Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
For seven months, President Biden has called on Israel to show more restraint in its war in Gaza and to allow more aid into the territory, and he has been mostly ignored. Now, belatedly and reluctantly, he is doing what presidents do all over the world: He is applying leverage.
Biden has delayed the transfer of 3,500 bombs to Israel and has warned that an all-out Israeli invasion of the packed southern Gaza city of Rafah would lead to further suspensions in the weapons flow. It was the only way to get the attention of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli leadership.
Republicans have denounced Biden’s move as weakening Israel and impeding its war effort, but the United States is continuing to provide defensive weaponry to Israel. The new moves affect only munitions that would be used to pulverize Rafah and cause thousands more civilian casualties there.
President Ronald Reagan likewise delayed arms shipments after Israel’s reckless invasion of Lebanon in 1982 led to enormous civilian casualties.
As I see it, Biden had to act, for both humanitarian and practical reasons. United Nations agencies have been warning that an invasion of Rafah would result in a catastrophic civilian toll. The United States would be complicit in that blood bath, through the use of American munitions and American backing for the war.
I only wish that Biden had taken such actions months ago. That might have saved the lives of so many Gazan children and prevented people from starving to death as aid flows were constricted.
It’s not clear how Israel will respond. Netanyahu may defy Biden, seeing an invasion of Rafah as his path to staying in power by retaining support from extremist parties in his country.
While Biden’s focus is on preventing an all-out invasion of Rafah, I hope he will also use this leverage to press Israel to allow more aid into the territory. Cindy McCain, the head of the World Food Program, warns that there is already full-blown famine in parts of Gaza, even as trucks with food are lined up outside the Israel-controlled entry points on the border. This is unconscionable.
David Firestone
Deputy Editor, the Editorial Board
It always feels a little too simplistic to suggest that federal judges deliberately act in the interest of the president who nominated them. Most of them, in fact, do their jobs with integrity and independence. But it’s getting hard to reach any other conclusion about Judge Aileen Cannon in Florida, who on Tuesday essentially blew up the classified-documents trial of the man who gave her the job.
Cannon said the trial of Donald Trump on charges of illegal possession of classified documents would not start on May 20, as she had announced. Then she refused to set an alternative date, delaying the case indefinitely and most likely past the election. The reason she gave was so ludicrous that it gave the game away: There were just too many unresolved legal issues to settle before the case could proceed. Of course, those issues are unresolved because she has somehow failed to resolve them.
After all the favorable rulings she has already provided to Trump, the delay on Tuesday was the final straw for many legal analysts. Several openly accused Cannon of ulterior motives to favor Trump and even advance her career if he wins in November.
“Judge Cannon seems desperate to avoid trying this case,” wrote Joyce Vance, a professor at the University of Alabama law school. “This isn’t justice.”
“Is it too cynical to believe that Judge Cannon timed the announcement of the postponement of a Trump classified documents trial to take away from the salacious sex details from Stormy Daniels’s testimony today?” asked Rick Hasen, a professor at the U.C.L.A. law school.
“After the election, if Trump wins, Jack Smith gets fired, the case gets dismissed, and Judge Cannon is ready for SCOTUS,” wrote Richard Painter, the White House ethics lawyer under George W. Bush, who teaches at the University of Minnesota law school.
This case has long been considered the most straightforward of the four prosecutions of Trump. He clearly took classified documents from the White House to Mar-a-Lago, as the government has demonstrated in great detail, and he then refused to give them back when the government demanded them. Trump’s team, aware of his vulnerability, has tried to argue that there are enormous complexities in the classification of the documents that require months of hearings.
A competent, nonpartisan judge — one like Justice Juan Merchan in the New York hush-money case — would have thrown out that kind of nonsense. A novice political acolyte like Cannon uses it like a wrecking ball.
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Gail Collins
Opinion Columnist
It’s taken a while for people to start comparing Donald Trump to Grover Cleveland. Cleveland, of course, was the only man to achieve Trump’s current political goal — win the presidency, lose the re-election and then win it again the third time around.
