Crooked Media - What A Day: Come on, Aileen

- Donald Trump, who has yet to master one language

Donald Trump found himself—where else—back in court on Friday.
 

• Disgraced former president Donald Trump appeared in a Florida federal court room on Friday to ask a judge to schedule his criminal trial for “mishandling” (wink) classified documents in August. The move represents the first time he’s asked for a trial date before the election—and he’s surely got a trick up one of his comically ill-fitting sleeves. He may think that booking a trial in August in Florida will stymie the D.C. election subversion case (and that, somehow, both can then be postponed). He might also be simply trying to schedule the trial at the most politically-advantageous time: the height of the presidential campaign. Federal prosecutors said the trial should start on July 8, just days before the Republican National Convention, which will be held in Milwaukee, WI. (Sorry to all of our Milwaukee readers for the influx of lunacy they will have to endure that week.)
   

• Trump-appointed U.S. District Judge Aileen Cannon did not indicate the date she would set, but boy are we not getting our hopes up that she will do the right thing! Trump has, naturally, sought to delay all four of his criminal trials. Should he win in November (dear God) he would be able to shut down the two criminal cases against him involving federal law. His lawyers say he cannot have a “fair” trial while running for president. Lol, okay pals. Trump’s trial related to his attempts to overturn the 2020 election has been delayed indefinitely while the Supreme Court decides his claim of presidential immunity. One new legal analysis found that, given this decision, Trump’s D.C. trial remains “likely” to start before the election. But it might not end until mid-November, December, or beyond. Meanwhile, Trump’s criminal case in Atlanta is bogged down in a sordid scandal over questions about the romantic relationship between two of the prosecutors. A judge said Friday he’ll rule within two weeks on whether District Attorney Fani Willis should be disqualified. 
   

• Trump has a vested political interest in trying to make sure that his court cases are not decided before November. According to a Reuters/Ipsos poll, one in four Republicans and half of Independent voters say they would not vote for The Don if he were convicted of a crime. Presidential polling should always be taken with a grain of salt, of course, but those numbers are significant. Trump’s first criminal trial is scheduled to start on March 25 in New York City, on charges of falsifying financial documents related to alleged hush-money payments to adult film star Stormy Daniels. 

Unfortunately, Trump’s legal fate in the coming months largely rests in the hands of a Florida judge and three Supreme Court Justices that he personally appointed. Feels like that shouldn’t be allowed, but we can revisit that at a later date I guess!

The Crooked Store’s latest collection is all about protecting reproductive rights and telling lawmakers to keep their bans to themselves. The No Trespassing collection features four different designs, each inspired by a different state where abortion freedom is under attack. There’s Stay Out Of My Swamp for Florida, Stay Out Of My Hole for Arizona, Stay Out Of My Prickly Pear for Texas, and Stay Out Of My Strip for Nevada. A portion of proceeds will go to Vote Save America's Fuck Bans: The Fight Back Fund which currently is supporting abortion rights organizations across key states. Head to crooked.com/store to shop.

A headline that unfortunately has become painfully commonplace in America is “Local affordable housing project killed by local residents.” It’s basically America’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.” Precisely this scenario took place In an affluent neighborhood of Florence, SC, as portrayed in a recent feature in the New York Times. Developers set out to build 60 subsidized apartments in the community of just under 40,000. The chairman of the City Council was enthusiastic. Then the neighbors found out. They gathered—I’m not kidding—at the local country club, and vowed to block the development. Nine days later, the same chairman of the City Council who praised the development helped deliver a fatal blow to the project. This was not public housing or Section 8, meaning the project was not intended for the poorest tenants, just subsidized under the Low Income Housing Tax Credit, which goes to developers in exchange for keeping rents lower than area median. Nevertheless, the City Council voted 8-0 to halt construction and change the zoning in the area from mixed-use to single-family only. 

