Opinion | Conversations and insights about the moment. (2024)

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Top Republicans Come Face to Face With Trump’s Seamy Past

Cohen now seems like a man whose life has been essentially wrecked — he went to prison, lost his law license, had to sell his New York and Chicago taxi medallions and is still on supervised release. Though his implosion has been particularly severe, he is far from alone; many people who’ve served Trump, no matter how faithfully, have been ruined in various ways by the experience.

Nevertheless, as Trump runs for re-election, Republicans are climbing over one another to get as close to him as possible. Toward the end of his testimony for the prosecution, Cohen was asked about his regrets.

“To keep the loyalty and to do things that he had asked me to do, I violated my moral compass, and I suffered the penalty,” he said. I’d like to know if Johnson, hearing this, had even a flicker of foreboding.

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The Increase in Drowning Deaths Should Be a National Priority

Drowning is the leading cause of death for children ages 1 to 4 in the United States and the second leading cause of death by accidental injury for children 5 to 14. Tackling the issue has clear bipartisan appeal and would improve quality of life in every American community.

Despite the obvious need for action, federal, state and local governments in the United States have invested very little to prevent these deaths.

The rise in deaths has caught the eye of former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, whose philanthropy told The Times this week it plans for the first time to direct millions of dollars to drowning prevention efforts within the United States to improve data collection and help fund swimming lessons in 10 states where drowning rates are highest: Alaska, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Michigan, New York, Oklahoma and Texas.

The planned $17.6 million investment by Bloomberg Philanthropies is modest compared with the $104 million it is spending globally on preventing drownings. But the focus by Bloomberg, whose prominent public health campaigns helped ban smoking in bars and restaurants in New York, could help raise the profile of this issue. Executives at the philanthropy said they planned to work with the C.D.C.

Many Americans of even wealthy backgrounds have lost children to drowning. But drowning is also an issue of equity. Black people and Native Americans are at substantially increased risk of drowning. So are teenage boys. The C.D.C. report found that these trends have continued. In 2020, they said, Black Americans saw the greatest increase in fatal drownings.

Red Cross surveys suggest that a majority of Americans lack basic swimming abilities. With C.D.C. data showing the existence of more than 10 million private pools in the United States and fewer than 309,000 public ones, it’s clear that large numbers of Americans lack access to basic information about water safety, as well as safe places to learn to swim. Instead of a public health issue, drowning is treated as a private matter and swimming as a luxury. To save lives, this needs to change.

Why Trump Is Ahead in So Many Swing States

Well, different voters want different things. But if I had to write a single sentence that reconciled these diverse findings, it would be this: The people who run America’s systems have led the country seriously astray; we need a president who will shake things up and lead the country back to normal.

When they hear “systems,” I assume voters are thinking of the network of institutions run by America’s elite — corporations, governing agencies, higher education, the news media and so on. If voters believe one thing about Donald Trump it’s that he’s against these systems and these systems are against him.

Voters clearly see President Biden implicated in these systems. The heart of his problem heaves into view when people are asked which candidate will bring about change. Seventy percent of voters said that Trump would bring about major changes or tear down the system entirely if elected. And 71 percent of voters said that little or nothing would change if Biden was re-elected.

In other words, the evidence suggests that the swing voter wants reactionary change, not revolutionary change. The mood suggested by the evidence is angry nostalgia. That would be my explanation for why Trump is so convincingly ahead in most of the swing states.

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Trump Told Cohen Disclosure of His Fling Would Be a ‘Total Disaster’

Cohen’s testimony about the Playboy model Karen McDougal, who says she had a nine-month affair with Trump, is important beyond Trump describing her to Cohen as “beautiful.” It cemented Trump’s attention to detail, which we’ve heard a lot about already. He constantly asked for updates on the hush money that American Media Inc., publisher of The National Enquirer, was paying at his direction to McDougal, replying, “Great!” or “Fantastic,” when Cohen delivered them.