Both championed tax cuts and fiscal restraint, although only Cleveland actually tried to balance the budget. And both had sex scandals — which we’re going to compare now just because it’s sort of fun.
Cleveland, unlike Trump, was unmarried. He’d never been divorced. And the closest thing he had to a sex scandal before his presidential nomination was a bunch of stories about jolly drinking parties he’d had with his male friends at neighborhood beer gardens.
Trump had — well really there’s no point in discussing that, is there? This week in court we’ve been dragged through his entanglement with Stormy Daniels (“He said, ‘Oh it was great. Let’s get together again, honeybunch,’” Daniels testified on Tuesday. “I just wanted to leave.”), which is only interesting now that we’re arguing about whether he illegally disguised the money he used to silence her as legal expenses.
Cleveland, a Democrat, was nominated for president as a virtuous bachelor. Then, a story arose about a possible son. There was definitely a child, born to an unmarried woman with a drinking problem. Cleveland looked after the child and eventually arranged to have him adopted.
It took some of the Republican tabloids of the era about two minutes to figure out a spin. “Ma, Ma, where’s my pa?” they roared. (To which the Democrats later replied, “gone to the White House, Ha, Ha, Ha!”)
Cleveland told his advisers to “tell the truth” in the face of the scandal. This approach succeeded, possibly because many people at the time assumed the child in question was actually the secret offspring of Cleveland’s longtime friend, Oscar Folsom, who had died not long before in a carriage accident. His daughter, a beautiful college student named Frances, was the secret love of Cleveland’s life.
Jump to the end here: The voters decided they were more interested in Cleveland’s super-honesty in public matters than secret offspring. He married Frances in the nation’s first White House wedding. And they lived devotedly until Grover died.
Not going to make you try to compare this with the Trump saga because really, I know you’ve already gotten there. Just a story about sex and the White House that might make you feel a little less depressed about what you’re reading today.
Michelle Cottle
Opinion Writer
Update: On Wednesday, Greene brought up a motion to remove Johnson from the speaker’s job. Republicans and Democrats joined together to save his position, and the motion was defeated on a 359-to-43 vote.
Let’s just come right out and say what pretty much everyone keeping an eye on Marjorie Taylor Greene’s effort to blackmail House Speaker Mike Johnson is now thinking: Way to keep screwing this up, congresswoman!
After huddling for several hours in two days of meetings with Greene this week to discuss her elongated crusade to oust him, the speaker emerged unscathed Tuesday afternoon, apparently without having committed to any ridiculous concessions. And really, why would he?
There was no way Johnson was going to get booted by Greene and her wee band of bomb throwers over the Ukraine funding bill. A majority of House Republicans are tired of her antics, and the Democrats were prepared to step in and save the speaker in the unlikely event he found himself in real danger from the wingers.
Not that there was a snowball’s chance of that happening once the report started circulating that Donald Trump had basically told his Georgia minion to stand down. The MAGA king does not respond well to displays of disobedience.
And so Greene and her wingman, Thomas Massie, were reduced to gas-bagging on the steps of the Capitol after their meetings with Johnson, insisting that this showdown isn’t over. Really! They mean it! Massie boldly proclaimed that the rebel forces will be watching to make sure the speaker makes “hourly” progress on the sprinkling of demands put before him.
I could bore you with what some of those demands are, but why bother? If Johnson is feeling indulgent, he can throw the rebels a bone or two. Assuming it won’t cause him too much trouble. But it’s not as if they have the upper hand — or much of any hand, really. At this point, they are less like blackmailers threatening a victim than like exhausted preschoolers begging for attention from their teacher.
Indeed, what Greene & Co. seem to need more than anything is a timeout, followed by a nice, long nap.
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Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
So far, Susan Necheles’s cross-examination of Stormy Daniels feels a little star-crossed, and not just because the jury in the Trump hush-money trial surely noticed when the lawyer accidentally called the CNN legal analyst Jeffrey Toobin “Jeff Daniels” and twice referred to Gina Rodriguez, Stormy Daniels’s talent agent, as “Geena Davis.”
