Pinned
Farah Stockman
Editorial Board Member
Biden’s Crackdown on Migrants Reflects a New Reality for Democrats
There’s no denying that the executive order President Biden signed on Tuesday — significantly curtailing the number of asylum seekers allowed into the country — is a head-spinning reversal for a president who promised to undo Donald Trump’s policies at the border. It’s worth remembering that Biden wasn’t alone on that front. Eight out of 10 Democrats running in the presidential primaries said in 2019 that they would make walking across the border without permission a civil infraction, like a traffic ticket, instead of a criminal offense.
Since then, the welcoming tone and policies of the Biden administration have attracted more migrants from around the world than American voters want to absorb. The number of people crossing the border has more than doubled — from one million in 2018 to 2.5 million in 2023, according to the Migration Policy Institute. As they arrive by the busload in cities like New York, Boston and Chicago, they have strained budgets and social services upon which vulnerable Americans depend.
Welcoming newcomers with dignity is important, but our capacity to do so is not infinite. For that reason, I don’t fault the Biden administration for trying to turn down the spigot. My biggest question is why it took so long.
As Border Patrol agents have long said, if asylum seekers were held in humane and family-friendly settings while their asylum claims were reviewed, instead of allowed in, the numbers at the border would quickly drop, since the main reason most come is to work.
But the administration ignored that recommendation and — thanks to cynical opposition from Trump — Congress failed to pass a bipartisan proposal that would have helped tackle the problem. Now the problem has gotten so bad that the asylum system itself is basically broken.
The executive order Biden signed on Tuesday allows for expedited deportations in a matter of hours or days, which can be harsh. It is not clear, however, whether the administration has the resources to detain and deport many thousands of people per day, although administration officials say that once the deportations begin, the number who try to come will dwindle. It’s also possible that the administration is banking on the courts striking the order down.
It is not fair, however, to say that Biden is just like Trump now on immigration. Biden has rightly done a lot to expand legal pathways for asylum seekers and other migrants. The asylum claims of people who manage to make an appointment through an online app — roughly 1,500 per day — will continue to be processed.
Those on the left who are sure to criticize this action as a betrayal should reflect on whether their advocacy has sent the Democratic Party down a political blind alley. If we want to protect the right to asylum, we can’t ignore the widespread abuse of that system.
June 5, 2024, 11:59 a.m. ET
Daniel J. Wakin
Opinion Deputy International Editor, reporting from Oslo
For Victims of Human Rights Violations, Family Matters
In the struggle against oppression, kinship matters deeply.
While plenty of international organizations fight on behalf of political prisoners, it is often spouses and children who are the most galvanizing — and sometimes effective — champions on behalf of individuals crushed by tyranny.
It was an unexpressed theme at the Oslo Freedom Forum, an annual conference by the Human Rights Foundation that highlights the struggle for democracy and freedom. The three-day conference presented individual stories of bravery and oppression, along with workshops on A.I. deep fakes, spyware protection, how to fight kleptocracies and other practical matters. It has also become a nexus for potential donors and activists.
On Monday, Sebastien Lai, an outspoken advocate for the freedom of his father, Jimmy Lai, a jailed Hong Kong newspaper publisher and critic of the Chinese Communist Party, took his turn on the stage. Lai, speaking at the Oslo Concert House on Tuesday, told of his father’s arrest in 2020.
A crowd of police came to Jimmy Lai’s apartment and took him away, but not before he turned around to his family and smiled, saying, “There’s no need to be afraid,” his son recounted. Then the police took him to his paper, Apple Daily, and paraded him through the newsroom.
Leonardo Gonzalez, a supermarket worker in Venezuela, was shot dead by security forces during a protest in 2017 while trying to flee. His wife, Olga, ran to the scene, which was near their home. Twenty-one bullets hit the car. “That’s what I counted,” she said. “One of those bullets went through my husband’s back.” In his pockets were four candies, she added. “Those were his weapons.”
Olga Gonzalez became an activist. She relentlessly pushed prosecutors to pursue her husband’s killers, fought bureaucracy, sat through 100 hearings and three trials that ended in convictions and then founded an organization for other families of victims of extrajudicial killings. “His case remains open,” she said.
Zhala Bayramova spoke of the arrest of her father, Gubad Ibadoghlu, on trumped-up charges in Azerbaijan. He was a thorn in the side of the country’s repressive president, Ilham Aliyev. While later passing out leaflets about his case, she told me of her exhausting search for international support to free him from prison — or at least get him medical care.
“I cannot imagine my dad dying,” she said. “We just want our loved ones to be alive.”
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June 3, 2024, 4:15 p.m. ET
Julie Ho
Opinion Editorial Assistant
The Incoming Mexican President Remains Linked to Her Predecessor
Claudia Sheinbaum, the first woman and the first Jew to be elected president in Mexico, won in a blowout on Sunday. Nearly half of Mexico’s 32 states are also expected to be governed by women. In a country where women die violently at staggering rates, where machismo reigns and antisemitism permeates, Sheinbaum’s rise is a symbol of women’s empowerment.
“I do not arrive alone. We all arrived,” she said in her victory speech, invoking “our mothers, our daughters and our granddaughters.” But her feminist statements have felt disconnected from the country’s women’s rights movement. That’s in part because her underlying message is less about social progress and more about protecting the Morena party’s promise of progress, as envisioned by Andrés Manuel López Obrador, her mentor and predecessor. For all their stylistic differences, what Sheinbaum shares with López Obrador, known as AMLO, is a core populist worldview.
That approach can champion women’s issues, but it often antagonizes women. Even as he has embraced gender parity and women’s rights, AMLO has failed to address the violence against women, and he derides feminists as being conservative and contrary to his leftist agenda.
Sheinbaum, 61, and AMLO, 70, both represent a new era of Mexican politics that follows generations of rule by the Institutional Revolutionary Party. AMLO decisively won the presidency in 2018 by promising to break with the corruption that party came to represent — a victory that resonated decades after the 1968 student massacre at Tlatelolco in which Mexicans confronted one-party rule en masse for the first time. Sheinbaum has presented herself as a member of that resistance, talking proudly about having parents who supported the protests and hosted student leaders at their home.
“She has a populist conviction that history is divided between a subject against its enemies, and democracy consists of the people taking control of institutions,” the Mexican writer and political analyst Jesús Silva-Herzog Márquez said in a video interview this year.
That narrative binary defines Sheinbaum’s thinking, outside of AMLO’s shadow. The criticism that she is merely his puppet discounts her own commitment to his party.
But what gave Sheinbaum an early and commanding lead over another woman who was her closest competitor, Xóchitl Gálvez, ironically, is her kinship with AMLO, and everything that made him polarizing but popular. She may have claimed a victory for women, but she probably didn’t need feminism to win.
June 3, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
Katherine Miller
Opinion Writer and Editor
After the Verdict, Both Campaigns Brace for Its Impact
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Every Monday morning on The Point, we kick off the week with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
President Biden will travel to France this week to meet with President Emmanuel Macron of France but also to speak at an event commemorating the 80th anniversary of D-Day.
In terms of events with real-world consequences that may also have political ones: On Thursday, the Supreme Court will release opinions again, and we await, among others, how the court will rule on a set of Jan. 6-related cases and a set of abortion cases, particularly one that focuses on emergency situations in Idaho.
Hunter Biden’s trial also starts in Delaware on Monday over felony charges related to the purchase of a gun. (The trial over his taxes has been delayed until the fall.)
This week, we’ll probably also continue to get polling of how voters see the Trump verdict. The Trump campaign says it raised wild amounts of money on Thursday and Friday. But the things that power small-dollar fund-raising or reaffirm a politician’s existing support are not always the same things that have broad-based appeal.
