I was among those who expected jury selection in the Trump porn star hush money election interference case to take much longer. In spite of the Indicted Impeached Insult Comedian’s attempts to sink it, Judge Juan Merchan runs a tight ship. He has not allowed Trump’s courtroom antics to go on for long and will be holding a contempt hearing tomorrow. That’s required by New York state law when the misconduct occurs outside of court. In this instance, it’s here, there, and everywhere.

I disagree with the armchair lawyers who want the Judge to obsess over the defendants’ conduct. It’s a sideshow performance by a political freak. The Kaiser of Chaos is baiting Judge Merchan. He wants to be thrown in jail, so he can fundraise off his fake martyrdom. Thus far the Judge hasn’t fallen into the trap of focusing on Trump’s style instead of the substance of the case. Keep up the good work, your honor.

Performative politics is, of course, Trump’s jam. He may not know much about history but Steve Bannon does. Bannon is influenced by the New Left of the 1960’s, especially the Yippies. Like Bannon and Trump, Abbie Hoffman and Jerry Rubin were nihilists who wanted to burn the system down. They were motivated by animus to the Vietnam War whereas Trump’s arsonist tendencies are rooted in his selfish desire to stay out of jail. Either way, he’s a MAGA Yippie.

One of Hoffman and Rubin’s most famous stunts was visiting the New York Stock Exchange in 1967 and throwing funny money around to see if the Wall Streeters would take the bait. The stockbrokers fell into the trap much to Hoffman and Rubin’s glee:

The Yippies called it guerilla theatre, I call it malakatude. Whatever you call it, it ended badly at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. It was the shitshow of shitshows, the clusterfuck of clusterfucks. It was a bloody mess; literally and figuratively.

The Yippies and their allies baited then Chicago Mayor Richard Daley into overreacting. Ironically, Daley was privately against the Vietnam War, but he hated hippies more than he hated the war. Hippie hatred motivated much of the backlash to anti-war protests of the day. As Rick Perlstein put it in Nixonland, “The only thing the American people hated more than the war were the anti-warriors.”

Hoffman and Rubin were eventually tried along with other protest organizers in the Chicago 7 trial. They brought their performative antics to Judge Julius Hoffman’s courtroom: he took the bait and made them martyrs for a minute or two. There’s a pretty good Aaron Sorkin flick about that trial on Netflix as well as this classic Graham Nash song:

The 2024 Democratic Convention will be in Chicago. There will be anti-Israel protesters in the streets but it’s unlikely to be a repeat of 1968. That’s a bit off-topic so I’ll send you to a column by New York Magazine’s Ed Kilgore. Shorter Adrastos: What Ed said.

There was another echo of the Sixties outside the Trump trial when a man set himself ablaze and later died. He seems to have been a far right conspiracy guy, not a leftist anti-war protestor. It’s another example of the eerie convergence of the far right and far left that I’ve written about so many times.

I’m not a fan of performative politics. I like some meat on the political bone: the MAGA Yippie antics of Trump, Marge Greene, Tom Cotton, and Steve Bannon leave me cold. After 8 years of Trumpism, I’m eager to help save our institutions from the political arsonists.  Our system is far from perfect but it’s better than the Trumpist alternative of unfettered greed and vengeful anarchy. That’s why I call him the Kaiser of Chaos.

The porn star hush money election interference case enters a new phase with opening arguments today. I’ll be covering the trial but not getting too far into the weeds. I’m a big picture guy. I hope that Judge Merchan is too. The Judge should continue to run a tight ship, but not overreact to Trump’s MAGA Yippie antics. It’s what he wants. If you give him what he wants, he only wants more; just like the stockbrokers and the Yippie funny money. It’s how greed works.

The last word goes to Jefferson Airplane: