"For Allowing Us to Reach this Day"

Trump New York Trial Diary, Day 4

Good Evening:

It’s a superb troll, but with all due respect to Rep. Jared Moskowitz, it is actually grossly unfair—to Neville Chamberlain.

Chamberlain exercised disastrously bad judgment as British Prime Minister in confronting Adolph Hitler in the run-up to World War II. His name will forever be synonymous with the policy of appeasement—which is itself a term that is today never used except in derision. His name is forever connected to Munich, which is today a synonym for betrayal of democratic allies. His name lives in genuine historical infamy.

And yet, without understating at all the magnitude of his folly and misunderstanding of the true predatory evil of Naziism, one must concede that Chamberlain was not a bad person. He was not acting in bad faith. He was just catastrophically wrong. Think of George W. Bush and the Iraq war, only in the opposite direction and on a much grander scale.

In this judgment, you need not believe me. I appeal, rather, to no authority less than Chamberlain’s principal political foe and ultimate successor, Winston Churchill, whose eulogy of Chamberlain on the floor of the House of Commons on November 12, 1940, I would like to commend to Rep. Moskowitz.

Let me start by saying that I can’t imagine that any of Marjorie Taylor Greene’s foes would eulogize her at all, much less begin some eulogy with the words that Churchill spoke of Chamberlain: “Since we last met, the House has suffered a very grievous loss in the death of one of its most distinguished Members, and of a statesman and public servant. . .”

I also don’t believe there is a single one of Greene’s detractors who would speak of their differences with her as Churchill spoke of his with Chamberlain:

The fierce and bitter controversies which hung around him in recent times were hushed by the news of his illness and are silenced by his death. In paying a tribute of respect and of regard to an eminent man who has been taken from us, no one is obliged to alter the opinions which he has formed or expressed upon issues which have become a part of history; but at the Lychgate we may all pass our own conduct and our own judgments under a searching review. It is not given to human beings, happily for them, for otherwise life would be intolerable, to foresee or to predict to any large extent the unfolding course of events. In one phase men seem to have been right, in another they seem to have been wrong. Then again, a few years later, when the perspective of time has lengthened, all stands in a different setting. There is a new proportion. There is another scale of values.

I am equally certain none of her colleagues will speak thus of her:

It fell to Neville Chamberlain in one of the supreme crises of the world to be contradicted by events, to be disappointed in his hopes, and to be deceived and cheated by a wicked man. But what were these hopes in which he was disappointed? What were these wishes in which he was frustrated? What was that faith that was abused? They were surely among the most noble and benevolent instincts of the human heart-the love of peace, the toil for peace, the strife for peace, the pursuit of peace, even at great peril, and certainly to the utter disdain of popularity or clamour. Whatever else history may or may not say about these terrible, tremendous years, we can be sure that Neville Chamberlain acted with perfect sincerity according to his lights and strove to the utmost of his capacity and authority, which were powerful, to save the world from the awful, devastating struggle in which we are now engaged.

And most importantly, nobody can even imagine speaking of her words like these—that when contradicted by world events, she changed:

He had a firmness of spirit which was not often elated by success, seldom downcast by failure, and never swayed by panic. When, contrary to all his hopes, beliefs and exertions, the war came upon him, and when, as he himself said, all that he had worked for was shattered, there was no man more resolved to pursue the unsought quarrel to the death. The same qualities which made him one of the last to enter the war, made him one of the last who would quit it before the full victory of a righteous cause was won.

No, Rep. Moskowitz, it would too honor Marjorie Taylor Greene to name her office after Neville Chamberlain.

I have a better idea for you.

There was a member of the House of Commons in that era who much more closely resembles Greene than does Chamberlain and whose name might far more fittingly grace her chambers.

This man of prominence was named Oswald Mosley. He founded and led the British Union of Fascists.

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And so let us celebrate, if only briefly, a day long belated in which the House of Representatives reminded itself that we are, in fact, not a nation of Marjorie Taylor Greenes—or Neville Chamberlains, for that matter.