Strangely enough, Daniels stood up better under cross than her former lawyer Keith Davidson did last week. In certain ways, she is doing even better on cross-examination — which continues on Thursday — than she did on direct examination by the prosecution in the morning.
On direct, Daniels was admonished by the judge for oversharing, and she might have sold her narrative so hard that it came across as canned. On cross, she didn’t fall into Necheles’s attempted traps or let the harsh questions intimidate her. With her hardscrabble background still in the minds of jurors, Daniels’s defiance on the stand seemed more spunky than defensive.
And Necheles went down some useless byways. She spent too much time trying to tarnish Daniels for not paying Donald Trump the legal fees a court awarded him in a frivolous civil suit that her lawyer at the time, the now imprisoned Michael Avenatti, persuaded her to bring against him.
When Necheles pressed Daniels on whether she really went to exercise class after a “supposed” encounter with a threatening man in a parking lot, it felt like a reach. Same for when she quibbled with Daniels’s estimate of the length of an interview.
Necheles was more successful in pushing Daniels on her changing stories about whether she and Trump had sex. But Daniels had explanations — some more convincing than others — for the zigzagging in interviews and statements by her lawyers.
Necheles practically shouted, “You were looking to extort money from President Trump, right?”
“False!” Daniels said with a vigor that obscured whatever her true motive might have been.
Later, Necheles charged, “Your whole story is made up, isn’t it?”
“No, none of it is made up,” Daniels replied.
Jurors probably won’t buy “none of it,” but I don’t see them rejecting Daniels’s whole story. Nonetheless, when she testifies on Thursday, she is likely to confirm that she had no connection to the falsification of business records at the heart of the case.
And that renders Stormy Daniels in the witness box little more than a circus sideshow.
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
The court transcript and eyewitness accounts cannot do justice to the entertainment value of Stormy Daniels’s testimony in Donald Trump’s felony trial on Tuesday.
But those of us inside the courtroom are uncertain of her impact on the case, especially since we haven’t yet heard all of what will surely be a long and blistering cross-examination.
The poised, smart and sassy black-clad witness — blond in front and brunette in back, with a big tattoo on her right lower arm — told a story that is familiar to tabloid aficionados but became much more powerful in court.
She spared no juicy details, from exactly and convincingly explaining how she met Trump at a 2006 golf tournament in Lake Tahoe; how he met her in his hotel suite clad in pajamas and she teased him about thinking he was Hugh Hefner; how Trump, sprawled in his boxer shorts on the bed, surprised her when she came out of the bathroom; how they had brief sex, though her mention of “the missionary position” was stricken from the record; how Trump invited her to other events with the lure of a possible appearance on “Celebrity Apprentice” before, more recently, describing her as “Horseface” and a “sleaze bag.”
Trump has denied everything except meeting Daniels briefly in Lake Tahoe. After hearing her testimony, it’s hard to imagine any jurors believing him.
But that hardly means they bought all of Daniels’s testimony. The least credible part came when she claimed that she was not in it for the money, but for “safety” because she had been confronted by a menacing man in a Las Vegas parking lot in the presence of her daughter.
My sense is jurors intuited that she would feel safer if she either signed the nondisclosure agreement, protecting her from threats, or went public with the sexual encounter, which would mean that if something bad happened to her, everyone would know why.
I asked several women in the courtroom how they thought women on the jury would react and opinion was divided, with some saying Daniels came across as self-regarding and untrustworthy. What we all agree on is that juries typically respond to real and assumed messages from the judge.
It helped the defense that Justice Juan Merchan sustained almost all objections to details in her testimony and, when the defense lawyers failed to object, did it for them.
Before the jury was summoned back from its lunch break, the defense made a motion for a mistrial, saying the details were too prejudicial.
But Merchan rejected the motion. He said “some things should probably have been better left unsaid,” but in fairness to the prosecution, “the witness was a little hard to control.” When he added, “I was surprised that there were not more objections,” I imagined steam coming out of Trump’s ears.
Even before cross-examination, it was clear Daniels had a lot of questions to answer about how she has exploited her time in the spotlight.