Cohen’s tape of Trump discussing that deal landed hard when it was played, and not just because it was Trump’s voice talking about “150” — a clear reference to the $150,000 in hush money that Trump — through Cohen and A.M.I. — was originally going to pay McDougal. Trump’s micromanaging, which we’ve heard about for two weeks, came to life in a way that didn’t help him. And when Cohen dissected practically every moment of the call, there was no mistaking the meaning of the brief conversation.

When Cohen told Trump that Stormy Daniels was shopping her story, “Trump was really angry with me,” he said. Trump told Cohen: “‘I thought you had this under control, I thought you took care of this! … Just take care of it!’”

According to Cohen, Trump thought he would surely lose the 2016 election if the Daniels story came out. He testified that Trump said, “This is a disaster, a total disaster. Women will hate me,” and added that “guys, they think it’s cool” to have sex with a p*rn star, “but this is going to be a disaster for the campaign.” In combination with the fallout from the “Access Hollywood” tapes, they agreed, it would send his already low polling with women into a tailspin.

“Get control of it!” Trump barked, Cohen testified. “Just get past the election. If I win, it’ll have no relevance when I’m president. And if I lose, I don’t really care.”

Here the prosecutor, Susan Hoffinger, asked if Cohen inquired about Melania Trump. He said yes, and said Trump responded: “Don’t worry. How long do you think I’ll be on the market for? Not long.”

Wow. With Trump, every time you think he’s touched bottom, he crashes through the floor. Here he was already looking ahead to his third divorce.

Cohen is doing very well on direct examination. The test will come Tuesday afternoon, when cross-examination is likely to begin.

Israel Needs to Allow More Aid Crossings to Keep Gazans Alive

If there were a dozen access points, spread across every two or three kilometers, then no single crossing would become a choke point, vulnerable to attack. He said there’s no reason that Israel, which controls the security envelope around Gaza, could not open far more checkpoints.

“People complain that Hamas is stealing aid, but there would be no incentive to steal if there was enough food going in,” said Harden, adding that he shared a plan to open more than half a dozen more border crossings in Gaza with a branch of the Israeli military about six weeks ago.

But since then, the opposite has occurred. The main artery for humanitarian aid, Kerem Shalom, was shut down on May 5 after a Hamas rocket attack killed four Israeli soldiers. Then Israel seized the border crossing at Rafah, gaining full control over the vital entry and exit point for people and goods for the first time since 2005. Israeli officials have blamed Egypt for the halt in humanitarian goods through Rafah since last week. But for months aid groups have cited the onerous inspections of aid convoys, Israeli attacks on aid workers and protests by right-wing Israeli settlers who have destroyed or delayed truckloads of aid as the cause of famine in Gaza.

“The situation is absolutely desperate,” Sean Carroll, who leads Anera, an American aid organization that has operated in Gaza for decades, wrote in an email on Monday. His staff members have been forced to evacuate Rafah at a moment’s notice, just like the rest of the population, and were forced to leave vital supplies in a warehouse behind.

“They are trying to keep delivering but there’s not much to deliver,” he told me.

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Believe It, Democrats. Biden Could Lose.

From their lips to God’s ear. But with stakes this huge, I can’t help worrying that such hopefulness verges on magical thinking and is midwife to a confidence, even a complacency, that Biden cannot afford. He needs to step things up — to defend his record more vigorously, make the case for his second term more concretely, project more strength and more effectively communicate the most important difference between him and his opponent: Biden genuinely loves America, while Trump genuinely loves only himself.

The new polling shows that Democratic senators up for re-election are doing better than Biden, so his party affiliation isn’t his doom. That’s the lesson, too, of the favor enjoyed by Democratic governors in red and purple states. Look, for prime example, at Josh Shapiro in Pennsylvania.

But Biden seems to get the blame for the war in Gaza. For the high cost of living, too. Regarding the economy, he has a story to tell — infrastructure investment, the CHIPS Act, low unemployment — and must tell it better, with an eye not on his liberal base, but on the minorities and young people who are drifting away from him. That’s the moral of the latest numbers: Take no voter for granted. And there’s not a second to waste.

Will Michael Cohen Throw Cold Water on Trump’s Polling Lead?