Here’s a helpful thread of initial polling results from various firms, which generally found no movement or modest movement in Biden’s direction after Donald Trump’s conviction. Very quickly after the verdict, Echelon Insights did an interesting thing, which was to re-poll the people they’d reached in the months before the verdict (and found modest movement toward Biden). Any movement in polling, as Nate Silver noted — even a 1-point movement if it were sustained — would be notable since the race is close and so little has moved the polls.
What has changed this week is: Trump now has lots of free time. How will he use it? Next weekend, he’ll be in Las Vegas for a rally, though presumably he’ll do something publicly between now and then. How he responds to the verdict, and what he chooses to focus on, might be just as important as the initial reaction from voters. On that front, if you missed this article by Maggie Haberman and Jonah E. Bromwich last week looking at Trump’s embrace of others accused of crimes, it’s worth reading.
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June 1, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Serge Schmemann
Editorial Board Member
Suddenly, a Real Chance to Halt the Fighting in Gaza
The “comprehensive new proposal” made by Israel for the Gaza war, announced by President Biden on Friday, is essentially a six-week cease-fire that would include the withdrawal of Israeli troops from populated areas of Gaza, the release of most Israeli hostages and a massive relief effort for two million battered, hungry Gazans. The stages beyond that — a permanent end to hostilities, release of all remaining hostages, the reconstruction of Gaza — are left to future negotiations.
That leaves a lot of open questions down the road, all heavily laden with polarized politics, animosities and unknowns. Yet if the plan Biden described on Friday is accepted by Hamas, which looks likely, the cease-fire alone would be a huge achievement for the United States and its mediating partners, Egypt and Qatar — and a desperately needed dollop of food, medicine, shelter and hope for Gazans.
Despite a deafening international outcry against the vast carnage and destruction in Gaza, including heated protests on American campuses and arrest warrants (albeit largely demonstrative) for top Israeli and Hamas leaders from the International Criminal Court, along with considerable pressure from the Biden administration, a cease-fire seemed always just beyond reach.
The reasons are many and varied: The Hamas terrorist attack of Oct. 7 left many Israelis hungry for the eradication of Hamas, cost be damned; Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his far-right nationalist government showed little interest in ending the fight, especially as that would most likely lead to the end of his fragile government and leave him facing criminal charges; the Hamas leader, Yahya Sinwar, insisted that the fighting must end before any hostage release or deal with Israel.
At the same time, the war put growing political pressures on Biden. There was always a threat of the conflict spreading to northern Israel and beyond, and the use of American ordnance against civilians in Gaza was feeding a swelling fury among American liberals, Biden’s constituency in a critical election year.
The president acknowledged some of the opposition the full proposal would confront in Israel. Responding to the longing for the destruction of Hamas, he claimed that the organization was no longer capable of an attack like the one on Oct. 7. Aware that some on the Israeli right wanted total victory, he argued that this would not bring hostages home, not bring an “enduring defeat” of Hamas and “not bring Israel lasting security.”
That is the message the president will have to relentlessly drive home over the six weeks the cease-fire is meant to last, if it starts and holds. All the obstacles to peace will still be in place as negotiations turn to a permanent end to hostilities. And Biden admitted that six weeks may not be enough. But for now, any respite is welcome.
June 1, 2024, 7:00 a.m. ET
Jesse Wegman
Editorial Board Member
Fantasies Aside, Sentencing Trump Poses a Very Tough Choice
Donald Trump is not your average felon. That creates a devil of a dilemma for Juan Merchan, the New York trial judge who by July 11 must decide on an appropriate sentence for Trump after his conviction on 34 counts of falsifying business records. Send him to prison? Fine him, put him on probation, order him to perform 300 hours of community service?
It’s not a straightforward question. Unlike the federal system, New York has no formal sentencing guidelines, but decades of case law help judges weigh several familiar factors — including age, criminal record, and the severity of the offense — in determining the right punishment.
“So much depends on the individual,” Michael J. Obus, who sat on the New York State Supreme Court bench for 28 years, and alongside Merchan for more than a decade, told me. “There’s just no precedent for this particular individual that makes this an easy decision. Everything pulls you in different directions. On the one hand, you’ve got a man who’s 77 years old and is convicted of the lowest-level, Class E felony. On the other hand, he’s been held in contempt 10 times and is not showing any remorse.”
As I followed the trial over the last several weeks, and then absorbed the jury’s verdict on Thursday evening, I found myself torn. Trump is a uniquely malign, and uniquely powerful, figure in American life. He mocks the notion of equal justice even as he squeals endlessly about his own mistreatment. He considers himself above the law even as he threatens to wield it against his enemies if given the chance. He poses an extreme danger to the rule of law and the future of democracy that no workaday carjacker could dream of.
And yet if no one is above the law, no one is below it either. Trump can’t be given an unusually strong sentence simply for being a bad president, or an immoral lout, or for any other reason not directly related to the specific crimes in this case and the usual factors judges consider.
Orange-jump-suited liberal fantasies aside, most people convicted of low-level, nonviolent felonies in New York are not sentenced to prison. At the same time, Obus pointed out, several of Trump’s crimes “took place while the defendant was in the White House. You can’t say that about most defendants.” (Trump may yet talk his way into the lockup if he keeps testing the limits of Merchan’s gag order.)
I don’t know the right answer and can’t predict Merchan’s decision. What I do know is that in a healthy country, a nominee for president would not come anywhere near the line of criminality — certainly not so close that reasonable people can debate whether he should spend time behind bars.
This is the situation we are faced with. That this candidate may yet prevail in November is the biggest predicament of all.
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May 31, 2024, 5:31 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
Six of Trump’s Dumbest Trial Mistakes
In the avalanche of post-conviction coverage, we’ve all heard that if Donald Trump had just copped to a misdemeanor, or admitted to having sex with Stormy Daniels, or been allowed to have his expert witness testify fully, he wouldn’t be a felon.
Maybe so, but that’s beside the point. Trump could still have been Trumpy and possibly won the case if he and his lawyers had not made six critical mistakes:
Trump disrespected the judge. The last thing any defendant should do is tick off the judge. Trump and his team did so repeatedly. His 10 citations for contempt of court, which almost got him thrown in jail, were just the start of it. Trump’s lawyers made a series of frivolous and repetitive motions that did their case — and their own reputations — no good. The only explanation is that their volcanic client must have insisted on it.
Trump dozed for much of the trial. Jurors might have been fine with him falling asleep occasionally. But inside the courtroom we noticed on the monitors (which showed Trump from the front) that his eyes were closed every day and for large portions of the testimony. That’s a bad look for any defendant trying to win favor with the jury.
The defense blew its cross-examination of Stormy Daniels. Susan Necheles, one of the defense lawyers, had a tough assignment: Prove Stormy Daniels was lying about her sexual encounter with Trump when she clearly was not. But Necheles made it worse by seeming to shame Daniels for her career choices, falsely hinting she had records to disprove the account, and by failing to object more when Daniels got prurient, as the judge later pointed out.
The defense dropped its best anti-Michael Cohen argument. The lead defense attorney, Todd Blanche, elicited on cross-examination that Cohen thought William H. Pauley, a former federal judge, was in on some kind of crazy conspiracy with Cohen’s enemies to hurt him. But Blanche was so eager to catalog all of Cohen’s lies that he failed to focus on Cohen’s wildest charge later.
The defense insisted on putting on a case. If the defense had rested without calling witnesses, Trump’s refusal to testify would have made a certain sense, suggesting the prosecution’s case was so weak there was no need to rebut it. Instead, the defense called the thuggish Robert Costello, who was by far the worst, least credible witness in the entire trial and was destroyed on cross-examination. This ended the trial on a down note for the defense.
