors. He described to them that he told Trump that the real deadline for certification was January 6.

Chesebro traveled to Washington to meet with Trump on Dec. 16 alongside a coterie of other Trump campaign attorneys.

Three years later, in the interview with Michigan prosecutors, Chesebro recalled the meeting with Trump: “The marching orders were, don’t say anything that would make [Trump] feel more positive than he did at the beginning of the meeting.”

He did not follow that advice. Chesebro told prosecutors that he began to speak with Trump after listening to the President talk on speakerphone with Newt Gingrich about something to do with Georgia voting machines. Then, the conversation turned to Trump’s chances in Arizona.

Chesebro did exactly what he had been told not to do: give Trump a sense of hope. He recalled telling Trump that the “real deadline” was Jan. 6. He was later admonished by former White House chief of staff Reince Preibus because, as Chesebro put it later to prosecutors, “the vibe that I had given him was some ground for optimism.”

Chesebro himself compared the meeting to a widely reported and infamous late-night encounter, two days later on Dec. 18, between Trump, Sidney Powell, former Overstock CEO Patrick Byrne, and the White House counsel’s office, saying that it was “sort of unauthorized.”

If Chesebro reliably told Jack Smith the same thing, it might strengthen the obstruction case. As it is, Jack Smith argues that the riot happened, Trump did nothing to stop it, and then he opportunistically targeted Mike Pence as his mob was hunting him down. He stops well short of saying he summoned the mob to overrun Congress.

Chesebro’s apparent unreliability may be preventing Jack Smith from taking the next step, showing that Trump heard from Chesebro on December 16 that there was still one more step to certification on January 6, which led him — less than three days later — to summon his mob. But if Chesebro’s testimony were more reliable, then he would not simultaneously be explaining that he ferried a second set of fake Michigan and Wisconsin certificates to DC but also simply showed up on January 6 in response to Trump’s Tweets. And it might change the import of the way he shadowed Alex Jones.

Still, as it is, Chesebro is central to the continued viability of 18 USC 1512(c)(2) and (k) charges. Under Fischer, there must be an evidentiary component to the obstruction charge. And in Chesebro, you have the sole member of the conspiracy who joined the mob on January 6 having earlier ferried fake elector certificates to members of Congress in hopes that Mike Pence would use the certificates to throw out Joe Biden’s votes.

If this ever goes to trial, Chesebro’s role — and possible testimony — may be key. But thus far, at least, it doesn’t appear that his testimony is reliable enough to build the case on.

I took a few days to go wander around Paris.

In the meantime (as Nicole and I discussed on Friday), the WaPo has subjugated itself to Donald Trump by spiking an endorsement of Kamala Harris.

Whatever else WaPo and LAT’s capitulation to Trump has done, it has focused attention on media failures this year.

I concluded back in February that the media was not going to help hold Trump accountable this year. I concluded that when zero traditional outlets pursued the story of how Donald Trump’s DOJ used a side channel to ingest dirt Rudy Giuliani collected from — among others — known Russian spies to criminally frame Joe Biden, with the Alexander Smirnov bribery allegation.

One candidate’s DOJ criminally framed the other candidate and it has been simply ignored.

That’s not the only way the media has failed. Hell, there have been maybe two stories about Trump’s abuse of pardons. There has been no scrutiny about whether Trump works for the Saudis, rather than the American people. We don’t talk about the fact that Trump stole 100 classified documents, and probably more we haven’t located.

This failure is not surprising. After all, the first act via which Trump cowed the media came with his success at spinning the results of the Russian investigation.

The Mueller investigation and its aftermath obtained legal judgments that Trump’s Coffee Boy, his National Security Adviser, his campaign manager, his personal lawyer, and his rat-fucker all lied to cover-up what happened with Russia in 2016. That’s an astoundingly productive investigation, one that should keep the issue of what really did happen at the forefront (particularly after Treasury confirmed that Russian spooks did get the internal campaign information Paul Manafort shared). And yet the media has never taken the time to fact check Trump’s Russia Russia Russia chant, via which he dismisses the result of the Russian investigation as a witch hunt. The media never calls him on that lie.

For whatever reason — perhaps ignorance, perhaps exhaustion — the media has allowed Trump to dodge accountability for the help Russia gave him in 2016. They have allowed him to apply a double standard on the Iran and Chinese hacks this year, when Trump invited foreign hacks in 2016. They simply ignored how in advance of 2020, Rudy Giuliani flew around the world soliciting help from — again, this is uncontroversial — at least one known Russian spy, right out in the open.

This is one thing I’ve tried to accomplish with the Ball of Thread series. Here’s how it worked.

• Trump and the media let the Steele dossier serve as a substitute for the actual things Trump did, both before and after the election.
• Trump turned an investigation into people grifting off their access to him into an attack on him by the Deep State.
• Republicans in Congress picked up and expanded the Steele dossier substitution.
• Along the way, these efforts did real, undoubtedly intentional damage to the FBI, especially those with expertise on Russia.
• Bill Barr thwarted what was intended as an impeachment referral.
• In his effort to kill Zombie Mueller, Barr created propaganda about the investigation and Joe Biden and laid the groundwork for January 6.
• The Durham investigation criminalized Hillary’s victimization by Russia.
• Bill Barr helped Rudy criminally frame Joe Biden.
• The Hunter Biden investigation(s) sucked up all the oxygen that should have been focused on Trump.

This is the process by which Trump has stoked grievance out of a Russian investigation that concluded that five top aides lied to hide what really happened.

And the media, to this day, lets him dismiss all that by chanting only Russia Russia Russia.

The media’s surrender, led by Jeff Bezos, to Trump’s authoritarianism is not new. The media has been doing this for six years.

Listen on Spotify (transcripts available)

Listen on Apple (transcripts available)

WSJ’s report that Elon Musk has had a number of communications with Vladimir Putin and other top Russians is unsurprising. Musk has obvious buttons to press (not just his narcissism, but also his insecurity about trans women arising from being dumped for Chelsea Manning and his daughter transitioning). And Musk has increasingly parroted obvious Russian propaganda of late.

I want to pull the passages of the story that describe the when, what, and who, because they’re important for understanding the import on the race.

As the story describes, Musk was originally supportive of Ukraine’s plight after Russia’s invasion. But then Musk’s provision of Starlink to Ukraine became one of what seem to be a number of complaints Russia raised about Elon’s businesses. And that period of pressure is when Musk’s public comments about the war began to change.

Later that year, Musk’s view of the conflict appeared to change. In September, Ukrainian military operatives weren’t able to use Starlink terminals to guide sea drones to attack a Russian naval base in Crimea, the Black Sea peninsula Moscow had occupied since 2014. Ukraine tried to persuade Musk to activate the Starlink service in the area, but that didn’t happen, the Journal has reported.

His space company extended restrictions on the use of Starlink in offensive operations by Ukraine. Musk said later that he made the move because Starlink is meant for civilian uses and that he believed any Ukrainian attack on Crimea could spark a nuclear war.

His moves coincided with public and private pressure from the Kremlin. In May 2022, Russia’s space chief said in a post on Telegram that Musk would “answer like an adult” for supplying Starlink to Ukraine’s Azov battalion, which the Kremlin had singled out for the ultraright ideology espoused by some members.

Later in 2022, Musk was having regular conversations with “high-level Russians,” according to a person familiar with the interactions. At the time, there was pressure from the Kremlin on Musk’s businesses and “implicit threats against him,” the person said.

But the most interesting ties have to do with Russia’s exploitation of Xitter for propaganda. The piece describes how Musk published Tucker Carlson’s simpering “interview” with Putin.

Earlier this year, Musk gave airtime to Putin and his views on the U.S. and Ukraine when X carried Tucker Carlson’s two-hour interview with the Russian leader inside the Kremlin. In that interview, Putin said he was sure Musk “was a smart person.”

And Musk’s contacts with other Russians include some with Sergei Kiriyenko, who is in charge of the Doppelganger effort.

But more conversations have followed, including dialogues with other high-ranking Russian officials past 2022 and into this year. One of the officials was Sergei Kiriyenko, Putin’s first deputy chief of staff, two of the officials said. What the two talked about isn’t clear.

Last month, the U.S. Justice Department said in an affidavit that Kiriyenko had created some 30 internet domains to spread Russian disinformation, including on Musk’s X, where it was meant to erode support for Ukraine and manipulate American voters ahead of the presidential election.

As for the contacts with Putin? Those are sourced to intelligence sources, suggesting that US — or possibly foreign — spooks are aware of the contacts.

One current and one former intelligence source said that Musk and Putin have continued to have contact since then and into this year as Musk began stepping up his criticism of the U.S. military aid to Ukraine and became involved in Trump’s election campaign.

But those contacts are not broadly known.

Knowledge of Musk’s Kremlin contacts appears to be a closely held secret in government. Several White House officials said they weren’t aware of them.

If spooks or the FBI are tracking these ties, you would closely guard details, not least to protect the coverage they have on Putin himself.

Both the Pentagon’s official comment and that of an anonymous source suggest the government is acutely aware of all this, but thus far measuring it in terms of leaks, not whether Musk’s reported Ketamine abuse or his open embrace of anti-American conspiracy theories make him unfit to retain clearance.

A Pentagon spokesman said: “We do not comment on any individual’s security clearance, review or status, or about personnel security policy matters in the context of reports about any individual’s actions.”

One person aware of the conversations said the government faces a dilemma because it is so dependent on the billionaire’s technologies. SpaceX launches vital national security satellites into orbit and is the company NASA relies on to transport astronauts to and from the International Space Station.

“They don’t love it,” the person said, referring to the Musk-Putin contacts. The person, however, said no alerts have been raised by the administration over possible security breaches by Musk.

And that’s sort of the underlying problem: Until Musk does business with a sanctioned entity or leaks information, these contacts would only be illegal if you could prove Musk were acting as an agent of Russia.

If this concerns you any more than Musk’s long-standing public Russophilia already should, then the best thing to do in the short term is to use Musk as a way to attack Trump’s campaign (as Tim Walz did the other day, though mostly just attacking Musk for being so dorky).

But there are three things not included in this story that make it more interesting.

First, Justin Trudeau testified last week that Tucker was being funded by RT.

Conservative political analyst Tucker Carlson and Canadian psychologist Jordan Peterson were among those who were funded by the Russian state-owned news outlet RT to boost anti-vax claims in 2022, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau claimed while under oath during testimony delivered Wednesday at the Foreign Interference Commission.

I’m genuinely a bit confused by Trudeau’s claim — whether he means Tucker himself was being funded or his promotion was. In any case, he was discussing 2022 activities (notably, the trucker protests that I hope to hell DHS keep in mind as potential election or post-election disruption).

But Tucker was mentioned in the RT indictment. One point I made about how DOJ unrolled it is that it disrupts or criminalizes ongoing funding from RT, and can be used as a basis for ongoing investigation and/or charges.

Relatedly, Tim Pool recently announced he is shutting down his podcast.

The more important detail not included in this story, given WSJ’s mention of Kiriyenko, is the involvement of Russian entities in magnifying the conspiracy theories behind the Southport riots in the UK.

“While all the action is happening on the ground and people in Britain are dealing with the consequences of this misinformation,” says Al Baker, managing director of Prose, “the people stoking the violence, the people flooding Telegram and other platforms of misinformation are largely based outside the UK.”

What it shows is the nature of the new far-right – not a tightly organised hierarchy based in a specific location, but an international network of influencers and followers, working together almost like a swarm to stir up trouble.

In the UK riots, you had both Musk and possible Russian bots stoking anti-migrant violence in a foreign country. If Musk has facilitated that — or even just if Kiriyenko used his contacts with Musk for ostensibly other reasons to optimize interference efforts on Xitter — that would be a grave concern (though the latter hypothetical involves no criminal exposure for Musk).

But by far the most important thing excluded from this story (it is admittedly tangential to the description of these contacts, but not to the import of them) is JD Vance.