But my guess is that jurors will eventually conclude her testimony was a fun but fundamentally irrelevant part of this trial.
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Jessica Bennett
Contributing Opinion Editor
He promised her dinner … but they didn’t have dinner. He told her she reminded him of his daughter … then stripped down to his boxers and a T-shirt while she was in the bathroom. He said he could help her career with a spot on his TV show … then scolded her, “I thought you were serious,” when she tried to leave.
To be clear, Stormy Daniels has never accused Donald Trump of anything but a payoff. She has maintained that the sex she says they had in his Lake Tahoe hotel suite in 2006 was consensual, albeit unenjoyable. But as I sat in the packed overflow room in the criminal courthouse where Trump is being tried and listened to Daniels testify about the sexual encounter she has often joked about, the whole thing sounded a lot darker, and murkier, than it had before.
Daniels took the stand on Tuesday and spoke confidently. She gestured with her hands, at times joking, and at other times she spoke so quickly that the judge had to ask her to slow down. But despite an agreement by the prosecution to not present “salacious” details about the sexual encounter itself, things took a bleak turn when Daniels described what came immediately before and after it.
Trump was not threatening during the sexual encounter, she testified, though he was standing between her and the door. She did not say no to sex with him, but she also didn’t consent to him not using a condom. She kept in contact with him after, she said — even going to another hotel room with him another time — because she wanted to expand her career, and he was dangling an opportunity to appear on “The Apprentice.”
And yet at times, the words Daniels used to describe the encounter with Trump were reminiscent of so many of the other stories of women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual assault: She said she “blacked out,” then lay naked, staring up at the ceiling. She “felt like the room spun in slow motion,” and that the blood left her hands and feet. When it was over, she said, she fumbled with her shoes — gold strappy heels she had trouble fastening because her hands were shaking so hard.
Ultimately she blamed herself: “I just thought, ‘Oh my God, what did I misread to get here?’”
Jesse Wegman
Editorial Board Member
As a purely legal matter, Donald Trump’s hush-money/election interference trial is not about the sex, but a single sexual encounter is at the heart of it. The prosecution made an important decision on Tuesday to highlight that in the most graphic way for the jury.
The district attorney’s team called Stormy Daniels, the porn star at the center of this whole imbroglio, to the witness stand to describe the tryst she said she had with Trump in 2006. He denies that happened, but the case is about whether he falsified records to pay her $130,000 to deny it as well.
Daniels has no incriminating bank statements or other business records to offer in support of the key charges against Trump, but in describing her hardscrabble upbringing and detailing a hotel-room sexual encounter with Trump, she has been without doubt the most interesting and engaging witness yet to appear before the jury. Her role appears to be to convince the jury that the sex took place, that it was “traumatizing,” and that Trump by implication is a liar, willing to go to great — and illegal — lengths to hide the encounter from the public.
At the same time, having Daniels testify presents real risks to the prosecution. She has been telling her Trump story for more than a decade now, and it’s evolved, which opens the door for defense lawyers to challenge her memory or, worse, her honesty.
As her testimony continued through the morning, in fact, it grew more contentious. Justice Juan Merchan became increasingly impatient with the prosecutors, sustaining numerous objections from Trump’s lawyers and admonishing Daniels to limit her description of the sexual encounter itself. “Just answer the questions,” he said to her. His impatience might rub off on the jury.
This is a common problem for those who prosecute crimes, which are generally not committed by people with redoubtable morals. That character flaw can extend to the people they surround themselves with, some of whom (like Michael Cohen) may be convicted criminals themselves, even as they are needed to deliver the most damning evidence against the defendant.
It’s hard to know how the jury will process Daniels’s testimony, but at least she managed something few others have — humiliating Trump to his face. “Are you always this rude?” she recalled asking him after dinner at his hotel room. “Like, you don’t even know how to have a conversation.”
A better summary of the last eight years would be hard to find.
