Kevin Drum

Donald Trump's latest loss in a British court prompted me to make a list of all the Trump court cases since he first ran for president. These are personal and business cases of substance, not trivial things or routine actions against Trump for his actions in office. Remarkably, out of all of them, he's only won one.

Have I forgotten anything major?

Case	Outcome	Details
E. Jean Carroll #1	Lost	Ordered to pay $5 million. On appeal.
E. Jean Carroll #2	Lost	Ordered to pay $83 million. On appeal.
New York business fraud	Lost	Ordered to pay $454 million. On appeal.
Hillary Clinton	Lost	Case dismissed, Trump fined $1 million for frivolous lawsuit. On appeal.
Steele dossier	Lost	Ordered to pay legal fees of $382,000.
Pulitzer Prize board	Ongoing	Defamation suit over awarding prize for coverage of Russiagate.
New York Times and Mary Trump for publication of tax information	Lost	Dismissed by judge. Trump ordered to pay legal fees of $392,000.
62 suits over election fraud	All lost	61 suits lost immediately, 62nd lost on appeal.
Mary Trump et al. against Trump over exclusion from will	Won	Suit dismissed, then Mary lost again on appeal.
Georgia election fraud	Ongoing	Of 19 co-defendants, four have pleaded guilty so far. Trump's case hasn't been scheduled yet.
Bob Woodward	Ongoing	Trump is suing Woodward for copyright infringement over an audiobook that includes interviews with Trump. Recently moved to New York.
Classified documents (federal)	Ongoing
Stormy Daniels hush money	Ongoing	Trial set for March 25.
Strzok/Page charge of political retribution by Trump	Ongoing	A judge has ruled that Trump can be deposed.
January 6 (federal)	Ongoing
CNN defamation (2020)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
CNN defamation (2022)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
New York Times defamation (2020)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
Washington Post defamation (2020)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
WJFW-NBC defamation (2020)	Lost	Dismissed by judge.
Michael Cohen	Lost	Dropped by Trump shortly before he would have been forced to give a deposition.
Trump University	Lost	All three suits settled for $25 million in restitution.
Trump Foundation	Lost	Foundation shut down, Trump ordered to pay $2 million restitution.
Letitia James misconduct	Lost	Dismissed, then dropped by Trump on appeal.
Six lawsuits against Trump related to January 6	Ongoing	Judges have ruled that the suits can proceed.

This is Charlie peering out of the bushes in the front yard, his favorite place to while away a warm afternoon. But who is he staring at? Evidence from other pictures in this series suggests his brother was roaming around in the garden too.

More bad legal news for Donald Trump:

A London judge, who threw out the case against Orbis Business Intelligence last month saying it was “bound to fail,” ordered Trump to pay legal fees of 300,000 pounds ($382,000), according to court documents released Thursday.

Sure, $382,000 is peanuts compared to Trump's other legal judgments, but every little bit hurts.

Trump had sued Orbis over the infamous "Steele dossier," but his case was tossed after a single day of hearings, much like a related lawsuit failed in the US. That previous case cost him $1 million, so he's now up to $1.4 million in penalties for wasting court time on obviously flimsy Russiagate lawsuits.

A brief history of Donald Trump and TikTok:

July 31, 2020: “As far as TikTok is concerned, we’re banning them from the United States.”

March 1, 2024: Trump noted that Republican mega-donor and Club for Growth benefactor Jeff Yass...whom Trump described as “fantastic”...

March 7, 2024: “If you get rid of TikTok, Facebook and Zuckerschmuck will double their business. I don’t want Facebook, who cheated in the last Election, doing better.”

Perhaps Trump's sudden reversal on TikTok makes more sense if you know that Jeff Yass is a mega-billionaire who made his fortune as an early investor in TikTok. He is the single largest donor in the current election cycle and, as Politico noted, "would potentially be a major financial boost to his campaign" if Trump won him over.

Does that clear things up?