Musk’s involvement in Trump’s campaign cannot be separated from Trump’s pick of JD Vance as his running mate, someone who is even more pro Russian than Musk, and someone whose regressive Catholic ties have aligned neatly with Russia in the recent past. Donald Trump has been an exceedingly useful idiot for Putin, but he was unreliable as to Putin’s immediate policy goals like eliminating sanctions.

There’s abundant reason to believe that JD’s selection was the price of Musk’s support (though it was a pick Trump was inclined to make anyway).

If Russia is using Musk to affect the election, it’s not clear whether the primary goal would be electing Trump or placing JD in the position where he would become President.

Axios’ Chief Dick Pic Correspondent, Alex Thompson, did something funny yesterday.

He got very aroused because Bob Woodward’s book describes that donors began expressing concerns about Joe Biden’s mental fitness after a fundraiser in June 2023.

Biden, who was 80, had flown in from Washington earlier that day. A donor acknowledged he had probably woken up very early but appeared tired. “He could not wait to sit down and only took two pre-arranged questions.” He carried a handful of note cards with the answers printed out, but even then seemed to wander off point.

But by later in the day — the following passage, not marked by Thompson, described — donors witnessed the opposite. Biden was energetic. He wouldn’t sit down for two hours.

Thompson did, however, mark a description of events eight days later in June where donors said he couldn’t complete a sentence.

Thompson treated this like a smoking gun. This was proof that Biden’s team was hiding his dementia!!!

But coming as it did from Axios’ Chief Dick Pic Correspondent, it was instead a confession.

That’s because any good Dick Pic Correspondent like Thompson would have started his perusal of Woodward’s book by consulting the parts about Hunter Biden; everyone in DC knows you start reading a Woodward book with the index! And right in the middle of a discussion about Biden’s decision to step down in July, there’s a discussion about Hunter.

Blinken knew Hunter’s struggles had derailed Biden emotionally much, much more than any outsider or the public realized. Another of Blinken’s friends called this “the real war,” the battle that affected Biden more than Ukraine, more than Israel. The guilt was overwhelming. If he were not president, “my beautiful boy,” “my little boy” would not be under the crushing scrutiny of all the investigations, he’d say. Biden was heartbroken.

In June 2023, Biden was showing what people viewed as signs of impairment, but also wild swings from hour to hour, on June 19. In June 2024, Biden had a disastrous debate performance, seemingly confirming real dementia.

And yet, as Tony Blinken described it, what was really going on, what the public didn’t realize, is that Biden was wracked with guilt in knowing that even as Hunter was trying to stay sober, Biden’s political adversaries — abetted by Chief Dick Pic Correspondents like Alex Thompson — had made private citizen and recovering addict Hunter Biden their singular focus, their means to find scandal with Joe Biden (before they moved onto marking just the passages of a book that described him struggling at fundraisers).

The connection between Biden’s worst moments and Hunter’s plight should have been clear to someone like Thompson.

It was to me.

The day after the disastrous debate, I laid out how much stress Biden had been under, pointing specifically to the toll of the deliberately humiliating trial earlier that month and the pending, even more humiliating one.

• His kid was convicted in a trial that not only laid bare what a cost Joe’s political career has been on his family, but that would, without question, never have happened if his son were not the son of President Joe Biden

And the passage that Thompson treats like a smoking gun shows that on the day prosecutors first floated that there was an ongoing investigation (and, as became clear in retrospect, the first day the new prosecutors who would renege on the plea deal got added to the case), Biden was a mess. But later in the day, when the plea deal had seemingly been finalized, Biden was great.

Here is Chris Clark’s declaration, which describes how, on June 19, Hunter’s team thought they had reassurances that the entire ordeal would soon be over.

35. On June 19, 2023, at 2:53 PM EST, after I had a phone call with AUSA Hanson indicating I would do so, I emailed AUSA Hanson a proposed press statement to accompany the public release of both Informations that read, in part, “I can confirm that the five-year long, extensive federal investigation into my client, Hunter Biden, has been concluded through agreements with the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware.” (Emphases added.) A true and correct copy of Chris Clark’s June 19, 2023, email to AUSA Hanson is attached hereto as Exhibit P.

36. Shortly after that email, I had another phone call with AUSA Hanson, during which AUSA Hanson requested that the language of Mr. Biden’s press statement be slightly revised. She proposed saying that the investigation would be “resolved” rather than “concluded.” I then asked her directly whether there was any other open or pending investigation of Mr. Biden overseen by the Delaware U.S. Attorney’s Office, and she responded there was not another open or pending investigation. Thereafter, at 4:18 PM EST that day, I sent AUSA Hanson a revised statement that read: “With the announcement of two agreements between my client, Hunter Biden, and the United States Attorney’s Office for the District of Delaware, it is my understanding that the five-year investigation into Hunter is resolved.” (Emphases added.) The new statement revised the language from “concluded” to “resolved,” a stylistic change that meant the same thing. A true and correct copy of Chris Clark’s June 19, 2023, email to AUSA Hanson is attached hereto as Exhibit Q. [Clark’s italics, my bold]

Days later, when disgruntled IRS agents and Chief Dick Pic Correspondents like Thompson began to claw away at the plea again, Biden was once again a wreck.

It’s absolutely true that Woodward’s book describes events a year ago when donors viewed Biden to be a wreck. It’s also true that Woodward provides the alternate explanation that Chief Dick Pic Correspondents should immediately recognize — but won’t, because they’re trying to drum up scandal somewhere else now. One of the things making Biden a wreck was the guilt of knowing his son had become enemy number one as a way to harm him personally.

I’m not saying Biden is not old. I’m not denying that Biden had difficulties advocating for his policies. Harris has done a far better job at doing so.

I am saying that the pack of rabid Dick Pic Sniffers who had spent the first two weeks of June wallowing in just how humiliating prosecutors had made that trial, for the entire Biden family, somehow forgot about what they themselves had described as an immense strain on the entire family a few weeks later when Biden bolloxed that debate. And now Chief Dick Pic Correspondent Alex Thompson can’t even recognize the significance of that date, June 19, 2023, when Biden was having wild emotional swings.

When Vice President Harris answered Hallie Jackson’s question that similarly tried to drum up a smoking gun about Kamala covering up Biden’s purported decline, Harris suggested that Jackson might ask Biden if there was another reason, beyond simple mental impairment, why he dropped out of the race.