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The Table Is Set for Michael Cohen to Testify Against Trump

The arc of the prosecution’s narrative has taken the jury from the “catch and kill” scheme (a coherent prelude to the crime) to the validation of highly incriminating records to the debunking of arguments for the defense. It all adds up to an effective precorroboration of Cohen’s likely testimony.

Stormy Daniels had no connection to the falsification of business records, the fundamental charge against Donald Trump. But by establishing that she did, indeed, have sex with Trump, her testimony provided important proof of motive. It’s increasingly clear to the jury that Trump coughed up the hush money to save his 2016 campaign after it was sent reeling by the “Access Hollywood” tape. He knew that a credible story of sex with a p*rn star would sink him. So he broke the law.

The defense has responded mostly by grasping at straws. It tried to make the hush money look like an extortion scheme, with the former president in his favorite position as victim — a difficult maneuver, considering that Trump has spent years in the same tawdry milieu.

On Monday and Friday, the defense attorney Emil Bove used technojargon and innuendo to suggest, without a shred of proof, that a key piece of evidence — a Sept. 9, 2016, call in which Trump and Cohen discussed hush money for the Playboy model Karen McDougal — was somehow tampered with by Cohen, the F.B.I. or some other sinister force and that it might not have been Cohen on the call. The idea was to use a nanosecond gap in the call and a change in phone ownership to capture the imagination of even a single conspiracy-minded juror. It takes only one to create a hung jury.

But Bove’s cross-examination crashed when a young prosecution witness explained that when people (in this case, Cohen) buy new phones, they usually keep their old numbers.

Is that all they’ve got? No, the defense is betting on the offensiveness of Cohen, who has been ignoring repeated pleas from prosecutors to keep his mouth shut in the days before he takes the stand. (Justice Juan Merchan strongly suggested he do so.)

If Cohen can straighten up and fly right, riding on a trove of evidence and surviving cross-examination, a conviction is well within sight.

The Ugly Spirit of the Confederacy Remains Very Much Alive

The decision to expunge the names was made four years ago, after the killing of George Floyd forced local governments and Congress to acknowledge the role that racism played in the decisions to memorialize Confederate commanders in place names, public monuments and military bases.

By that time, it had become clear that the monuments, in particular, were memorials to the racial terrorism that the Southern states employed to strip African Americans of their rights during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

The sudden reversion to type in Shenandoah County shows that Confederate propaganda is still very much a force in American life.

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Biden Is Less Unpopular Than His Peers

As we all know, however, voters are remarkably reluctant to give President Biden credit. Lately a number of observers have been picking up on a theme I’ve been banging on for a while: There’s a huge gap between voters’ negative perception of the economy and their generally positive assessment of their own situation. For example, according to the latest Quinnipiac poll of Wisconsin, only 34 percent of voters say that the economy is excellent or good, but 65 percent say that their own finances are excellent or good.

And negative perceptions of the economy are weighing down Biden’s approval rating. Or are they?

Morning Consult has just released its latest assessment of public approval for major leaders around the world. It reveals, among other things, that every Group of 7 leader has low approval — maybe because voters are still angry about past inflation. But here’s the shocker: Biden is the least unpopular of the bunch. Only Italy’s Giorgia Meloni comes close in the not-too-low approval contest:

By the way, I have no idea what’s going on in Japan.

You can argue that Biden should be doing better. But anyone suggesting that Biden is a uniquely bad candidate should be aware that his peers in other countries are doing much worse. In fact, if Britain were to hold elections today, Rishi Sunak would probably preside over the death of the Tories as a major political party.

Of course, if Biden loses in November, it might mean the death of American democracy. So he may be doing better than his peers, but the stakes here are higher.

Stormy Daniels Will Not Be Shamed

“Correct,” Daniels replied.

“And yet according to you, seeing a man on a bed in a T-shirt and boxers was so upsetting that you got lightheaded?”

“When you are not expecting a man twice your age in his underwear, absolutely,” Daniels replied.

Daniels has largely been unflappable in the face of combative questioning. But that did not stop the defense from pursuing what is perhaps the oldest trope in the book: harping on her sexual history.