The defense lied about the “Access Hollywood” tape. “You heard that politicians reacted negatively to the ‘Access Hollywood’ tape,” Blanche said, in one of the biggest lies during his closing. “None of that is true.” Oh, yeah? So why was Trump nearly dumped from the 2016 ticket over it? This jury wasn’t born yesterday, and they had heard lots of testimony about the effect of that explosive tape.
Trump still doesn’t get that a court of law is not the same as the court of public opinion. Politicizing the trial might be good for donations and even polling but it will hurt him on July 11, when he will have to answer for his antics at sentencing.
May 31, 2024, 3:10 p.m. ET
Zeynep Tufekci
Opinion Columnist
Bird Flu Doesn’t Have to Become History’s Most Avoidable Disaster
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The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported on Thursday that another farmworker has been infected with H5N1, an avian flu virus. Alarmingly, unlike earlier cases, he has respiratory symptoms. This means the virus is in his lungs, where it has a better chance to evolve into an airborne form that could easily infect others.
Viruses often hit a dead end when they cross from one species to another, getting stuck at their first victim. For example, H5N1 has been around since the 1990s, but most patients have had extensive, direct contact with sick poultry and almost never pass it on to other humans.
The pathogens that have the greatest potential to set off a pandemic often have a deadly combination of airborne transmission and frequent mild cases, allowing them to spread widely and stealthily. That’s a key reason there hasn’t yet been an Ebola pandemic. The disease causes severe illness and kills most victims, and it mainly spreads through close contact with infected bodily fluids. It has fewer chances to spread widely than another disease might.
The United States is certainly giving H5N1 many, many chances to adapt to spreading easily and quietly among humans.
Cows started getting sick with H5N1 last winter, but unlike birds with H5N1, they weren’t dying. It took dogged investigation by Dr. Barb Petersen, a veterinarian in Texas, to determine that they were afflicted with a form of avian influenza. When we spoke, she told me that whenever cows fell sick on farms she monitored, an unusual number of people also became ill.
In April, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported a farmworker in Texas had been infected with H5N1. This month, state health officials in Michigan found two more human cases (including the one reported on Thursday). Even so, public health officials have largely been slow to establish the sort of widespread testing and data sharing that would give Americans the best chance at stopping an H5N1 pandemic.
This month, Dr. Mandy Cohen, the director of the C.D.C., told The New York Times there were no immediate plans to make testing mandatory. But if we don’t test for H5N1, we won’t find it.
As Rick Bright, an expert on the H5N1 virus who served on President Biden’s coronavirus advisory board, told me: “We are missing additional cases by not testing. We are missing evolutionary patterns of the virus by not sequencing more. We are also losing the trust of people by not being completely timely and transparent with data and information as it becomes available.”
This virus may never evolve to spread dangerously among humans, but if it does, this particular avian flu pandemic will go down as one of the most avoidable slow-motion disasters in history.
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May 31, 2024, 1:43 p.m. ET
David Firestone
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
Trump Is ‘Honored’ by a Verdict That Should Shame Him
Donald Trump could have gone any number of directions on Friday morning in his first speech after becoming a felon. A better human being might have expressed some remorse or a modicum of respect for the jury’s verdict, but that’s not who he is. He might have at least acknowledged that the historic conviction was a significant defeat and urged his supporters to help him rise above it in pursuit of some larger goal. But he didn’t even do that.
In fact, what was remarkable about the speech at Trump Tower was how little effect the conviction seems to have had on his permanent vocabulary of grievance. To hear him tell it, it’s just another speed bump erected by what he called the “fascists” in the Democratic Party, no different from his two impeachments, or the devastating Jan. 6 investigation, or the judgments against his business, or the civil finding that he is a sexual abuser. To acknowledge that this moment is spectacularly different would be to give the verdict real power, and he was determined to rob the legal system of any ability to get in his way.
And so, even though he must have known that the audience for this speech would be unusually large, he tossed out the same jumbled shards of anger, lies and hyperbole that he dispenses every day on the trail. The usual journalistic cliché for speeches like this one is “rambling,” but at least on a ramble you actually go someplace, if slowly. Trump, on the other hand, had no apparent destination.
He insulted the district attorney, Alvin Bragg, and said Justice Juan Merchan “looks like an angel but he’s really a devil.” But those attacks were blended with fevered denunciations of President Biden for imaginary policies like banning cars, letting vast mobs of terrorists march unimpeded into the country and ruining the country with a politicized system of justice. “We are living in a fascist state,” he said.
Regarding the trial itself, he bashed Michael Cohen as a “sleazebag,” denied having a sexual affair and dismissed the crime of falsifying business records as some kind of bookkeeping hiccup. The jury didn’t believe any of this for a minute, of course, but Trump will never stop trying to litigate it, and he was even less effective than his inept lawyers.
The only real acknowledgment that something unusual had happened was when he called the conviction “a great, great honor” that he was willing to bear, as if he were Saint Sebastian, pierced by Democratic arrows for the country’s greater good. His wounds, however, are entirely self-inflicted.
May 31, 2024, 10:30 a.m. ET
Kathleen Kingsbury
Opinion Editor
What the Nation Needs to Hear From Trump (but Won’t)
Donald Trump has announced he plans to speak to the nation from Trump Tower on Friday morning. It made me pause and consider what I — and I suspect many voters, especially swing voters, and maybe even some of Trump’s supporters — want to hear less than 24 hours after the first conviction on felony charges of a former president.
What I want to hear — from a sober, humbled presidential candidate — is this: “Yesterday a jury of my peers rendered a verdict against me and my actions in 2016. I have believed, from the get-go, that this prosecution was politically motivated, and there is evidence that the district attorney always intended to bring it, despite a lack of any good evidence that I committed a crime. I continue to think the case rested on a bogus legal theory, and we will appeal. But until that appeal is ruled on, I will respect this verdict, as much as I disagree with it.”
In other words, I would like the former, and potentially future, president to rise to the seriousness of the occasion.
Of course, Trump will say no such words, and he will express no remorse in a way that might lighten his eventual sentence. He will declare the trial rigged, and he will rail against the judge, the court and the jury, despite the responsible and somber ways in which all parties conducted themselves. He will ask his supporters to join him in his outrage, and he will continue — as he has done time and time again — to undermine the law and democratic norms.
He will not rise to the occasion. And our country will be worse off for it.
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May 30, 2024, 6:58 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
‘Is That Your Verdict?’ As Trump Seethes, a Jury Says ‘Yes.’
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The verdict might not have been a total surprise, but the timing sure was.
All Thursday afternoon, those of us in the courtroom watching the Donald Trump trial had been expecting a Friday verdict. This was validated when, a little before 4 p.m., Justice Juan Merchan came into the courtroom and told us that the jury would be excused at 4:30 and would resume deliberations on Friday.
Then crickets. For more than half an hour, we heard nothing — certainly not the buzzy bell we expected if the jury had a note to send or a verdict.
The judge had left the bench to tell jurors he was excusing them and hadn’t come back.
I had a nice whispered chat with Andrew Giuliani, a fervent Trump supporter who was sitting behind me. I told him I expected a conviction and asked him if he would blame his fellow New Yorkers who had spent many hours painstakingly examining the evidence. He said yes and took a shot at Matthew Colangelo, the federal prosecutor who came in from the Justice Department to help the D.A.’s office.
“That’s totally unprecedented!” Giuliani said, previewing some of the team’s damage-control spin. I reminded him that this had been done countless times in civil rights cases in the South and complex local prosecutions.