Deciding to end the public targeting of his son could well be one reason.

I first fell into the rabbit hole of the largely invisible appendix looking for Lee Chatfield.

At the time Trump called him and then-Michigan Senate Majority Leader Mike Shirkey to the White House in November 2020, Chatfield was Michigan’s House Speaker. And one of the first things that I realized about the appendix is that Jack Smith relied on Shirkey’s January 6 interview — exclusively, it seems. But he relied — again, exclusively — on DOJ’s own interview with Chatfield (which appears, in sealed form, at roughly pages GA 70 through GA 82). To confirm that that was Chatfield and try to puzzle through why Smith might rely on J6C interviews for some people but do his own interview for others, I took the trouble to index the identifiable interviews. Among other things, I discovered a third interview pertaining to Michigan, a witness whose name falls between Barr and Bowers (Michigan State Senator Tom Barrett also attended the meeting, but it could also be MI Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson), as well as about 36 pages of interview transcripts, from GA 323 to 359, from Ronna McDaniel.

My original hypothesis about why Smith did his own interview of Chatfield was probably wrong. Chatfield was indicted in Michigan for embezzlement in April, and I figured you’d want to lock in the testimony of someone who is in legal trouble himself. A more likely explanation is that Chatfield’s interview with J6C was considered informal, so Smith had to get more formal testimony.

But one thing it the additional interviews allowed Smith to do was sort through a seeming discrepancy about the meeting. As the January 6 Committee Report noted, Shirkey and Chatfield had slightly different memories of the event, with Shirkey denying that Trump made any precise ask, whereas Chatfield described that he understood Trump’s “directive” about having “backbone” to be a request to overturn the election by naming fake electors.

Although Shirkey says he did not recall the President making any precise “ask,” Chatfield recalled President Trump’s more generic directive for the group to “have some backbone and do the right thing.”157 Chatfield understood that to mean they should investigate claims of fraud and overturn the election by naming electors for President Trump.158 Shirkey told the President that he was not going to do anything that would violate Michigan law.159

157. Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Informal Interview of Lee Chatfield (Oct. 15, 2021). Leader Shirkey did not remember any specific “ask” from the President during the Oval Office meeting. Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Transcribed Interview of Michael Shirkey, (June 8, 2022), p. 16 (“One thing I do remember is that he never, ever, to the best of my recollection, ever made a specific ask. It was always just general topics[.]”).

158. Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Informal Interview of Lee Chatfield (Oct. 15, 2021).

159. Select Committee to Investigate the January 6th Attack on the United States Capitol, Transcribed Interview of Michael Shirkey, (June 8, 2022), p. 57.

As it is, there’s something missing in this telling. The report describes that Rudy Giuliani was on the call. But it makes no mention that, even though she had specifically told Trump she couldn’t be involved in a meeting with legislators because it might amount to lobbying, he had patched Ronna McDaniel into the call.

That detail does appear in Mike Shirkey’s testimony (he claimed that she said nothing of substance). But Shirkey offered the detail of McDaniel’s participation long after Chatfield’s “informal interview” on October 15, 2021 and a week after McDaniel’s own interview on June 1, 2022, in which her participation in the call never came up.

Smith’s brief doesn’t say much about what McDaniel said, though this section does cite to what must be her interview. He did reveal that McDaniel made the initial contact with Shirkey and Chatfield, then got looped into the call after being warned against participating.

On November 20, three days before Michigan’s Governor signed a certificate of ascertainment appointing Biden’s electors based on the popular vote, the defendant met with [Mike Shirkey] and [Lee Chatfield], Michigan’s Senate Majority Leader and Speaker of the House, at the Oval Office.148 The defendant initiated the meeting by asking RNC Chairwoman [McDaniel] to reach out to [Chatfield] and gauge his receptivity to a meeting.149 The defendant also asked [McDaniel] to participate in the meeting, but [McDaniel] told him that she had consulted with her attorney and that she could not be involved in a meeting with legislators because it could be perceived as lobbying.150 After [McDaniel] made the first contact, on November 18, the defendant reached out to [Shirkey] and [Chatfield] to extend an invitation.151

Shirkey testified that Trump made no specific ask. But, as noted, Chatfield was more equivocal.

The January 6 Committee described Chatfield’s description of Trump’s calls in the following weeks.

That was not the end, however. Chatfield and Shirkey received numerous calls from the President in the weeks following the election. Chatfield told the Select Committee that he received approximately five to ten phone calls from President Trump after the election, during which the President would usually ask him about various allegations of voter fraud.161 Chatfield said that he repeatedly looked into the President’s claims but never found anything persuasive that could have changed the outcome of the election.162

But it doesn’t provide a detail about follow-up calls included in the immunity brief: That Rudy contacted Chatfield and asked him to throw out the valid votes.

Despite failing to establish any valid fraud claims, [Rudy] followed up with [Shirkey] and [Chatfield] and attempted to pressure them to use the Michigan legislature to overturn the valid election results. On December 4, [Rudy] sent a message to [Chatfield] claiming that Georgia was poised to do so (based on [Rudy’s] and [John Eastman’s] false advocacy there in the December 3 hearing) and asked [Chatfield] for help: “Looks like Georgia may well hold some factual hearings and change the certification under ArtII sec 1 cl 2 of the Constitution. As [Eastman] explained they don’t just have the right to do it but the obligation. . . . Help me get this done in Michigan.”168 On December 7, [Rudy] attempted to send [Shirkey] a message (though failed because he typed the wrong number into his phone): “So I need you to pass a joint resolution from the Michigan legislature that states that, * the election is in dispute, * there’s an ongoing investigation by the Legislature, and * the Electors sent by Governor Whitmer are not the official Electors of the State of Michigan and do not fall within the Safe Harbor deadline of Dec 8 under Michigan law.”169 Campaign operative [Mike Roman] was involved in the drafting of this message with the assistance of [P41] who was associated with the defendant’s Campaign efforts in Michigan.170 The following day, [Rudy] shared the draft with the defendant, sending it to his executive assistant, [Molly Michael], by email.