And let us celebrate—again, only briefly—that while we may exhaust all other opportunities first (for so Churchill is reputed to have said of us), we are a nation that can be counted on to do the right thing, at least on the most important questions.

And let us celebrate, if only for a moment, that we have a president who—however we may criticize the pace of his provision of certain weapons systems to our partners—has never wavered for a moment in the broad proposition that Churchill was right and Chamberlain was wrong, and who has no political bread to break with the Oswald Mosleys of our time.

And let us celebrate as well, if only just today, the civic activism of thousands of Americans and Ukrainians who reminded many members of the House of that bread they should not break and reminded them as well that it’s better to be tardy in the service of democracy than to fail to show up at all.

And let us therefore give thanks to God, or to each other, or to our shared democratic political commitments, or to whatever power greater than ourselves we are inclined to acknowledge that we have been kept alive and sustained and allowed to reach this day.

And then, having done so, let’s quickly stop congratulating ourselves and thanking God and get the fuck back to work. Because we have been damnably late and we can’t ever do that again. And because there are 113 members of the House of Representatives who need to be taught a memorable teaching and drummed out of public life and left to die in obscurity with nobody who will honor them as Churchill so graciously spoke of Chamberlain.

And more immediately, we need to remember that $60 billion only goes so far in a war against a giant country. And we thus need to remember that we will have to be back and to do this—as the estimable

Charlie Sykes

likes to say—all over again, and not too long from now.

And we need to remember that there were a number of Democrats who could not bring themselves to sign the discharge petition to get this vote done earlier because, yes, they hate Israel just that much that they are willing to see Ukrainians die so as not to have to sully their hand by moving a bill that also contains aid for Israel.

And we need to get to work on all of this now, because time has this way of moving faster than we think and because democracies are fragile things. And because while we get to take a break and a breath between our battles, we don’t get to forget that the next battle is coming, and that it is coming sooner than we think or want or pray.

So pour a glass of champagne tonight, perhaps with one eye on the Senate, but please don’t be hung over tomorrow.

There’s work to be done, people, and it does not stop.

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Emma Tsurkov’s campaign of trolling Iraqi Prime Minister Mohammed al-Sudani came to its climax Friday afternoon, when she managed to get herself into a speech the prime minister was giving at the Atlantic Council and shouted him down about her sister, Elizabeth Tsurkov, who has been held hostage by a terrorist group that is also part of Sudani’s ruling coalition. Here’s the video:

The prime minister’s translated response from the other end of the room is here:

Emma informs me that the Iraqi government responded to her outburst, notwithstanding the prime minister’s fine words, by blocking her “Bring Elizabeth Home” website inside Iraq. Keeping is classy, Iraq.

Emma also reports that she was told after her ejection from the audience that the Atlantic Council had asked those present not to share video of her outburst.

I was not present, and I would not honor such a reques if I had been present.

As a general matter, as a think tank scholar, I oppose disrupting events. In this instance, however, the normal rules of decorum do not apply. Emma has been trying to meet with Iraqi officials about her sister’s fate for months, and they ignore her. And frankly, the urge to save a sister, and to put pressure on officials to use their power to do so, trumps rules of decorum anyway.

To put it simply, Emma is out of fucks to give, and I’m here for that attitude.

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Behold today’s #BeastOfTheDay, in honor of the House finally doing the right thing:

mikejdukarm

A post shared by @mikejdukarm

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Trump Trial Diary, April 20, 2024

The next diary entry I post, two days from now, will occur after opening statements to the jury on Monday morning in the first criminal trial of a former president of these United States since the founding of the Republic.

A complete jury has now been seated, along with six alternate jurors. We are ready to roll. The schedule of events for this week is the following:

• Sunday evening: I head to New York.

• Monday morning: Opening statements, for which I will be in court with the estimable Anna Bower. Court will wrap up at 2:00 pm so the Jews can get home for Seder. I will be on a 3:00 pm train home and will be livestreaming from the train.

• Monday evening: First Seder.