Around 4:30 p.m., Merchan mounted the bench and announced that he had received a note from the jury. I first thought it was another request for more evidence to be read back. This was a conscientious jury that had been deliberating since midday on Wednesday. But the note said that a verdict had been reached and jurors needed another half-hour before announcing it.
You could hear a collective gasp in the courtroom.
At 5:03 p.m., the jury entered. After the foreman, an Irish-born former waiter clad in a blue pullover, stood and confirmed that the jury had reached a verdict, he was asked about each count and said “guilty” 34 times.
The defense was asked if it wanted to waive its right to poll the jurors and, of course, said no. When asked, “Is that your verdict?” each of the other 11 jurors — their poker faces intact — calmly answered, “Yes.”
Trump had become a felon.
Merchan thanked the jurors for their service in a “very stressful and difficult task” and told them they are “free to discuss the case, but you are also free not to. The choice is yours.”
Then came what I have always viewed as the most moving part of the trial, a ritual of democracy performed eight times a day, as the jury moves back and forth for breaks and lunch and exits when court adjourns:
The jurors marched past Donald Trump without looking at him, soldiers for justice.
Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche, moved for a “judgment of acquittal” because there’s “no way this jury could have reached a verdict without accepting the testimony of Michael Cohen.”
Merchan thought he heard Blanche say that even the judge knew Cohen had perjured himself on the stand. Blanche backtracked, and the motion was denied with dispatch.
At the request of Blanche, who has other Trump legal proceedings to deal with in June, Merchan set sentencing for July 11. It struck me that since Trump is guilty of 34 felonies in the first degree, he is unlikely to get off with a slap on the wrist. First he will have to undergo a probation interview, followed by a probation report.
This summer, will we be discussing ankle bracelets in the White House? Quite possibly.
Merchan asked for Trump’s current bail status.
In what may have been my favorite line of the day after “guilty,” the prosecution lawyer Joshua Steinglass said, “No bail, judge.”
In another trial, that might mean the felon had been denied bail. Here it was a simple recognition of the stark reality that a jury had just convicted a former president of the United States, who would not be sent to a holding cell.
As usual, Trump walked up the center aisle, swinging his right arm out in an exaggerated handshake with his son Eric. He looked more hunched than usual, with pain on his face.
In the elevator a photographer who has been shooting him for years said, “I have never seen him looking so tired.”
May 30, 2024, 4:30 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
Trump’s Trial and Lincoln’s Example Make 2024 a Character Test
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History hangs heavily over the Manhattan Criminal Courthouse this week. Everyone inside feels its weight. After the jury was sent to deliberate, things loosened up a bit and I chatted with a court police officer from Brooklyn who for weeks has been one of our hall monitors. She spoke of being able to someday tell her grandchildren that she witnessed a historic trial.
There has been other presidential history made in Lower Manhattan, of course. In 1860, little more than three months before Abraham Lincoln became the Republican nominee for president, he came to New York, where he bought a new suit at Brooks Brothers and a stovepipe hat. He also stopped by a home for desperately poor children, just two blocks south of where the courthouse now stands. The children’s faces, a witness reported, “would brighten into sunshine as he spoke cheerful words of promise.” When told he had inspired the children, Lincoln responded, “No, they inspired me.”
Lincoln’s address during that New York trip at the Cooper Union, a mile north of the current courthouse, would help catapult him to the presidency. He wrote the ending in all capital letters:
LET US HAVE FAITH THAT RIGHT MAKES MIGHT, AND IN THAT FAITH LET US, TO THE END, DARE TO DO OUR DUTY AS WE UNDERSTAND IT.
Donald Trump often compares himself to Lincoln, noting that they are both honest and Republicans. But he has inverted Lincoln’s motto of right making might, believing the opposite. He also castigated Lincoln for nearly losing to a bigger hero, the Confederate general Robert E. Lee. And the ultimate un-Lincoln constantly celebrates Jan. 6 insurrectionists who threatened to kill his vice president and flew a Confederate flag under the Capitol dome built by Lincoln.
The liar and cheat we’ve heard the most about in the courtroom for the past six weeks is not Michael Cohen but Trump, whose basic values deviate not only from Lincoln’s but also from those of any man who has ever held the office of president.
I understand why many voters might favor Trump under the mistaken impression that he has their back. But for any leaders or well-educated people in any realm — from Nikki Haley to the billionaire Stephen Schwarzman to your otherwise intelligent uncle — to support Trump now out of narrow self-interest raises deeper questions about their patriotism.
They know better, and as the evidence presented in this trial has shown, they are failing the character test of their generation.
Now we are engaged in our own cold civil war, and American voters must think harder about whether this nation — or any nation — can long endure the consequences of another Trump presidency.
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May 30, 2024, 2:00 p.m. ET
Adam Sternbergh
Opinion Culture Editor
Ángel Hernández Made Baseball Great
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The retirement of Ángel Hernández, long reputed to be the worst umpire in baseball, was greeted by many baseball fans with unfettered glee. In an age when the strike zone is constantly displayed on TV and each pitch can be instantly measured for speed, movement and location, the notion of a human consistently misjudging balls and strikes can seem not just outdated but absurd. The outsize antics of certain umpires — presumably intoxicated by their own power — has long been a subject of fan exasperation, inspiring the derisive phrase “ump show.”
I admit I reacted to the Hernández news by watching a series of his most questionable calls, many of which made me laugh out loud. I’m not here to debate whether he was a good umpire; the data clearly indicates he was one of the least accurate.
But Major League Baseball needs fallible humans like Ángel Hernández. The ump show is as much an essential part of baseball as bone-headed errors, egregious showmanship or players angrily tossing a glove into the stands. The alternative scenario — in which baseball is adjudicated, flawlessly and bloodlessly, by machines — would make the sport less meaningful.
The Automated Balls and Strikes system, or A.B.S., is already in use in Triple-A, and the argument for embracing so-called robo-umps boils down to their accuracy. Yet the element of human judgment, as displayed by human umps, is as intrinsic to baseball as is the element of human skill, as displayed by the players. Players drop balls. They lose fly balls in the lights. They overrun bases or run through stop signals. All of this is part of the game. Blown strike calls, idiosyncratic strike zones and even flamboyantly performative umps are, and should be, a part of the game as well.
You might counter: But bad officiating adversely affects the outcome of the game. Yes, but so does bad playing. Also, it’s a game. The argument that technological proficiency should supersede human fallibility in all arenas is pernicious enough elsewhere in society, but it seems especially wrongheaded when it comes to sports, an entertaining but meaningless forum for human excellence and human foibles. There is a reason the most enduring examination of baseball’s allure ends with a mythically talented player striking out.
Infallible robot brain surgeon? Honestly, I can see the argument. Infallible robot umpires? No, thanks — I’ll take the ump show.
May 30, 2024, 10:59 a.m. ET
Paul Krugman
Opinion Columnist
Inflation and the Problem of McMisinformation
The United States, like many other countries, experienced a burst of inflation in 2021-22, which has since largely subsided. But prices haven’t gone down, so almost everything costs more than it did a few years ago.
Wages, however, have risen even more, so most Americans’ purchasing power is higher than before the pandemic. But anyone who points this out gets a huge amount of pushback from people saying “Get out of your office into the real world! The price of food (it’s usually food, although it’s sometimes other stuff) has doubled!”
As it turns out, such claims about the “real world” are almost always false. A few months ago I looked at some independent estimates of grocery prices and found that they closely match the official data. No, inflation isn’t much higher than the deep state wants you to know.