That’s a far more specific ask than Chatfield admitted to with J6C.

This passage is all sourced to an entirely sealed section of Appendix III, but the type of evidence included there is somewhat obvious. The section relies on:

• 168: A text to Chatfield
• 169: Something recording Rudy’s attempt to send a text (to the wrong phone number!) and 10 more pages documenting what message Rudy wanted to send.
• 170: One page showing some proof that Mike Roman and [P41] were involved in this messaging attempt.
• 171: Rudy sharing the draft with Trump, via Molly Michael.

It’s possible this evidence doesn’t include evidence obtained from Rudy’s phone in April 2021; for example, Smith could prove that Rudy missent the text via Rudy’s call data and the text to Chatfield, showing a very specific ask, could have come from Chatfield. The text to Shirkey could not have come from Shirkey, though, because he never received the message (which may be why Shirkey was much sketchier about any asks from Trump than Chatfield, because he didn’t receive this shamelessly direct ask).  But, particularly given that the email to Michael is just one page long (when asked, she provided no specifics about communications pertaining to Chatfield and Shirkey in her J6C interview), it may well have partly relied on that phone seizure and may well have been necessary.

If it came from the phone, though, it came from legal steps Lisa Monaco first put into motion on her first day on the job, months before J6C was even formalized.

Wherever it came from, the added detail could be utterly critical to proving the case against Trump. Before you get this additional evidence (from both Rudy’s and, possibly, Roman’s phone, as well as an email sent to Molly Michael), you’ve got Chatfield and Shirkey claiming Trump made no specific ask. After you get the additional evidence (and so long as you reach the bar of proving that Rudy was Trump’s co-conspirator in this nefarious effort), you have a very specific ask to just throw out the legal votes that Rayne and I and millions of other Michiganders cast for Joe Biden in 2020.

In this episode of Ball of Thread, we showed how Bill Barr’s efforts to kill the parts of the Mueller investigation that continued after he misrepresented the report itself led directly to January 6. In his effort to lower the sentencing recommendation for Roger Stone, for example, Barr treated threats from Stone and the Proud Boys against a Federal judge a “technicality.” And after Barr’s efforts to reverse the prosecution of Mike Flynn failed, Trump pardoned his former National Security Adviser just as Flynn and Sidney Powell were creating the Big Lie.

When I vowed to stop calling Liz Cheney “BabyDick” when she announced she would vote to impeach Donald Trump, the second time, I wrote:

Liz “BabyDick” Cheney and I will never be friends. But she will have served a key leadership role in this troubled time in providing another path for the Republican party by voting to impeach an authoritarian.

May she help others feel safe in rejecting this scourge.

I thought back on it as I watched this clip, from the third of three joint appearances Kamala Harris and Cheney made in the Blue Wall states yesterday, this time in Waukesha, WI, one of the most important swing suburbs in WI.

Charlie Sykes introduced the questioner as Dan [Voberil], a retired Catholic teacher (I’ll call him “Dan” since I couldn’t make out his last name) and claimed he was a genuinely undecided voter.

He didn’t appear to be undecided — at least not by the time he asked his question, 31 minutes into the event — though Cheney taunted him, “Cmon Dan,” as he started to ask his question.

It may matter that Cheney had already answered a question about choice, noting that she’s pro-life, but that post-Dobbs restrictions go too far in a number of states, because Dan described himself as a Catholic who is pro-life, pro-choice, depending, but as someone who has five daughters.

He was there, at least in significant part, because he has daughters in the post-Dobbs era.

But Dan — who spoke of how much courage speaking up like this took (and as a teacher in a Catholic school, he may have reason to fear) — spoke most about, as a teacher and a father, how embarrassing “the toxicity that exists” is.

I was told I was going to be an alternate. I was a little worried about getting my question, but.

[Harris: Take your time, take your time.]

This is a question — actually, I retired from MPS but I currently teach and I teach at a private Catholic school and I’m Catholic but I’ve also been pro-life, pro-choice depending, but I have five daughters and I think it’s my duty to continue, with the children I teach as well, I see that we need to respect women and I’ve really come to the conclusion that this toxicity that exists is just rather embarrassing and as a life-long Republican [gestures towards Cheney] I thought your father would be a great President —

[Cheney: Thank you!]

Not to say George wasn’t but I’ve come to this realization and it’s been very difficult so I’m just — my big question was for the future of my children and also students that I encounter and try to show that we have to have some kind of civility like we did back in the 80s, when Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill, of course, could talk about things and solve problems and now it’s trying to get one better than the other and so I’m just wondering, in your position now, how to convince people like me who, some of my siblings may be questioning what I’m doing here but, like you said, we have to be courageous, and that’s what I’m trying to be, and so what do you think we can do in the last 15 days, or you can, Madam Vice President, to try to get some of these people to cross over. I know you already said that some probably won’t say who they’re voting for but … or something I could take with me to say, this sounds very good. We ought to at least listen to this.

Harris didn’t respond at first; Cheney did.

As she did, I recalled reports of how furious she was that Trump sent a mob after not just Mike Pence — whom, I have no doubt, Cheney includes among the “good and honorable people” that Trump betrayed — but also his daughter, Charlotte, who was with Pence that day. I remember reports that a big part of what especially infuriated Cheney was her horror that Charlotte was subjected to the mob, too.

I think that you’ve really put your finger on something that’s so important, and you see it as a teacher. Any of us who are around young children — I see it as a mom, my kids aren’t so young anymore, but you know, when they look at how elected officials — and in particular how Donald Trump is conducting himself now, that’s not a lesson that anybody would look up to. And I think about it, often, from the perspective of the men and women who’ve worn the uniform of our country and who have sacrificed so much for our freedom. All of us have an obligation to be worthy of that sacrifice.

[applause]

In this moment, there are millions of good and honorable people who Donald Trump has just fundamentally betrayed. And I think it’s so important for people to think about this from the perspective of, you know, the decision to give somebody the power of the Presidency, means that you’re handing someone the most awesome and significant power of any office, anywhere in the world. And you have to choose people who have character, choose people of good faith.

You know the Framers knew this. The Framers knew that it was so important that we take an Oath, that also, fundamentally, you had to have people of character. And Donald Trump has proven he’s not one of those people by his actions.

So what I say to people is, look, for us to get back to a time where we are actually having policy debates and discussions and disagreements, we have to protect what undergirds all of this. And what undergirds all of it is the Constitution.

And we have to be willing to say, as a Nation, we’re better than partisanship. And I say this as someone who spent a lot of years engaged in partisan battles. And there are important debates we have to have.

But if we allow someone, again, if we give him the power again, to do all the things he tells us he’s gonna do, he says he’ll terminate the Constitution, he says he deploy the military against the enemy within, that is a risk that we simply can’t take as a nation. And I think that this vote, this election cycle, this time around has to be about so much more than partisanship.

And I will just end this by saying, and I also know because I have spent time with Vice President Harris, because I have come to understand what she believes about how she will govern, that she will be a President for all Americans, that she’s committed to listening, and committed to having viewpoints some of which come from different ends of the political spectrum.

And if you think about how you conduct you life outside of politics, how we call conduct our everyday lives, those are the kinds of people that you trust, those are the kinds of people you can work with.

Like, if you wouldn’t hire somebody to babysit your kids, you shouldn’t make that guy the President of the United States.

I’ll repeat again caveats I’ve made before. I don’t know if this appeal to Republicans will work. I don’t know if Harris would have been better served doing something to listen to Muslim and Arab voters, what may be the single biggest own goal of her campaign.

But Dan — who as an older white Catholic man, is in every way a Trump demographic — modeled something pretty similar to what we watched Ramiro González model across two Univision town halls.

Dan is someone for whom being a Republican has been a core part of his identity. Dan is someone you’ll never convince that Reagan and Liz’s own father Dick engaged in a great deal of toxicity themselves (I was thinking of Cheney telling Pat Leahy to go fuck himself as I watched this).

But for our purposes, you don’t need to do that work.

For the purposes of breaking through the concrete polarization of MAGAt politics, you don’t need to do that work, not in the next two weeks.

You need to give people who’ve come to hate that their own party runs on dick stories and demeaning others, especially women and people of color, the courage to choose not to rejoin in that hatred out of partisan inertia or Republican self-identity. Both Cheney and Harris have talked about power and powerlessness, and I can’t help but wondering if they’ve discussed Václav Havel’s essay on the power of the powerless while flying around together on a plane Liz’s father used to command, of the import of everyday people taking small acts of courage, the import of people like Dan refusing to join in Trump’s attacks on people that might include his five daughters (though, to be clear, Harris’ models of courage would come out of the Civil Rights movement, a culture in which she was raised).

Sykes described that Dan is a genuinely undecided voter. He sounded like a voter who had made his decision, but was asking for courage, was asking for Cheney and Harris to make it easier to sustain that courage. By 31 minutes into this town hall, he was even asking for, “something I could take with me to say, this sounds very good. We ought to at least listen to this.”

I don’t know whether it will work.

What I do know is that neither Harris nor Cheney are mistaking the enormity of the task, of trying to break the authoritarianism of a party that has overwhelmed voters with a blanket of disinformation and dehumanization.

They’re just trying to give people the courage to break out of a lifetime habit of voting for Republicans and instead to vote for the Constitution.

I still owe you a longer post on what I gleaned from my deep dive into the mostly sealed immunity appendix over the weekend. Here’s my evolving understanding of the appendix so far.

Volume I:

• GA 1 through around GA 660: Interview transcripts
• Around GA 661 to GA 722: Material justifying treating Eric Herschmann as unofficial role

Volume II:

• GA 723 through GA 771: Presidential Daily Diaries
• GA 772 through GA 965: Social media

Volume III GA 968 through GA 1503: State-related documentary evidence

Volume IV:

• GA 1503 through around GA 1684: Pence and January 6-related documentary evidence
• GA 1685 though GA 1885: Material justifying treatment of Trump’s statements as unofficial conduct

But for now, I want to share a hypothesis: that Mike Roman and Boris Epshteyn used technical (in the case of Roman) or legal (in the case of Epshteyn) delays to stall the exploitation of their phones.

Again, this is all speculative.

As I laid out here, the superseding indictment does not name either Roman or Steve Bannon as co-conspirators using the designator “CC.” But the immunity filing treats both as co-conspirators, as least for the purpose of admitting their speech via a hearsay exception. In that post, I posited that Jack Smith considered a more substantive superseding indictment, adding charges based (in part) on their actions, but did not do so, possibly because of the timing in advance of the election. I further developed that hypothesis in this post, in which I suggested additional charges might pertain to inciting violence.

It is possible that SCOTUS’ decisions — not just Fischer and the Immunity ones, but also the 14th Amendment one — made Smith reconsider his charging decisions; see this post for how those rulings changed the legal landscape around Trump’s actions, and those of his co-conspirators.

But it may also be that a delay in accessing evidence meant that Smith could not yet consider such charges when he first charged Trump.

The mostly-sealed immunity appendix suggests there are fairly key texts obtained from the phones of Roman and Boris Epshteyn.

Much of the first 50 pages of Volume III, from GA 968 through GA 1014 (right up to the unsealed beginning of Pence’s book), are likely texts from Roman or Epshteyn’s phones. GA 968 to 996 are the texts in which Roman encourages a colleague at the TCF counting center in Detroit to “Make them riot.” The next three pages describe similar efforts in Philadelphia. It’s not clear where those came from, but Roman is from Philly, so it’s likely he’d be involved in any fuckery there.

Then, starting at GA 1004 (after three pages of unsealed transcripts showing Trump conceding in an AZ suit), there are what appear to be 11 pages of texts from Epshteyn’s phone. The texts start with the ones describing Steve Bannon telling Boris that Trump had just fired Justin Clark, he (Boris) would report to Rudy, and that Bannon, “had made a recommendation directly that if [Rudy] was not in charge this thing is over Trump is in to the end.” The apparent Epshteyn texts include his efforts to set up meetings to pressure Pence, ending with texts from January 5 where Epshteyn reported back to Bannon that Mike Pence’s counsel, Greg Jacob, had refused their last entreaty to just throw out all the Biden votes, in response to which Bannon said, “Fuck his lawyer.”