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Nicholas Kristof
Opinion Columnist
Israeli forces have entered Rafah, near the Egyptian border of the Gaza Strip, but we don’t yet fully understand whether this is the beginning of a full-scale ground invasion of the city or something more modest. What we do know is that the flow of desperately needed food aid into a territory that is already starving is severely impeded.
The World Food Program warns that there is already a “full-blown famine” in northern Gaza, and children have already died of malnutrition. It’s unconscionable that children should be starving as trucks full of food line up outside the border, waiting to enter. Israel’s latest move aggravates the crisis.
The Israel Defense Forces seized the Rafah border crossing on Tuesday, halting the transfer of aid through that crossing from Egypt. And another crucial crossing, Kerem Shalom, was closed after a Hamas attack on Sunday killed four soldiers in the area. There are other ways assistance could enter Gaza, but U.N. agencies warned that the closures of these two crucial crossings risk worsening the starvation.
Israel has the right to pursue Hamas fighters who attacked Israeli civilians in a brutal attack on Oct. 7 and to recover its hostages still kept in Gaza. But Israel does not have the right to starve civilians.
The United States, along with Israel and Hamas, bears a measure of responsibility for the crisis. It is the United States that has continued to provide the weapons to prosecute the war and that has provided the diplomatic protection for Israel at the United Nations. The Biden administration is providing both food aid to Gazans and the bombs that fall on them.
Israel’s actions also amount to a challenge to the Biden administration, which this week faces a deadline to announce whether it will enforce a law that restricts transfers of arms to countries that block American humanitarian aid. J Street, a liberal advocacy organization, says that more than half the Democratic members of the House and Senate have called for enforcing that law.
When President Biden has applied leverage — by raising the possibility of cutting off the flow of offensive arms — Israel has announced measures to allow more food into Gaza. A central question this week is whether Biden will use his leverage to prevent the starvation in which the United States is complicit.
Serge Schmemann
Editorial Board Member
The Israeli government’s decision to kick Al Jazeera out of Israel says more about the government than the TV network. The Arabic programming on Al Jazeera may often be tendentious and anti-Israeli, but shutting it down further erodes Israel’s proud image as a democracy in a neighborhood populated largely by authoritarian or hereditary rulers. And it may well be counterproductive.
Silencing a news outlet, however divisive or hostile it may be, is the trademark of strongman rule. It is a way of declaring that information is the monopoly of the ruler, and it’s a favored populist tactic for channeling public anger at moments of national crisis. Al Jazeera has often come under attack from Arab countries, including Egypt and the Gulf States, whose leaders bridled at its reporting — especially during the Arab Spring, when it gave extensive coverage to opposition movements.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu of Israel accused Al Jazeera of being a security threat by serving as a megaphone for Hamas. But if the network was hostile to the messaging of Netanyahu’s right-wing government, it was also one of the very few international networks reporting from within the Gaza Strip, from which foreign media has been barred by Israel. One of the many Palestinian journalists killed in Gaza was Hamza al-Dahdouh, a son of Al Jazeera’s Gaza bureau chief, Wael al-Dahdouh, who earlier in the war lost another son and his wife, daughter and infant grandson.
Founded in 1996, Al Jazeera is the most popular source of news for much of the Arab world. (A separate English-language service was founded in 2003.) From a purely tactical point of view, having an Al Jazeera bureau in Israel gave Israelis a better shot at getting their message to the Arab world than shutting it down. Over the years, many Israeli officials have been interviewed on Al Jazeera, and the Israeli Army’s Arabic spokesman has appeared on the network during the current war.
That link would be especially important now that Israel and Hamas are talking about a cease-fire. With its clout, Al Jazeera, based in Qatar, will be crucial to the reception of any agreement by the Arab world — something Netanyahu was undoubtedly aware of. According to the Israeli daily Haaretz, the timing of Netanyahu’s decision might be “another bid to thwart the deal,” for which Qatar has been an important intermediary.
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Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
In Donald Trump’s felony trial last week, we heard about Hulk Hogan’s sex tape, and we watched Hope Hicks cry.
So far this week, we heard all about ledgers, invoices and accounts payable stamps. We watched as a loyal Trump accountant authenticated Allen Weisselberg’s handwriting. The same documents with different dates popped up not once or twice but over and over again.