Well, I now have an unexpected ally in this argument. Management at McDonald’s is apparently irked by constant claims that its prices have doubled since before the pandemic. So the company has issued a special news release about what has really happened to its prices, which are up, but not by nearly as much as the inflation truthers claim:
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The price of a Big Mac, in particular, is up 21 percent since 2019, not the 100 percent some are claiming. Over the same period average wages of nonsupervisory employees — that is, most workers — rose 28 percent:
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So no, McDonald’s hasn’t become unaffordable, whatever your vibes may say.
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May 30, 2024, 10:18 a.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
The Best Move for the Trump Jury: A Split Decision
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With the jury still deliberating, it’s time for those of us who have heard every minute of this trial to place our bets. My prediction is this: Donald Trump will be convicted on nine of 34 counts of falsifying business records. He’ll go down for the nine fraudulent checks he signed in the White House in 2017 — each a piece of a broader effort to falsify business records and, ultimately, to interfere unlawfully in the 2016 election.
I could easily be wrong, of course, but here’s my reasoning. To resolve differences with a split-the-baby approach, the jury might decide that Trump’s fingerprints are literally on those checks, while the 11 false invoices, 12 false ledger entries and two false checks signed by Donald Jr. and Eric are not as closely connected to Trump, though he was the one who caused the falsification of all of them.
Jurors are showing commendable signs of diligence. It would have hurt the credibility of their verdict had they returned with one too soon on Wednesday, the day they began deliberating. On Thursday morning they reheard portions of the judge’s instructions and many pages of important trial testimony. No one has any idea if they will ask to hear more.
I think Trump deserves to be convicted on all 34 counts. But reasonable jurors could legitimately conclude that they are more comfortable with nine.
And if they reach that outcome, it could have a political effect. A conviction on fewer counts would be the best possible outcome for the country, demonstrating that the jury was unbiased and carefully considered each count, dismissing most of them.
If convicted, Trump is unlikely to win on appeal. Justice Juan Merchan has dotted his i’s and crossed his t’s, making an immediate reversal a long shot. Federal courts, including the Supreme Court, probably won’t want to get involved, and if they did, it wouldn’t be until months or years after the election.
So Trump will spend the rest of his life attacking the verdict, the judge, the prosecutors and the fair-minded residents of his hometown who determined his fate.
But at least it will be a little harder for him to spew his venom if the jury thoughtfully studies the evidence and clears him on 25 counts. His base won’t care, but I have faith that at least some swing voters who respect our jury system will conclude that this man is a criminal who should not be returned to power. Will that be enough at the margins to tip the election? No one knows for sure.
But we do know that this would probably be the only conviction of Trump before November. A careful jury verdict could help build a constituency to keep a felon out of the White House.
May 30, 2024, 6:44 a.m. ET
Mara Gay
Editorial Board Member
Time to Examine Why New York Fared Poorly Early in the Pandemic
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In the coming days, House Republicans in Washington will hammer Andrew Cuomo, New York’s former governor, over his botched pandemic response, after issuing him a subpoena to appear.
That may be a political stunt, but it’s more than the Democrats who run New York State’s government have done to examine the deaths of approximately 23,000 New York City residents from Covid-19 in the first three months of the pandemic. According to an analysis by the Empire Center, a nonpartisan think tank, New York City had a higher population-adjusted Covid death rate than any state in 2020, and a rate that was 132 percent higher than the national death rate from the coronavirus.
But New York State has yet to conduct a thorough review of the actions by state, city and local officials that may have contributed to the deaths. An important bill under consideration in Albany would finally change this by creating a commission to study New York’s pandemic response. The legislation is sponsored by State Senator Julia Salazar of Brooklyn and Assemblywoman Jessica González-Rojas of Queens, whose districts were hard hit by the virus.
The commission they propose would have the authority to hold public hearings, review confidential state records and correspondence related to the pandemic, and, importantly, issue subpoenas. A review ordered by Gov. Kathy Hochul in 2022 is being conducted by a private firm, is delayed and has no such powers.
In the years since 2020, the disastrous handling of the pandemic by former President Donald Trump has been the dominant story on the issue. But New York’s early response to the virus is also worthy of scrutiny. Most widely known is a directive issued by the Cuomo administration in March 2020 ordering nursing homes to accept residents who had tested positive for the virus, leading the virus to spread even more rapidly among a vulnerable population. In 2022, a report from State Comptroller Thomas DiNapoli found that Cuomo’s administration had underreported deaths in nursing homes related to Covid-19 by more than 4,000 people. Cuomo also directed state health officials that March to give his family members special access to Covid-19 tests.
New York officials made other critical missteps. The Metropolitan Transportation Authority, which is run by the state, barred workers until early March from wearing face coverings. Former Mayor Bill de Blasio waited too long to close the city’s school system, as cities such as San Francisco had lower case counts but shuttered their schools earlier. On March 5, de Blasio discouraged the use of masks among the general public, language that was similar to guidance then from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and downplayed the threat posed by the virus.
New Yorkers deserve as full an accounting as possible of how and why these decisions were made.
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May 29, 2024, 5:48 p.m. ET
Michelle Cottle
Opinion Writer
Team Biden’s Urgent Pitch to Black Voters in Philadelphia
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At the rollout of the Black Voters for Biden-Harris effort in Philadelphia on Wednesday, Team Biden’s basic message — what it desperately needed to convey — was summed up by Vice President Kamala Harris near the end of her brief remarks: “Who sits in the White House matters. It matters!”
This may seem obvious. But as Democratic strategists and officials will tell you, a lack of urgency about, or even interest in, the outcome of this year’s presidential election — especially among younger Black voters — is one of the scariest threats the party is facing.
At this rare joint appearance, in a city where they desperately need to do well in November, both Harris and President Biden spotlighted numerous “promises made, promises kept” that they figured would be of particular interest to Black Americans.
Harris ticked through specifics, such as capping the price of insulin, forgiving billions in student loan debt, making it so medical debt doesn’t affect a person’s credit score and strengthening background checks for gun purchases.
Biden ran through even more wins — pardoning people incarcerated on charges of marijuana possession, investing in historically Black colleges, appointing the first Black woman to the Supreme Court — along with some promises about what he would do with a second term.
And both leaders brought up some of the darker moments of the Trump years, from Donald Trump’s efforts to kill Obamacare to his musings about injecting bleach as a way to cure Covid-19.
The president was not playing around. He asserted that, after Trump lost in 2020, “something snapped” in the guy, who is now “clearly unhinged.” Noting the former president’s vow to pardon the Jan. 6 rioters, Biden asked: “What do you think would have happened if Black Americans had stormed the Capitol?”
Wrapping things up, the president urged the crowd to go forth and spread the word about the urgency of this race. “Talk to your families,” he pleaded.
Biden and his team are well aware of how hard it is to break through to people who have decided to tune out an election. All of us had best hope they find a way.
May 29, 2024, 4:42 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
Is Trump Starting to Worry About a Conviction?
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Donald Trump dozed on Wednesday through a good chunk of the judge’s all-important instructions to the jury, rousing himself once to ask one of his attorneys for a bottle of Poland Spring. (His favorite drink, Diet co*ke, is not allowed in the courtroom.) After Justice Juan Merchan sent the jury to deliberate, Trump chatted with Don Jr. and Alina Habba, an incompetent lawyer from an earlier trial. Then he did a quick, lip-pursed intake of breath that indicated some anxiety.
In the hallway outside, he told reporters that “Mother Teresa could not beat the charges” because of the way the judge, whom he called “corrupt,” instructed the jury. He seemed to be hinting that he believes a conviction is likely.
In fact, Merchan’s hourlong charge to the jury was standard issue in New York State and incorporated unsurprising rulings that went back to pretrial motions in March. One difference is that he read the more complicated parts twice.