“So help me god,” Mike Pence says via the title page of his book on the very next page of the appendix.

It would probably make a dramatic narrative arc if we could read it in sequence.

These texts are (along with the transcript showing Trump’s campaign team conceding a legal case) the first pieces of documentary evidence presented to Judge Chutkan, to support the section of the immunity brief describing, “Formation of the Conspiracies.” But neither the specifics of the communications nor the treatment of Roman and Bannon as co-conspirators show up in the original and therefore the supseseding indictment.

I’ve been suspecting that Smith first obtained the Roman texts, from a phone seized in September 2022, sometime between August 1, 2023 (the date of the original indictment) and December 5, 2023, when Smith asked to submit the “Make them riot” texts in a 404(b) filing, the same filing that asked to present evidence of Trump ratifying the Proud Boys’s sedition that is entirely absent from this brief. That is, I suspect that in the four months after obtaining the original indictment, Jack Smith grew confident he had evidence to prove more than he had originally charged, but by that point, Trump had already secured his eight months of delay, putting the first chance to charge anything more in the pre-election window.

Mike Roman is technically sophisticated. It would be unsurprising if his phone were protected with the kinds of security that could cause a year long delay breaking into it. The reason I suspect there was a delay in getting these texts is that incredibly damning language that should otherwise merit treating Roman, from the start, as a co-conspirator, language that Smith now uses to open the start of his brief, only appeared in the public record in December 2023.

The reasons and means via which I think Epshteyn may have delayed access to texts that, like the Roman ones, don’t appear in the original indictment are different. These are the texts that got Bannon treated as a co-conspirator in the brief, that provided basis for Smith to use Bannon’s public commentary on his podcast — “all hell will break loose” on January 6– as a reflection of Trump’s own views.

Epshteyn’s phone, like Roman’s, was seized in September 2022. Starting in the months before the phone was seized, Epshteyn expanded his consigliere role for Trump, orchestrating Trump’s legal team that would help to hide stolen documents. It’s not entirely certain whether Jack Smith treats Epshteyn’s role as that of a lawyer in his stolen documents court filings. It was not until some months later that Epshteyn started billing his time as a lawyer. But Epshteyn got the press to describe him as serving in a legal role earlier than that.

According to someone who appears to be Eric Herschmann, Ephsteyn took on this lawyer role in order to obtain cover for his own earlier actions. In a November 2, 2022 interview, someone with Herschmann’s potty mouth and access  [Person 16] described how a “total moron” who looked like Epshteyn [Person 5] was, at that time, trying to give himself legal cover for previous activities.

According to Person 16, he “believed [Person 5] was now trying to create [redacted] to cover [him] for previous activities. [Person 16] believed [Person 49’s] records may reflect recent [redacted] that did not reflect what actually transpired.”

And it’s not just January 6 related crimes that Epshteyn might have been obscuring; prosecutors were also investigating a cryptocurrency scheme that Epshteyn and Bannon used to bilk Trump supporters.

To the extent that Epshteyn could claim there was attorney-client privileged material on the phone seized over three months after Epshteyn was involved in recruiting Christina Bobb to sign a declaration on June 3, it would create real obstacles in accessing material from the phone. And since 2023, Epshteyn’s lawyer, Todd Blanche, has also represented Trump, creating all sorts of complexities regarding the protective order.

It took nine months (April 2021 to January 2022), with the involvement of a Special Master, to exploit Rudy’s phones. It took far longer than that to exploit Scott Perry’s. Prosecutors only recently obtained content from James O’Keefe’s phone seized almost three years ago. It would be unsurprising if Epshteyn’s effort to retroactively create a privilege covering his phone extended how much time it took to access his content. And that might explain why details, like Bannon informing Epshteyn he was reporting to Rudy and Bannon’s treatment as a co-conspirator, would not be substantiated in time for the original indictment.

Again, this is all speculation based on what we see in the immunity brief that we didn’t see in August 2023 in the first indictment. But a delay in accessing the texts that have now become the opening act in Jack Smith’s documentation of Trump’s conspiracy might explain the shifted focus.

[NB: check the byline, thanks. /~Rayne]

I think Marcy and I both have takes on Trump’s fast food stunt. Mine comes from an awareness of fan studies, which is a subset of communications and cultural studies.

This old dude is cosplaying.

Donald J. Trump wearing an apron while dispensing french fries at a McDonald’s fast food restaurant in Pennsylvania as part of a campaign stunt on Sunday, October 20, 2024. Photo by Doug Mills/AP.

What’s cosplay, you may ask if you’re not familiar with popular culture. From Wiktionary:

cosplay

Noun
cosplay (countable and uncountable, plural cosplays)

(uncountable) The art or practice of costuming oneself as a (usually fictional) character.
(countable) A skit or instance of this art or practice.

Coordinate terms
dress-up

Verb
cosplay (third-person singular simple present cosplays, present participle cosplaying, simple past and past participle cosplayed)

(intransitive) To costume oneself as a character.
She cosplayed at the manga convention.
(transitive) To costume oneself as (a character).
She cosplayed Sailor Moon at the manga convention.
(figurative, often derogatory, transitive) To adopt the behavior and mannerisms of another.

It’s playing in costume, dress-up like we might have done as children, or at costume parties.

Cosplay originated roughly a hundred years ago but it didn’t enter mainstream popular culture until the 1980s. At first it was tied more closely to specific events; by the 1980s it became more widely practiced as an expression of fandom participation. Its popularity has risen in sync with that of comic book conventions, which have in turn expanded to encompass much of popular culture from comics to movies to premium cable series.

Cosplaying offers an escape from one’s real life as well as a sense of belonging to a fandom community.

For some folks cosplay is a kink as well. I’m not going to kink shame – your kink is not my kink and that’s okay – but let’s acknowledge for some participants there’s a sexual element to this expression of fandom.

(Side note: Based on Stormy Daniels’ statements about her intimate episode with Trump during which she spanked him with a magazine, it’s possible Trump has a humiliation kink. Cosplaying at McDonald’s might serve his need to be shamed by what he perceives as beneath him.)

Trump is dressing up as a character. He is not actually working in fast food. A shut-down McDonald’s and a Fox News TV crew isn’t real but a stage and a production team for campaign propaganda.

This is not the first time we’ve seen Trump cosplaying, either.

The question before voters is this: when is Trump NOT cosplaying?

~ ~ ~

Let’s look at other roles Trump may have cosplayed in the past.

Exhibit A: Trump cosplayed as a successful investor of real estate and casinos.

Trump in Trump business office c. 1970s. Photo: Getty Images

Perhaps this is why his real estate ventures have been of questionable success. He was only playing at this, not actually being a rational, competent real estate investor but a man costumed as one.

Cosplaying a business tycoon could explain why Trump racked up multiple bankruptcies and failed businesses from Trump-branded steaks to Trump University.

(It’d also explain why the office in this photo looks unfit for business — like a simulacra of an office.)

Exhibit B: Trump cosplayed as a rich and successful CEO.

Trump Tower on Fifth Avenue bearing a promotional banner for NBC’s The Apprentice reality TV series with a photo of Donald Trump and the tagline words, “You’re Fired.” Photo: Bernd Auers via Fortune.

The Apprentice was a scripted program in which Trump was characterized as the leader of a successful organization. This script was based on the previous cosplay effort; in other words, a canon of Donald J. Trump had already been established in a way that The Apprentice could simply extend this commercial franchise.

Buying into this scripted costume play could explain why Trump hasn’t released tax returns – who’d expect a man who only appears to be a businessman on TV to do anything more than follow the script?

Apparently Mark Burnett should have written a couple episodes dealing with business taxes.

Exhibit C: Trump cosplays as a golfer.

Via Newsweek: Donald Trump at Trump National Golf Club on August 10, 2023, in Bedminster, New Jersey. The former president bragged recently about winning two golf tournaments. Photo: Mike Stobe/Getty Images

Real golfers don’t need to cheat every round, to the point one is a legendary cheater. Trump just pretends to be a golfer. His cheating assures his golf score card looks like a real golfer’s score.

Exhibit D: Trump cosplays as a family man with family values.

Screen capture: tweet containing two photos of Trump with a young Ivanka sitting on his lap. Source: Snopes

This is so very obvious, from his chronic infidelities to his abusive behavior toward his first wife and sons, to his revolting attitude and behavior toward his daughter.

Exhibit E: Trump cosplayed as president.

Trump in White House Oval Office behind Resolution Desk while giving an address. Photo: Carlos Berria/AP

When did the extended commercial franchise end? Do we really know?

The person who sat in the Oval Office for four years wasn’t competent as president. He performed the role of president but a substantial number of his actions were not deeply thought out and instead reflexive. Perhaps many of his actions were scripted by others; some recent White House staff memoirs suggest others were definitely pulling the strings on this man who has no moral compass and a pathological need for approval.

Did he cosplay a presidential candidate as well in 2015-2016, failing to respond as one might expect a legitimate candidate because he only appeared to be a candidate?

Is he cosplaying a presidential candidate now because he has more incentive to play the role of his life, for his life?

Does that include cosplaying a fast food worker doing the kind of labor he’d never have been caught dead doing in reality?

~ ~ ~

Marcy and I have both mentioned kayfabe before with regard to Trump – me with regard to his handling of COVID, and Marcy with regard to the performative drama in which members of the media have participated wittingly or unwittingly with regard to Trump’s current campaign.

Kayfabe is performance; when effective and sustained, audiences and sometimes performers themselves can be sucked into believing performance is real and not a synthetic creation miming an alternative reality.

Cosplay is not kayfabe but dress-up. One doesn’t become a dog by wearing a fur suit.

It’s possible for kayfabe and cosplay to overlap, though.

Trump donning an apron in a closed-to-the-public McDonald’s and handing out fries is cosplay. In no way does he gain any further true understanding of what real fast food workers’ lives are like.

Taking off the apron ends Trump’s cosplay; in reality, taking off the apron doesn’t end challenges for minimum-wage workers. They don’t shed rent, health care, and transportation costs they can’t afford on part-time minimum wages. They don’t lose the challenges of scheduling child and elder care, education, household needs when they walk out the restaurant’s door.

Trump donning a suit and tie, then touting economic policy he doesn’t fully understand is both cosplay and kayfabe. Like a wrestler we never see without their trademark hair cut and attire, we don’t see Trump outside his blue suit and red tie or his white polo shirt and khaki golf pants. These are the element of both his cosplay as business person and president and golfer. They are signs of his engagement in kayfabe – when he’s wearing them, he’s on.

But you never see him outside these costumes, you might note.

That’s because there’s nothing there behind the suit and tie, behind the de rigueur golf apparel, and now behind the fast food apron.

Trump is an empty husk of a man. His narcissism underlies his fear others will discover this, that he is nothing but a propped-up costume used like a puppet by his sponsors whether Putin or billionaire oligarchic fascists.

He’s compelled to cosplay because he dare not do otherwise. Whatever costume he was wearing would crumple to the floor as he decompensated.

~ ~ ~

It is not in this nation’s best interests to elect a cosplayer-in-chief.

We have real problems requiring real solutions from people who aren’t playing or performing to the darkest interests. We need leaders who think and care deeply about the needs of this nation and are willing to do the real work necessary to serve.

It is and has been a national security problem to allow a narcissist who placates his screamingly hollow ego with praise from hostile foreign leaders and fascist oligarchs for his performative behavior in costume.

Imagine what will happen if he is elected again and is told by his sponsors on Day One, “Okay, Mr. Trump, give us your best impression of Hitler. We know you can do a great job.” He’s already warned us he’s interested in becoming an autocrat out of the gate.

This same approach may already have been used to encourage him to cosplay at McDonald’s: “Sir, we know you can be a better fast food worker than Harris. We know you can do a great job and it’ll help your campaign.” Voila, the hollow man has donned the apron to mimic a minimum wage worker for a photo op.

Imagine what a weak man with a humiliation kink, a desperate hunger for approval, and a love of cosplay could do if an authority figure demands specific kayfabe while in costume.