It’s deadly boring. But it’s deadly to Trump’s defense if the jurors can stay awake for it.
With one or two drowsy exceptions, they are. They seem to understand that Trump was indicted on 34 counts — one for each falsified business record — and that they must carefully study Trump’s $35,000 monthly checks to Michael Cohen in order to grasp the heart of the prosecution’s case.
The documents were validated today by a former senior vice president of the Trump Organization, Jeffrey McConney, and an accounts payable supervisor, Deborah Tarasoff, both of whose legal fees are being paid by the company. Stormy Daniels’s sexy testimony, expected as soon as Tuesday, is not nearly as significant to the basic charges as that of these mundane gray-haired bean counters.
Of all the stultifying numbers we heard in the courtroom today, the one that stands out is the $130,000 that Weisselberg, a former chief financial officer of the company, scrawled on a bank document before “grossing it up” (his handwritten description) to $420,000. That was to cover up the fact that $130,000 is the exact amount of money that Cohen wired to Keith Davidson, Daniels’s lawyer, to keep his client quiet. As in Watergate, the crime is mostly in the cover-up.
We’re awaiting Cohen’s testimony that Trump knew that he was reimbursing Cohen $35,000 a month for hush money, not for vague legal services, and thus broke the law. But the circumstantial and documentary evidence precorroborating Cohen — and lessening the impact of his multiple lies — is now piled as high as Trump Tower.
At the end of the day, the judge asked Josh Steinglass of the prosecution team how much longer he expected the D.A.’s case to take. When Steinglass said “very roughly” two weeks — to May 21 — I saw Trump raise and lower his arms in exasperation, like a 6-year-old told to clean up his Legos. Then he went into the hallway and whined to reporters, “I thought they were finished today.”
Trump never thought anything of the kind. He’s a caged animal (to use his word for immigrants) and wants out ASAP. Good luck with that.
Anna Marks
Opinion Staff Editor
On Monday night, a select group of celebrities and fashion designers mounted the steps of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, presenting a litany of costumes for the public to devour. The Met Gala is an annual spectacle of celebrity that raises money for the museum’s Costume Institute, which works to preserve fashion history.
The night’s enduring power can largely be chalked up to the way guests interpret its themed dress code, which changes every year. At its most brilliant, a theme might inspire absurd, campy or daring interpretations by clever designers. At its most exhausting, it inspires famous people to perform vacuous social commentary while attending an event where a ticket reportedly costs as much as $75,000. In either case, the commentary the theme provokes gives the gala its enduring cultural relevance.
This year’s theme is “The Garden of Time,” based on J.G. Ballard’s dystopian short story about a count who, for a time, prevents a mob from destroying his villa and the works of culture it contains. The story is an allegory warning about the consequences of keeping art out of public view. The most generous reading of the story in the context of the Met Gala is probably that the Costume Institute, by giving art to the masses instead of hiding it away in a place only the wealthy inhabit, averts Ballard’s dystopia.
But there’s also an unfortunate irony in choosing this particular story. Ballard implicitly criticizes the wealthy count’s distance from the public, but the gala essentially celebrates the counts among us.
High culture is available to the public largely because the wealthy, charitably, make it so. But the nature of this gala, with its emphasis on extolling the captivating virtues of celebrity, leaves me wondering whether the event’s organizers misread the story’s critique or were simply blind to it. For a less generous interpretation of the story appears to mock the culture-consuming public.
Consider the greatest threat to the count’s rarefied life: the teeming people, described as struggling laborers and soldiers, who unthinkingly defile his cultural artifacts at the end of the story. Is that how the party’s organizers see the ordinary museum patrons and tourists who will fill the institute’s halls after the cameras are gone?
I hope the organizers simply didn’t think hard enough about the implications of their chosen story. But if they did, they would do well to remember that art, even high fashion, endures because a mass audience witnesses and appends meaning to it.