The judge sided with the defense by telling the jury that if it focuses on tax offenses, it must find that Trump “willfully” intended to commit unlawful acts. But if it finds that campaign finance violations are the underlying crime, he twice mentioned that corporate contributions are banned altogether and the maximum allowable individual donation is $2,700 — a lot less than the $130,000 in hush-money that Michael Cohen paid to Stormy Daniels with Trump’s approval.
Merchan essentially instructed the jury that it can think Cohen lied about many things but find him credible on other things. And he told the jurors, “You need not be unanimous on whether the defendant committed crimes personally, by acting in concert with another, or both.” Unanimity is required only for overall conviction on each of the 34 counts.
The state law on falsifying business records requires intent to commit other crimes, so the judge spent lots of time defining that term.
In the afternoon, after nearly five hours of deliberation, the jury sent notes to the judge asking to rehear at least some of the judge’s complex instructions, which is likely to happen on Thursday. Jurors would also like another look at testimony from five weeks ago by David Pecker, the former publisher of The National Enquirer, about one particular 2016 phone call with Trump (highlighted Tuesday by a prosecution lawyer, Joshua Steinglass, in his closing argument). And jurors want to hear again why Pecker backed out of the Karen McDougal deal and how Pecker and Cohen depicted the Trump Tower meeting in August of 2015 that prosecutors argue was the birth of the conspiracy.
Trump’s defense team also focused on that meeting, insisting that it was commonplace for candidates to “work with the media” to squelch sex stories, as Pecker said he did with Arnold Schwarzenegger and Rahm Emanuel. (It is not commonplace.)
Because the jurors are now practiced at poker faces, we aren’t learning which way they are moving, only that they are diligently examining the evidence.
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May 29, 2024, 3:36 p.m. ET
David Firestone
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
Nikki Haley’s Valentine to Civilian Death
It was a sweet little heart, the kind you might draw on a Valentine’s Day card. “America 💜 Israel Always,” the author wrote, above her handwritten signature: “Nikki Haley.” How lovely.
Except it wasn’t written on a greeting card. Haley drew the heart in purple ink on a 155-millimeter artillery shell, the kind that the Israeli Army has routinely loaded into howitzers and fired on Gaza in the hopes of eradicating Hamas but resulting in the mass deaths of civilians. Tens of thousands of these shells have rained down on Gaza since the Oct. 7 massacre, and when they explode they send countless metal fragments in every direction, with a casualty range of between 100 and 300 meters. A coalition of human rights groups say that this particular artillery weapon is so indiscriminate that its use in heavily populated areas like Gaza violates international humanitarian law.
But that wasn’t all that Haley wrote. Above the little heart was a message of savage revenge: “Finish them!”
— Team Nikki Haley (@NikkiHaleyHQ) May 28, 2024“Finish Them, America ♥️ Israel Always!”
Message from @NikkiHaley, written on an Israeli missile intended for Hamas. pic.twitter.com/DgPQYNvkWM
Haley, the former governor of South Carolina, made it clear on social media that both the inscription and the shells were intended for Hamas. But her scrawled fondness for bloodshed — with little apparent concern for whose blood will actually be shed — sends a more important message to American voters.
A huge number of progressive voters are furious at President Biden for not doing more to stop Israel’s assault on Gaza. And it’s true that many of those artillery shells were supplied by the United States. But if those voters think that the situation in Gaza will change if they sit out the election and allow Donald Trump and other Republicans to be elected, they don’t really understand what’s coming. Because it would be a lot worse.
Haley lost her bid to become the Republican nominee for president because she was seen as too moderate for a party that still prefers Trump’s recklessness. When it comes to issues like Israel, most of the party is further to the right than the author of “Finish them!”
Biden should have done much more to use American leverage on Israel to reduce the civilian toll in Gaza. But Republicans pound him every day for withholding an arms shipment to Israel to prevent it from being used to attack Rafah, in the Gaza Strip. He has never signed his name on a lethal explosive device and expressed a hope that it would kill. There’s a big difference.
May 29, 2024, 12:50 p.m. ET
Neel V. Patel
Opinion Staff Editor
The Stalled Pandemic Accords Offer an Opportunity for Vaccine Equity
For more than two years, the member states of the World Health Organization have been meeting to iron out an agreement on how to prevent and respond to future pandemics. The text of the accord was supposed to be finalized last Friday, for nations to formally approve it this week during the World Health Assembly in Geneva.
That deadline came and went, and negotiations on the accord have stalled because of disagreements about global vaccine availability. Countries cannot agree on whether to prioritize making new treatments more available to poor countries or certain intellectual property rights of vaccine manufacturers in wealthy countries instead. There’s a stark division between the haves and the have-nots of the global stage.
On the surface, the breakdown in talks is a familiar story of international diplomacy. But it also presents an opportunity. Wealthier nations could use this moment to reverse course on the agreement’s more rushed, toothless measures and turn it into something consequential and lifesaving.
Not even three years ago, richer countries like the United States bought enough Covid-19 vaccine stock for twice its population; Canada, for five times its population. Poorer countries came last, relying on donated vaccines and Covax, the global vaccine-sharing scheme. Vaccine hoarding among wealthy nations probably led to more than a million deaths in 2021 alone. Many countries on the African continent suffered an especially slow rollout, causing their economic recoveries to lag those of the rest of the world.
Besides the moral argument that developed countries should do more to help developing ones, there’s a practical argument to make: Pandemics don’t care about national borders. If an infectious disease is allowed to thrive in one region, travel and migration ensure that it will inevitably threaten surrounding regions as well, putting the globe at further risk.
If our leaders want to avoid a fate similar to 2020, they need to guarantee that essential vaccines and treatments are available wherever they are needed.
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May 28, 2024, 10:15 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
Prosecutors Leave the Jury With a Mountain of Evidence Against Trump
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Humor helps, especially if you are delivering a five-hour speech.
Joshua Steinglass of the prosecution team knew he was taking a risk by “trading brevity for thoroughness” in his closing argument in the Donald Trump felony trial in Manhattan; besides being exhausted after an 11-hour day, jurors might conclude “the people” (the formal name for the prosecution) were not sure enough about their case to avoid piling on.
So Steinglass copped to “beating a dead horse” and helped neutralize the defense’s best point with a little playacting.
In the morning Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche, again called Michael Cohen a liar for claiming he phoned Trump on Oct. 24, 2016, to talk to him about hush money for Stormy Daniels when text chains showed he wanted to ask Keith Schiller, Trump’s bodyguard, about a 14-year-old prank caller who was harassing him.
To explain that Cohen could have talked about both, Steinglass assumed Cohen’s voice and cradled an imaginary phone:
“Hey, Keith, how’s it going?” he asked, imitating Cohen. “Hey, is the boss near you? Can you pass him the phone for a minute?”
Then Steinglass turned self-effacing — “Sorry if I didn’t do a good job” — before proving that was only one of about 20 times in October alone that Cohen updated Trump about his progress in hushing Daniels, thereby helping to save Trump’s sagging campaign.
Steinglass went to great lengths to show that his case did not rely entirely on Cohen. Steinglass returned again and again to the first-week testimony of David Pecker, a former publisher of The National Enquirer, who implicated Trump directly in a conspiracy to interfere in the 2016 election. And Steinglass assembled, disassembled and all but cleaned what he called “the smoking gun” — the handwritten notes detailing Trump’s scheme to disguise his reimbursem*nt of Cohen as legal expenses.
The long faces in the Trump guest section reflected the sense in the courtroom that Trump’s story that the $420,000 he paid to Cohen was really a legal retainer will not fly. Steinglass showed that Trump himself admitted in court documents and other records that it was a reimbursem*nt.
Steinglass also proved that “Michael Cohen is no rogue actor” and that in 2018 Trump, Rudy Giuliani and the lawyer Robert Costello treated Cohen like a mob rat as part of the cover-up. This was La Casa Blanca meets La Cosa Nostra.
The defense has a better shot at creating doubt that Trump intended to commit a crime, but even here, Steinglass had a heap of evidence to shovel in the jury’s direction.
The judge allowed most of it until the prosecutor overreached by urging jurors not to let Trump get away with shooting someone on Fifth Avenue, evoking his famous line about what he could get away with.
Just after the objection to that was sustained by the judge, Steinglass finally stood down, and we all dragged off to bed. The case finally goes to the jury on Wednesday.
May 28, 2024, 6:17 p.m. ET
Farah Stockman
Editorial Board Member
Netanyahu Is Sorry/Not Sorry for the Killings in Rafah
I often tell my 8-year-old daughter that saying “sorry” doesn’t cut it if she continues the behavior that she’s apologizing for. It’s a basic lesson that kids learn. World leaders need to learn it, too, apparently.
After facing international blowback for the Israeli military strike that burned dozens of people alive in their tents in a refugee camp in Rafah on Sunday, the Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the civilian deaths a “tragic mishap.” He also said that his government was making “utmost efforts not to harm innocent civilians” and that mistakes would be investigated.
It reminded me of the awfully similar statement he gave in April, after the Israeli military attacked a convoy of World Central Kitchen staff members who had just unloaded food aid at a warehouse in Gaza. Those deadly airstrikes took place even though the World Central Kitchen workers drove in a clearly marked convoy and had meticulously coordinated their movements with the Israeli military. After an international outcry, Netanyahu issued a statement calling the deaths “a tragic accident” that “happens in war.”
“We are conducting a thorough inquiry and are in contact with the governments,” the statement read. “We will do everything to prevent a recurrence.”
But by that time, the sheer number of attacks on aid workers and on Gaza civilians seeking aid raised real questions about whether we have been witnessing intentional killings or “reckless incompetence,” as Christopher Lockyear, an official with Doctors Without Borders, noted.
On the side of reckless incompetence, there was that time in December when Israeli soldiers fired on three unarmed men waving white flags — only to discover that they were Israeli hostages who had managed to break free of their captors. At that time, Netanyahu’s office released a statement that called the killings “an unbearable tragedy.” The statement pledged to “learn the lessons” to ensure that it wouldn’t happen again.
How many apologies will be issued and investigations pledged before this God-forsaken war ends? Netanyahu’s list of international apologies keeps growing. But the attacks on Rafah — and the unspeakable suffering of Palestinian civilians — continue.
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May 28, 2024, 3:49 p.m. ET
Frank Bruni
Contributing Opinion Writer
Pope Francis’ Remarkable Act of Contrition
I’m not accustomed to apologies from popes. Aren’t they infallible?
Yes, I know, that term doesn’t have practical, colloquial application — it doesn’t mean that they never bungle math problems or lose track of where they hung their robes. But the general notion or mythology of infallibility reflects a kind of papal authority and aloofness that discourages any real-time revisiting of false steps, any open regret for errant syllables.
“I’m sorry” belongs to the political realm (or at least did until Donald Trump came along). Popes inhabit a higher plane.
So a Vatican statement on Tuesday that Pope Francis “extends his apologies” to anyone offended by something he recently said is a big and surprising deal. It’s all the bigger and more surprising because Francis was apologizing for insulting gay people, and for most of my 59 years, Roman Catholic leaders were more concerned with condemning or converting or chiding or hiding us than with making sure our feelings weren’t hurt.
In a closed-door meeting with Italian bishops last week, Francis reportedly responded to a question about whether openly gay men should be admitted to seminaries by saying that those training grounds for future priests were already too crowded with “frociaggine,” a crude Italian slur.
I’m disappointed that he used it, contradicting past statements of his that urged respect for gay people and his decision last year to allow priests to bless same-sex couples. I don’t know whether he was disclosing his own lingering bigotry or trying to curry favor with the conservatives around him.
But I know this: Another pope in a prior era wouldn’t have been so quick to do damage control. Another pope in a prior era mightn’t have felt that any damage was done.
And even Francis could have decided simply to ignore the media attention to his offensive language until it died down. Popes are expected to worry not about the news cycle but about eternity. What’s more, he would have pleased some of his sternest critics by moving on. They complain that he has done too much outreach to L.G.B.T.Q. people and been too indulgent of them.
His apology speaks to the kind of pope that he, at his best, has been: one who means to heal wounds. But it says even more about an altered church in a changed world, where gay people still endure taunts aplenty but also encounter unexpected moments of grace.
May 28, 2024, 3:18 p.m. ET
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
The Trump Team’s Inept Closing Argument Blew Up
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If Donald Trump becomes a felon in the coming days, he and his defense team can partly blame themselves. Throughout the trial they offered implausible arguments against the prosecution’s case, and on Tuesday Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche, slipped an I.E.D. into the end of his closing argument that blew up in his face.
“You cannot send someone to prison based on the words of Michael Cohen,” Blanche said, in a bid to make jurors think it was their role to decide if a president should be incarcerated.
“Saying that was outrageous,” Justice Juan Merchan told Blanche after the jury left for lunch. Mentioning sentencing to gain sympathy with jurors who have no say in punishment “is simply not allowed,” he said, and that it was “hard for me to imagine how that was not intentional.”
The defense got more than a tongue-lashing. After lunch, Merchan turned to the jurors and told them why they had to ignore this sneaky move — not a good final look for the defense.
In his three-hour closing argument, Blanche gave jurors a few places to explore reasonable doubt but mostly swung wildly and set up the prosecution for better arguments in the afternoon.
My favorite dumb moment: “Guess who else you did not hear from in this trial?” Blanche asked. “Don and Eric. Is there some allegation that they are part of a conspiracy?” No, counselor, but the jury will likely wonder why the defense called Robert Costello, who was destroyed on cross-examination, instead of Trump’s own sons.
Blanche huffed and puffed to discredit the two possible “smoking guns” offered by the prosecution. The first consists of the scrawled notes of Allen Weisselberg, former financial head of the Trump Organization, breaking down the $420,000 that Trump paid Cohen in 2017. Weisselberg wrote “gross it up” in reference to doubling the $130,000 in hush money for tax purposes. That “is a lie,” Blanche said, using a word he would employ more than 30 times in his closing argument, to diminishing effect.
But it wasn’t a lie. The former controller of the Trump Organization had confirmed on the stand that the numbers and “gross it up” were in Weisselberg’s own hand.
The other smoking gun involves a call Cohen taped, during which Trump said “150” in reference to the hush money for Karen McDougal. While trying and — to my mind — failing to establish that Cohen’s phone was tampered with, Blanche played the tape and challenged the idea that Trump even said “150” and that Trump saying “cash” on the tape had anything to do with hush money. Jurors will presumably listen to the tape and decide for themselves. Believe me, you can hear “150.”
Blanche ended his closing argument by telling jurors that if they focus on the evidence, “this is a very easy and quick not-guilty.” Insulting the jury’s intelligence? Not smart.
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May 28, 2024, 2:30 p.m. ET
Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
The Trump Team’s Big Lie About the ‘Access Hollywood’ Tape
In his closing argument on Tuesday, Donald Trump’s lead defense attorney, Todd Blanche, repeatedly tried to sell a revisionist history of the infamous “Access Hollywood” tape, in which Trump was recorded boasting of his penchant for sexual assault. In the felony case against Trump, the “Access Hollywood” tape is important because, in the story the prosecution is telling, it’s the reason Trump was desperate to quash Stormy Daniels’s story.
“The government wants you to believe that the release of that tape from 2005 was so catastrophic to that campaign that it provided a motive for President Trump to do something criminal,” he said.
Attempting to undercut that narrative, Blanche insisted that it really wasn’t that big of a deal. It caused, he said, a “couple days of frustration and consternation, but that happens all the time during campaigns.” He added: “The ‘Access Hollywood’ tape is being set up in this trial to be something that it is not.”
This is insultingly and obviously untrue. As the longtime Trump aide Hope Hicks testified about that moment in the 2016 campaign, “I think there was consensus among us all that the tape was damaging, and this was a crisis.”
We now know that a critical mass of voters doesn’t care about Trump’s misogyny and predation, but we didn’t know that then. One job of the prosecution, which begins closing arguments Tuesday afternoon, will be to take the jury back to a more innocent time before Trump’s election, when people still imagined there were Republicans with a capacity for shame.
May 28, 2024, 11:22 a.m. ET
Michelle Goldberg
Opinion Columnist
There’s Nothing Simple or Obvious About Trump’s Trial Defense
During closing arguments in Donald Trump’s felony trial on Tuesday morning, his lawyer Todd Blanche said, “There’s a reason why, in life, usually the simplest answer is the right one.”
I found this an odd approach, because to believe his theory of the case requires accepting several improbable things. First, although it’s not legally germane, Blanche reiterated, perhaps at the insistence of his client, that Trump “has unequivocally and repeatedly denied” any encounter with Stormy Daniels. And rather than simply arguing that Trump didn’t know about the scheme to reimburse Michael Cohen for the payoff to Daniels, he appears to be arguing that no such scheme existed.
Cohen, said Blanche, had a verbal retainer agreement in 2017 to serve as Trump’s personal attorney, and that’s why he was paid $420,000. If that’s the case, it’s hard to imagine why Cohen pleaded guilty and served prison time in connection with the hush-money payment.
Blanche’s argument has been internally inconsistent. First, he insisted that Trump, being busy as president, didn’t always look at the checks he signed. Then, trying to discredit the idea that Trump would reimburse Cohen $420,000 for a $130,000 payment — which Cohen has claimed was grossed up to include taxes and a bonus — Blanche pointed to “all the evidence you heard about how closely President Trump watches his finances.”
During a long digression about the National Enquirer’s practice of “catching and killing” stories, he insisted that there had never been a “catch and kill” plot involving the Playboy model Karen McDougal, implying, I think, that her deal with the publication was on the level. “She wanted to be on the cover of magazines, she wanted to write articles,” Blanche, said and that’s what she did.
Obviously, I have no idea what the jury is thinking. But given the implausibility of the narrative that Trump’s defense is spinning, it just seems weird that Blanche is invoking Occam’s razor.
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May 28, 2024, 5:04 a.m. ET
Patrick Healy
Deputy Opinion Editor
How Quickly Would a Trump Verdict Sink In for Voters?
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Each week on The Point, we kick things off with a tipsheet on the latest in the presidential campaign. Here’s what we’re looking at this week:
The most consequential week of Donald Trump’s criminal trial in Manhattan has arrived: The jury could begin deliberating in the next two days. We’ll also get insight shortly about Justice Juan Merchan’s instructions to jurors — basically, a clearer picture of what options they have for a verdict. As for the political impact of any decision by the jury, I think that will take weeks to become clear as Americans learn and absorb the news — as suburban women outside Philadelphia, for instance, weigh the verdict and their feelings about Trump against their views on the economy or abortion rights.
It takes time for voters to process big news, and opinions can shift with time. Part of why James Comey’s Oct. 28, 2016, letter about Hillary Clinton’s classified email was so politically damaging to her was that it came as many people were casting early votes and others were making up their minds ahead of the Nov. 8 election. The Trump verdict will be historic, but the election is five months away. How voters feel about the verdict could surely change in that time.
We’ll also start getting a clearer picture this week about whether Robert F. Kennedy Jr. will qualify to join the June 27 debate between President Biden and Trump. There’s a good explainer here boiling down how Kennedy needs to make the November ballot in a bunch more states first to make the cut for the debate. Given the various rules, I don’t think there’s much time for him to make the June debate; he may have a better shot at the September debate. Either way, I can’t see the Biden and Trump campaigns eager to have him onstage — they don’t want anything distracting voters from seeing the flaws and fumbles in the other guy, and R.F.K. Jr. will be one big distraction.
I’m preoccupied with the Biden-Trump fight for Pennsylvania and whether Biden can borrow from the winning political playbook of Gov. Josh Shapiro, who won a 15-point landslide in 2022. Biden is trailing Trump by a couple of points in the state polling average. As in other swing states, Biden needs to do far better than he’s currently polling with young voters and nonwhite voters, and with voters in Philadelphia and its suburbs. So keep an eye on Biden’s campaign trip to Philadelphia on Wednesday and his pitch for why Americans should want another four years of his presidency.
Trips like Biden’s Philadelphia event are planned weeks in advance, but as it happens, this one will probably happen just as the Trump jury is deliberating on Trump’s fate (or returning with a verdict). The split screen of Biden heralding Ben Franklin and Trump attacking jurors is a news cycle the Biden campaign badly wants.
May 24, 2024, 2:10 p.m. ET
Bret Stephens
Opinion Columnist
What’s Spanish for ‘Chutzpah’?
This week’s announcements by the governments of Ireland, Norway and Spain that they will recognize a Palestinian state are drawing predictable reactions from predictable quarters. Some see them as useful rebukes to Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s war strategy in Gaza that will further isolate Israel. Others, including me, view them as f*ckless gestures that reward Hamas’s terrorism.
That’s a column for another day. For now, it’s enough to note the Spanish government’s sheer nerve.
Though Spanish public opinion overwhelmingly supports swift recognition of Palestinian statehood, it’s another story when it comes to Spain’s own independence movements. In 2017 the regional government of Catalonia held a referendum, declared illegal by Spain’s Constitutional Court, on the question of Catalan independence. Though turnout was low — in part because Spanish police forcibly blocked voting — the Catalan government said nearly 90 percent of voters favored independence.
The central government in Madrid responded by dismissing the Catalan government, imposing direct rule. Two years later, under the current left-wing government of Pedro Sánchez, Spain sentenced nine Catalan independence leaders to prison on charges of sedition, though they were later pardoned. This year the lower house of the Spanish Parliament voted to grant amnesty to those involved in the 2017 campaign as part of a deal to prop up Sánchez’s government, despite a Senate veto. Seventy percent of the Spanish public opposes the amnesty.
Catalans aren’t the only ethnic minority in Spain that has sought independence, only to encounter violent suppression. In the 1980s the Spanish Interior Ministry under a socialist government responded to the long-running Basque separatist movement with state-sponsored death squads, notoriously responsible for a string of kidnappings, tortures and assassinations. The Spanish government called the separatists terrorists — as indeed some were — though their tactics look tame compared with Hamas’s. By the time the conflict ended in 2011, it had claimed more than 1,000 lives.
Spain possesses two cities on the African continent, Ceuta and Melilla, both of which are claimed by Morocco and have been stormed by African migrants seeking entry into the European Union. They are protected by extensive border fences and fortifications strikingly reminiscent of Israel’s breached border fence with Gaza.
There are many other independence movements throughout Europe, from Scotland to Flanders to Corsica and the Balkans. Many of these movements tend to have affinities with Palestinians, for reasons that are obvious. More difficult to explain are governments that suppress independence seekers at home while applauding those abroad. Some might call it deflection. To others, it looks like hypocrisy.