Necheles said Daniels was “selling herself” when she made appearances at exotic-dancing clubs. (“I was not ‘selling myself’ to anyone,” Daniels replied.) She hammered Daniels on a recent “affair” while Daniels was separated from her husband. But the most striking exchange came when Necheles implied that Daniels’s work writing for p*rnography films had primed her to fictionalize a sexual encounter with Trump.

“You have a lot of experience making phony stories about sex appear to be real,” Necheles said.

“Wow,” Daniels replied, taken aback. She took a long pause, then said, “The sex in those films is very much real, just like what happened to me in that room.”

The idea that Daniels’s p*rnography career could be equated with making up a story — or used to undermine it — might have been convincing in a pre-#MeToo world. But the public perception of sex work has changed a lot since Daniels’s initial accusation, as has the way the public understands trauma.

Daniels, for her part, was unapologetic: She is a woman who proudly makes p*rnography for a living and doesn’t believe it hurts her credibility one bit.

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A Furious Trump Is Denied His Mistrial

In moving for a mistrial that would end his client’s misery, Blanche argued that Daniels’s account of spanking Trump with a rolled-up magazine was extremely prejudicial and that allowing in questions about whether the former president wore a condom was “a dog whistle for rape.” The defense was especially upset about the jury hearing that Daniels “blacked out” before sex and “doesn’t know how her clothes came off,” among other details.

One of the prosecutors, Joshua Steinglass, argued persuasively that the defense’s claim to having been “ambushed” by a new story from Daniels was “nonsense.” He’s right that Daniels had not changed her story in significant ways.

The judge did more than agree with that. He ripped Susan Necheles, who interrogated Daniels for the Trump team, for her incompetence. I saw Boris Epshteyn, one of Trump’s senior lawyers, happily fist-bump Necheles after her cross-examination, but Trump must be furious at how her missteps sank not just his chances for a mistrial but at least some of his hopes on appeal.

Merchan ruled that Daniels was allowed to offer details to “corroborate her account” — especially because Trump has denied it ever happened — and the prosecution was allowed to argue that the sexual encounter was relevant because if it happened, it “increases the motivation to silence her.” To rebut that, he said, the defense can offer testimony that it never happened, but that, of course, would require Trump to testify.

The judge then admonished Necheles: “There were many times when you could have objected but didn’t.” Merchan noted that he, not the defense, had objected to admitting the damaging mention of Trump offering to get Daniels “out of the trailer park,” and struck it from the record. He said he couldn’t imagine why Necheles didn’t object to the condom testimony.

I heard from a Trump lawyer unconnected to this case that in 2023, Trump called Necheles “a loser” to her face. You can bet that he’s calling her that — and worse — Thursday night.

A Defiant Stormy Daniels Survives a Difficult Cross-Examination

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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Months Late, Biden Uses His Leverage on Israel

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.

There’s Only One Explanation for Judge Cannon’s Actions

“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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Grover Cleveland Didn’t Lie About His Sex Scandal

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 interesting only 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 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 superhonesty in public matters than secret offspring. He married Frances Folsom in the nation’s first White House wedding. And they lived devotedly until Cleveland 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.

The Fizzled Rebellion of Marjorie Taylor Greene

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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Stormy Daniels Stood Up Well to the Taunts of Trump’s Lawyer

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.

Stormy Daniels Was Entertaining, but Did She Make a Real Impact?

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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The Darker Side of Stormy Daniels’s Testimony

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?’”

The Dangers in Putting Stormy Daniels on the Stand

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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The U.S. Must Keep the Rafah Invasion From Turning Into a Starvation Crisis

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.

Israel Shutters One of Its Few Links to the Arab World

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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The Boring Documents That May Be Devastating to Trump

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 circ*mstantial 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.

The Baffling Theme of This Year’s Met Gala

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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Jail for the Chief? There’s a Better Punishment.

“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.

A Little More Carbon Monoxide Might Really Help the Planet

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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Trump Is Rallying in New Jersey and Boasting of New States. Is It a PsyOp?

• 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.

Putin’s Defense Shake-Up Is a Danger for Ukraine