"'An indictment would help Trump!' is wholly premature."

Says Jennifer Rubin. 

But once it happens, it's too late to worry about what effect it will have. At that point, everyone against Trump will fight to make it hurt him and everyone for Trump will fight to make it help him. Rubin's column is an early — premature? — effort in the fight to make it hurt him. 

Rubin's first point is that Trump hasn't yet received much support from Republican politicians.

"Al Franken spends his first night as 'Daily Show' host making nice with Lindsey Graham."

The Star Tribune reports.

Their fondness for each other may have robbed viewers of any meaningful debate. The two each squeezed in their differing talking points on Donald Trump, but the chat felt a lot like a photo opportunity with both holding back any serious jabs. Franken even reiterated his belief that Graham was the funniest person he had met in Washington. The extended version of their conversation, available only online, had slightly more meat, but no fireworks.

Sunrise — 7:06.

"Graphic videos show a police SUV ramming a crowd and running over at least one person in Tacoma, Washington, on Saturday."

"In videos from the scene, the police SUV revs its engine while a group of people surrounds it in the street. The SUV briefly backs up and then charges forward as people in the crowd scream. One person can be seen on the ground as the front and rear wheels of the vehicle roll over them."

BuzzFeed News reports (with video if you choose to see it).

"Trump Calls for Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg to Be Criminally Charged for 'Interference in a Presidential Election.'"

Mediaite reports.

“It is the District Attorney of Manhattan who is breaking the law by using the fake and fully discredited testimony (even by the [Southern District of New York]!) of a convicted liar, felon, and jailbird, Michael Cohen, to incredibly persecute, prosecute, and indict a former president, and now leading (by far!) presidential candidate, for a crime that doesn’t exist,” the ex-president seethed [on Truth Social]. “Alvin Bragg should be held accountable for the crime of ‘interference in a presidential election.”

Also: 

Barriers are going up outside the courthouse where a grand jury is hearing testimony in the "hush money" case involving @realDonaldTrump.

There's definitely some tension in the air as the city prepares for the possibility of demonstrations should the 45th President be indicted. pic.twitter.com/dqDbLvTkts

— Robert Sherman (@RobertShermanTV) March 20, 2023

"An essay published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1897 refers to fatness as a 'crime' and a 'deformity'..."

"... and argues that a fat woman 'will not be a social success unless she burnt-cork herself, don beads, and then go to that burning clime where women, like pigs, are valued at so much a pound.' People have been pushing back against fat stigma since at least the nineteen-sixties, when activists staged a 'fat-in' at the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. But the desire to achieve thinness by any means necessary—amphetamines, grapefruit diets, SlimFast—remains an almost foundational tenet of female socialization. When I was a preteen, in the heroin-chic nineties, pro-anorexia Web sites proliferated on the Internet; in the early two-thousands, teen girls puked or did obsessive sit-ups or took Hydroxycut in pursuit of abs like Britney Spears’s. In the twenty-tens, even as the Kardashians ostentatiously displayed their curves, they sold Flat Tummy Co. teas—laxatives—and waist trainers...."

Writes Jia Tolentino in "Will the Ozempic Era Change How We Think About Being Fat and Being Thin?/A popular, growing class of drugs for obesity and diabetes could, in an ideal world, help us see that metabolism and appetite are biological facts, not moral choices" (The New Yorker).

Sunrise — 6:53.

"I sort of keep thinking it’s all gonna end, but it doesn’t. It’s so impressive that it doesn’t end."

Said Michael Delacour, quoted in "Michael Delacour, People’s Park co-founder, dies at 85 Delacour hosted the first meetings to organize and build People’s Park at his Berkeley home in the 1960s" (Berkeleyside). 

"'Many years ago I realized that a book, a novel, is a dream that asks itself to be written' is how his new novel, The Shards, his first in thirteen years, begins."

"It is narrated by Ellis’s alter ego, a fifty-six-year-old writer named Bret.... Bret listens to bands such as Icehouse and Ultravox (he especially likes the song 'Vienna,' with its soaring, mournful refrain, 'This means nothing to me') and spends weekends at parties or the movies, or in his room working on the book that will one day become Ellis’s first novel, Less Than Zero (1985).... Ellis published Less Than Zero when he was a twenty-one-year-old student at Bennington College. Its cultural impact is hard to overstate. The book is narrated by Clay.... Clay drives around, does drugs, goes to parties, and remembers his dead grandparents.... ... Ellis’s desire to see the worst is so all-consuming that it blinds him to anything else. He has a once-in-a-generation talent for conjuring dread and disgust and exposing them as the consequences of a sick, hollow, and narcissistic culture; he’s also funny. But the truth that lies beneath the surface of the world is not that we are depraved authors of Boschian nightmares; it’s that our Boschian nightmares exist alongside acts of love, compassion, faithfulness. Ellis’s stark and unsentimental moral vision is blind to half of human truth, and in this way has remained as childlike as the innocence it wants to dispel...."