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Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
Before summoning the jury on Monday, Justice Juan Merchan directly addressed the defendant, whom he called “Mr.” and not President Trump. In a measured and by-the-book tone that showed no hint of his exasperation, Merchan told Donald Trump that he had now found him in contempt of court on a 10th charge. Each carries a $1,000 fine, the most allowed by New York State law.
The judge then warned Trump that if he continued to violate his order, “this court will have to consider a jail sanction.”
Merchan told Trump that he was well aware that “you are the former president of the United States and possibly the next president as well” and that he understood that jailing Trump “would be disruptive to the proceedings.” The judge said he also worried about the court officers, corrections officers, Secret Service and other law enforcement personnel who would be involved in the incarceration of a former commander in chief.
“The magnitude of that decision is not lost on me,” Merchan said. “But at the end of the day, I have a job to do.” Trump’s offenses, he noted calmly, represented “a direct attack on the rule of law, and I cannot allow that to continue.”
As he spoke, the loud clacking of reporters’ fingers on their laptop keyboards sounded like the cicadas that will appear this summer.
But jail shouldn’t be the only penalty the judge considers. He has wide latitude in imposing sanctions, so why not consider alternative punishment if he reoffends? After all, Trump said last month that it would be his “great honor” to be jailed by this “crooked” judge.
He’s bluffing, of course. If he thinks the toilets are “disgusting” in the courthouse, wait till he sees what they’re like in the holding cell. And the bed, if you can call it that, is unlikely to be up to Mar-a-Lago standards. His hairdresser would not be allowed into the cell, which could prove inconvenient to Trump when he’s released and has his picture taken.
Even so, Trump should not be allowed to use his punishment to play the martyr. A more appropriate sanction would draw on Trump’s history of adopting highways and attaching a sign thanking himself for beautifying them.
If Trump again attacks witnesses or the jury, Merchan should assign him to pick up trash in parks on two or three Wednesdays, when court is not in session. (City judges have done this before to contempt offenders.) Parks could be more easily secured by the Secret Service than roads, and that would spare the agents uncomfortable nights outside his cell.
I imagine Trump would need a long trash stick because even after losing some weight, he’s still too heavy and out of shape to bend down. The orange man in the orange jumpsuit would need help picking up all of the cigarette butts, Styrofoam coffee cups and old newspapers with headlines about his disgrace.
Peter Coy
Opinion Writer
Scientists have figured out an easier way to turn carbon dioxide into carbon monoxide.
That might seem like a dubious achievement, since carbon dioxide is something we exhale and carbon monoxide is deadly.
But carbon monoxide is an important feedstock for the chemical industry. It can also be made into a fuel. Carbon dioxide, on the other hand, while nontoxic, is overheating the planet. So converting carbon dioxide that’s captured from smokestacks or the atmosphere into something more useful is a good thing.
In the latest issue of the journal Science, chemists reported the discovery of a potentially cheap and stable catalyst that can efficiently split carbon dioxide (which has two oxygen atoms) into carbon monoxide (one oxygen atom).
The catalyst is based on the element molybdenum, which is a trace element in foods and is available in dietary supplements, so obviously is not dangerous. The catalyst can break down carbon dioxide at about 600 degrees Celsius, as compared with 1,000 degrees Celsius by some other methods under development.
In contrast to some other experimental catalysts based on molybdenum, this one is highly stable (so it doesn’t have to be replaced constantly) and highly selective (so it doesn’t trigger other reactions, creating less useful byproducts such as methane).
The lead researchers were Milad Ahmadi Khoshooei and Omar Farha of Northwestern University.
If humanity is going to get climate change under control, it will have a little bit to do with economists and politicians and a lot to do with scientists such as Khoshooei and Farha.
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Katherine Miller
Opinion Writer and Editor
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:
This week, in Manhattan, Donald Trump’s trial will continue. He will also be campaigning, a little unusually, in New Jersey on Saturday, near Cape May.
Cease-fire talks regarding Israel and Gaza are continuing, and that remains front and center for national politics, particularly for President Biden. Also, as she is doing quite often, Vice President Kamala Harris will be doing a campaign event on Wednesday focused on abortion in Pennsylvania.
Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she’ll try to oust the House speaker, Mike Johnson, this week after he helped pass the foreign aid package last month. Democrats have said they will help him out because he helped pass that package, which would really cement the unusual nature of the Congress we have. It’s functionally a coalition government, as Brendan Buck recently wrote in a guest essay for Times Opinion.
Over the weekend, Trump compared the Biden administration to the Gestapo and said Democrats “get welfare to vote, and then they cheat on top of that” during a fund-raiser, as Maggie Haberman and Shane Goldmacher reported.
Toward the end of Maggie and Shane’s article, they report that Trump campaign officials told donors that the 2024 race has only three swing states: Wisconsin, Pennsylvania and Michigan. But Trump campaign officials also showed donors an “expanded reality” map that included Minnesota and Virginia, neither of which has received much attention this year.
Their inclusion here could be a couple different things. First, maybe they’ve polled and really see something in those states; the electoral map can change, as when Democrats won Georgia in 2020. Second, sometimes campaigns will spend money in less apparently competitive states primarily to require opponents to divert resources from a more competitive state.
But as a note on Virginia: Insofar as Republicans have done better there since 2020, it’s probably because people like Glenn Youngkin have been able to balance appealing to voters who do and don’t like Trump, while also turning frustrations with public school closings during the pandemic into a revived social conservatism. As time has gone on, though, voter enthusiasm for that social conservatism seems to have waned, as Jamelle Bouie has argued.
Lastly, Gov. Kristi Noem’s book is being released this week, and at this point, it feels like anything could be in it.
Jonathan Alter
Contributing Opinion Writer
“Sometimes I give too many details,” Stormy Daniels said toward the end of her cross-examination on Thursday at Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York.
Justice Juan Merchan thought so when he admonished her on Tuesday to keep her answers shorter. And the defense clearly hoped that the difference between the details she included in her testimony and those she included in interviews were harmful to her credibility.
Perhaps. But more likely, Daniels’s propensity for offering TMI — bolstered by easygoing quips that made the jury laugh — kept her basic story and her credibility intact.
Susan Necheles is legendary in New York courtrooms for her cross-examinations and she lacerated Daniels for hours. Daniels was defiant and didn’t give an inch.
Necheles’s best moments came when she trapped Daniels on whether she had eaten dinner with Trump or not. In an interview with In Touch magazine, she said she had talked at length with Trump in the hotel suite “before, during and after” dinner. On Tuesday, Daniels testified that amid the conversation “we never got food.” On Thursday, her excuse was, “I’m very food-motivated and in all of these interviews, I would have talked about the food” if there had been any. So, great, a discrepancy about whether they ate anything.
The defense approach has been to slam everything against the wall and see what stuck. Little else did. Necheles’s efforts to challenge Daniels on a dozen details ran aground in part because the witness had offered hundreds more over two days that the defense didn’t challenge — accounts so detailed they would be hard to make up.
Necheles sneered that because Daniels believed in the paranormal and wrote films, Daniels had a lot of experience in remembering “things that aren’t real.” Daniels replied, “If that story was not true, I would have written it to be a lot better.” Reporters spotted jurors visibly stifling laughs.
For much of the morning, Necheles tried to make Daniels seem like a liar for not admitting that she, for instance, approved the name “The Making America Horny Again Tour.” Again, big whoop. While Daniels was dodgy about the extent of her capitalist impulses, it’s hard to imagine the jury caring.
At one point, Necheles made everyone think she was prepared to blow Daniels sky-high. Daniels had testified that the foyer in Trump’s suite had a black-and-white tile floor. On Tuesday, the judge used the tile floor as an example of Daniels’s being too detailed. When Necheles started pushing hard on what Daniels remembered about the foyer, I was sure the lawyer would produce a décor plan or photo from Harrah’s proving the floor tile was not black-and-white.
She didn’t do so. In the end, it didn’t matter much that Daniels got dinged a bit, or that some of her testimony was slightly at odds with what she told In Touch, Slate and Vogue. Her story came off as believable.
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