The Republican-controlled Supreme Court is about to give U.S. presidents, or at least Republican U.S. presidents, a massive amount of leeway to commit crimes while in office. In The New Republic, Brynn Tannehill says that the Republican justices will someday regret what they're doing: The conservatives on the Supreme Court have ... exposed their hubris, willful ignorance, and foolishness to the entire world in stark terms, and it will cost them and the nation dearly in the long run. They somehow presume that if Trump is elected and goes full dictator, that the power of the court, and their rep ..read more

In The New York Times a few days ago, Maggie Haberman told us that Donald Trump is being humbled by his experiences in criminal court: For the next six weeks, a man who values control and tries to shape environments and outcomes to his will is in control of very little.... The mundanity of the courtroom has all but swallowed Mr. Trump, who for decades has sought to project an image of bigness, one he rode from a reality-television studio set to the White House. ...the shared sense among many of his advisers is that the process may damage him as much as a guilty verdict. Now that the trial is ..read more

Poor Donald Trump -- he wants another January 6 outside the courtroom, but his fans aren't delivering, as The New York Times reports: Donald J. Trump was evidently not happy with what he saw out the window of his chauffeured S.U.V. as he rode through Lower Manhattan on Monday morning for the beginning of opening arguments in his first criminal trial. The scene that confronted him as he approached the dingy courthouse at 100 Centre Street was underwhelming. Across the street, at Collect Pond Park, the designated site for protesters during the trial, only a handful of Trump supporters had gathe ..read more

The New York Times has assigned young reporters to cover the protests around Columbia University right now, so this story is much more nuanced than it would be if the usual middle-aged Times hacks were involved: Days after Columbia University’s president testified before Congress, the atmosphere on campus remained fraught on Sunday, shaken by pro-Palestinian protests that have drawn the attention of the police and the concern of some Jewish students. Over the weekend, the student-led demonstrations on campus also attracted separate, more agitated protests by demonstrators who seemed to be una ..read more

For the thousandth time, we've begun to think we've really got Trump this time! David Frum writes: For nine years, Trump has dominated the Republican Party.... Enough of the Republican base supported him. Everybody else either fell in line, retired from politics, or quit the party. ... Trump won almost every fight that mattered.... On aid to Ukraine, Trump got his way for 16 months. When Democrats held the majority in the House of Representatives in 2022, they approved four separate aid requests for Ukraine, totaling $74 billion. As soon as Trump’s party took control of the House, in January ..read more

In The New York Times, Nate Cohn writes: Was Trump Benefiting From Being Out of the News? Donald J. Trump appears to be a stronger candidate than he was four years ago, polling suggests, and not just because a notable number of voters look back on his presidency as a time of relative peace and prosperity. It’s also because his political liabilities, like his penchant to offend and his legal woes, don’t dominate the news the way they once did. In the last New York Times/Siena College poll, only 38 percent of voters said they’d been offended by Mr. Trump “recently,” even as more than 70 perce ..read more

New York magazine's Ed Kilgore notes that Democrats will hold their convention in Chicago this year, at a time when left-wingers are angry at the party about its involvement in a war. So will 2024 be like 1968? Kilgore says no -- but I think there's somewhat more risk than he's willing to acknowledge. Here are some of the reasons he's not worried: Gaza isn’t Vietnam. ... There were over a half-million American troops deployed in Vietnam in 1968, and nearly 300,000 young men were drafted into the Army and Marines that year.... Even from a purely humanitarian and altruistic point of view, Viet ..read more

In a New York Times op-ed, Elizabeth Spiers gives us the conventional wisdom about Donald Trump's relationship with New York City, where -- fittingly, as Spiers sees it -- Trump's criminal trial is taking place: It feels uniquely appropriate that Mr. Trump will have to endure the scrutiny on his old home turf.... He rose to fame here, but was never truly accepted by the old money elites he admired. The rich and powerful sometimes invited him to their parties, but behind his back they laughed at his coarse methods and his tacky aesthetic. His inability to succeed in New York in quite the way he ..read more

Many commentators and politicians -- mostly but not exclusively on the right -- tell us with great sorrow that the Republican Party has suffered a takeover by forces hostile to its true purpose. What once was the noble "party of Reagan" is now, alas, the "party of Trump," an entity that would repulse the Gipper and his allies. A story in The Guardian reminds us that that's a lot of malarkey: Two powerful conservative non-profits have donated millions of dollars to a number of pro-Trump groups led by key far-right allies Stephen Miller, Charlie Kirk and others that have promoted election denia ..read more

The only Donald Trump criminal trial that's likely to take place this year starts today in New York. Trump is charged with falsifying business records in order to cover up an affair with porn star Stormy Daniels. Amanda Marcotte thinks that testimony from Daniels will be "devastating" for Trump, largely because, as Daniels told Anderson Cooper on 60 Minutes in 2018, their sexual encounter was not fully consensual and was miserable for her: Stormy Daniels: And I was like, "Ugh, here we go." (LAUGH) And I just felt like maybe — (LAUGH) it was sort of — I had it coming for making a bad decision f ..read more