Writes the novelist Christine Smallwood, in "The Exorcist/Bret Easton Ellis’s novels are filled with beautiful actors in nightmarish dreamscapes who seem innocent but are revealed to be guilty" (NYRB).

You can buy "The Shards" here. I've never read a Bret Easton Ellis book. Have you? I've never seen a movie based on one of his books either. I'm not recommending the new book, just observing its publication and trying to understand what Christine Smallwood is saying about it. Maybe read her novel: "The Life of the Mind."

"Is the United States Creating a ‘Legion of Doom’?/The emerging China-Russia-Iran axis may force the United States to choose between some unappealing options."

 Asks Daniel Drezner (at Politico).

"Circular, and dark blue, with a Tupperware-style lid, it is precisely the kind of vessel you’d transport a soup or salad in."

"I’ve even sealed it inside a freezer bag, to contain any leaks. Or smells. I walk slowly and with care across Westminster Bridge, because any trip could prove disastrous. As I enter St Thomas’ Hospital and head for the infection department on the fifth floor, I realise the object I’m carrying is still warm, and, despite my preparations, I’m sure I can detect a faint whiff of something ripe, like camembert. It is, in a word, a turd. Freshly laid, and brimming with bacteria, the doctors I’m delivering it to believe such faeces could be the future of medicine. I’ve carried mine across London to be made into capsules – that someone else will ultimately eat...."

 
Writes Linda Geddes, in "Keep taking the crapsules: how I became a faecal transplant donor" (The Guardian).

"The total weight of Earth’s wild land mammals – from elephants to bisons and from deer to tigers – is now less than 10% of the combined tonnage of men, women and children..."

"... living on the planet. A study by scientists at Israel’s Weizmann Institute of Science, published this month, concludes that wild land mammals alive today have a total mass of 22m tonnes. By comparison, humanity now weighs in at a total of around 390m tonnes. At the same time, the species we have domesticated, such as sheep and cattle, in addition to other hangers-on such as urban rodents, add a further 630m tonnes to the total mass of creatures that are now competing with wild mammals for Earth’s resources. The biomass of pigs alone is nearly double that of all wild land mammals...."

 Hard to believe, but that's what it says here in The Guardian.

"The fact that Trump is doing considerably better among Republican voters of color than White Republicans flies in the face of the fact that many Americans view Trump as racist...."

Writes Harry Enten, in "Voters of color are a big reason Trump leads the GOP primary" (CNN).

"The Trees, The Track and The Carvings - a walk up ancient Hell Lane, Symondsbury, Dorset."

Hell Lane, "the infamous smugglers pathway," is a famous "holloway," it says at Cool Places Britain: "These sunken roads date from at least 300 years ago, many going back as far as the iron age. They would have started as drovers’ roads or pilgrims’ paths, worn down by human feet, hooves of horses and cattle, and wheels of carts...."

Sunrise — 7:04, 7:07.

A perfectly good question asked by Jen Psaki, who has a TV show and a written column at MSNBC.

"Could a Trump indictment actually help him politically?"

The headline is good for attracting clicks. It got mine, and I know I'm exacerbating the unwholesome skewing of traffic by linking, but I want to complain that there isn't even an effort to answer the question asked. I guess Psaki brings her presidential press secretary frame of mind to her new job.

The column begins "Don’t freak out" and ends "don’t freak out quite yet."

In between, we're told that Trump can be expected to "weaponize" the indictment for political gain, which just restates the question in the headline. Will the political weaponization of the indictment (if there is one) work? 

There's really nothing more on the topic. A sentence about Trump's poll numbers. A mild quote from Mike Pence referring not to the substance of the indictment but to January 6th — "history will hold Donald Trump accountable." A quote from Chris Sununu:"We’re moving on." As for the effect of criminal charges: "We just don’t know yet." Well, yeah, but where's the analysis? Just "don't freak out" and "Rest assured that I will be following this closely." It doesn't seem like you are.

ADDED: What's really going on here? To say pay no attention to this now means don't talk about it while there's still some time to cry out before it happens. Will the Sunday shows this morning be full of Democrats warning that criminal prosecution is a horrible mistake that will backfire on Democrats (and on everyone else who's keen on stopping Trump)? Or will they all have gotten the memo that we read in Psaki's column: Nothing to see here; the prosecution of Trump is not political, but Trump, if indicted, will politicize it, and we'll just have to wait and see how far that takes him.