In most of America’s affluent communities, zoning rules bar low-income housing developments, or any multifamily housing, in what’s known as “exclusionary zoning.” But Florence County’s zoning code actually permitted the construction of the subsidized apartments in the proposed area. So what happened? As so often occurs, opponents of the project were mostly wealthy and White. Based on area demographics and incomes, most of the tenants in the subsidized apartments would have likely been Black. When they got up to voice their dissent, White objectors repeated an all-too-common sentiment: “We are not opposed to the development — we are opposed to the location of this development.” A quite literal variation of “Not In My Back Yard.” The public dissenters were very quick to assure each other and the Council that this wasn’t about race. But a different conversation amongst other opponents unfolded on Facebook, where one local resident claimed that subsidized housing serves “sorry lazy people” and another wrote “the only thing that protects us from high crime is distance.” Another person wrote that if low-income people want to move to a place like Florence then they have to do so by “working hard [and] saving,” calling the entire concept of low income housing “woke crap.” Whew!

Local (mostly White) resistance to affordable housing developments (or any multifamily housing projects, really) is a shameful constant of American civic life, and is as common in blue states as it is in red ones. It has been a highly-successful tool in maintaining segregation in the decades since Brown vs. Board of Education became the law of the land. The city of Florence is now at the center of a lawsuit for the City Council’s abrupt reversal on the development, which the developers say violates the Fair Housing Act of 1968 because, in effect, the City Council’s decision keeps Black residents out of a majority-White community. According to MIT Professor of Urban Planning Justin Steil, residential segregation by race has only decreased slightly since then, and economic segregation has increased, in part because the affluent increasingly wall themselves off in wealthy enclaves, maintained by exclusionary zoning. In a time of a national housing crisis where millions of Americans are disproportionately rent-burdened (spending over 30 percent of household income on rent), exclusionary zoning has been repeatedly found to raise rents by limiting the housing supply. In the largest study of its kind, a Harvard research project found that the children of families who move from a low-opportunity to a high-opportunity neighborhood saw an average lifetime earnings increase of almost $200,000. The wealthy hoarding opportunity and pulling up the drawbridge to keep out other hard working Americans through exclusionary zoning is a sin so grave that the Florence, SC case has us rooting for a [shivers] developer.

President Biden announced on Friday that the U.S. military will carry out the first airdrop of food and supplies into Gaza in the wake of one of the deadliest single incidents of the war so far in Gaza City, where over 100 Palestinians lining up to receive aid were killed. 

World leaders on Friday intensified demands that Israel allow more aid to reach Palestinians. Germany’s foreign minister called on the IDF to “fully explain” the killing of over 100 Gazans on Thursday waiting outside of an aid convoy. 

A New York Times analysis of aid truck deliveries found that aid to Gaza—already woefully inadequate to meet the staggering need—declined sharply in February. 

Hamas announced on Friday that the group killed seven of the hostages it was holding in Gaza as a result of the IDF’s continued bombardment of the enclave. It is not yet clear when the seven died. 

In the nearly five months since the October 7 Hamas terrorist attack, former president Donald Trump has said notably little about Israel on the campaign trail or in interviews, only that Israel and Netanyahu are doing a bad job with “public relations.” Leave it to Trump to put one of the bloodiest conflicts in our lifetime in business terms. 

A New Jersey businessman on Friday pleaded guilty to trying to bribe Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ) as part of a plea deal with prosecutors that will require him to testify in the corruption case against Menendez. 

Elon Musk sued OpenAI and its CEO Sam Altman, the makers of ChatGPT, accusing them of abandoning the startup’s mission to develop AI “for the benefit of humanity” rather than for profit. Okay sorry but we don’t find Elon Musk to be a particularly trustworthy source on the topic of corporate altruism.

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Pharmacy giants CVS and Walgreens will begin selling the abortion pill mifepristone over the counter in some states beginning as soon as next week. 

A sea of thousands of defiant Russians gathered for the funeral of Putin opposition leader Alexei Navalny on Friday, chanting his name outside of a Moscow church. 

California Democratic Assemblyman Phil Ting introduced legislation on Wednesday that would prohibit colleges and universities from receiving state funds if they provide preferential admissions to children of donors or alumni, or legacy admissions. I’m sure the wealthy Whites will have an extremely normal reaction to this.