It's curious that progressives are so unhappy these days. They have a lot to be proud of! Here's a collection of changes over the past decade in the condition of the poor:

The only real dim spots (red bars) are in housing. There's been good progress everywhere else. This, needless to say, is due entirely to liberals, and they should be blowing their own horns about it more.

NOTE: I hardly think I need to say this, but all the metrics based on money are adjusted for inflation.

The American economy gained 275,000 jobs last month. We need 90,000 new jobs just to keep up with population growth, which means that net job growth clocked in at 185,000 jobs. The headline unemployment rate increased to 3.9%.

The number of unemployed went up 334,000, and the number of new jobs in December and January were both revised downward. Put this all together and the jobs report is good but not great—which, ironically, might be "perfect." It's more evidence for a soft landing.

Wages were up 5.4% from January on an annualized basis. Adjusted for inflation, that's about a 1.7% increase. This is good for workers, but maybe not so good for inflation.

Wages were up 3.7% from a year ago. Adjusted for inflation that's growth of 0.6%.

Joe Biden's State of the Union speech was more interesting than I expected. This is mainly for two reasons.

First, he was surprisingly tough on Republicans and on Donald Trump in particular—though, as usual, he refused to mention Trump by name. It was a very bristly speech, one that's likely to rouse the liberal political base.

Second, he seemed fine. Better than usual. His speaking style was forceful and he was both clear and easy to follow. There were no serious bumbles, and he responded well to the occasional heckling. My biases aside, I don't see how anyone could have watched this and come away with any issues about Biden's age or stamina.

It was interesting watching Mike Johnson, too. He maintained pursed lips the entire time, but occasionally he nodded in agreement almost unconsciously. In particular, he was nodding the entire time Biden talked about Ukraine. This makes me think that he'd personally really like to pass the Ukraine/Israel aid bill but just doesn't know how to do it with all the lunatics in his caucus.

Biden talked a lot about the "$2 trillion" Republican tax cut, which produced one of his signature moments. Last year he badgered Republicans in the audience into agreeing they wouldn't cut Medicare, and this year he (sort of) badgered them into agreeing they didn't want another big tax cut. This doesn't mean anything in substance, but it was good theater.

The other subject that got a lot of time was immigration, in particular the bipartisan Senate immigration bill that Republicans killed. Biden obviously wanted to bang home the point that partisan Republicans killed the bill for cynical political reasons while virtuous Democrats just want to fix the border. I'm not sure he really got that point across clearly enough, but he gave it a good try.

Overall, it was a pretty good speech and pretty good optics. I don't think it will make a huge impact, but it might be good for a point or two in his approval ratings.

POSTSCRIPT: And the prime minister of Sweden was there!

Today is the day for columnists everywhere to tell us what Joe Biden should really say in tonight's State of the Union address.

Don't bother with them. Without exception, they're all stupid ideas. What Biden is going to do is present a laundry list of stuff he's done and stuff he wants to do, interrupted by a few shoutouts to regular folks sitting next to Jill in the audience. It will last about an hour.

That's what every president does. And while political junkies find it tedious, ordinary people like it. They always have. So you might just as well accept right now that this is what you're going to get.

This is from a Twitter post about a middle school in New York City that's adopted a phone-free policy:

Yondr? What's that?

That's clever. In comments to the Twitter post, a lot of people said they disliked phone-free policies because they wanted their kids to be able to contact them in case of a school shooting or something similar. The odds of that may be pretty small, but it's still an issue, especially now that pay phones are extinct.

But Yondr pretty much solves this problem. In case of an emergency, you just step outside the school gates (where you'd probably be anyway after evacuation) and unlock your phone. For less critical things, presumably the principal's office has an unlocker that they can make available if circumstances warrant.

I'm not entirely sold on phones and social media being the scourge that so many old people think they are, but I can certainly understand what a nuisance they are in classrooms. This seems like a pretty good solution.

Here's another poll released today: