At today’s hearing on Donald Trump’s claim of absolute immunity from criminal prosecution, the Republican-appointed Supreme Court majority appeared poised to give him what he most desires in the case: further delays that virtually preclude the chance that he will face a jury in his election-subversion case before the November election. But the nearly three hours of debate may be even more significant for how they would shape a second Trump term if he wins reelection. The arguments showed that although the Court’s conservative majority seems likely to reject Trump’s claim of absolute immunity f ..read more

Here are a few things that Donald Trump’s lawyer says a president ought to be immune from prosecution for doing: selling nuclear secrets employing the U.S. military to assassinate a political rival launching a coup During a Supreme Court hearing this morning, John Sauer, representing the former president, argued that each of these actions could be understood as an “official act” of the president, and that no current or former president may be charged with crimes for doing them. These are shocking arguments, no less so for the fact that Sauer was already asked about the assassination during a ..read more

Photographs by Jason Andrew You could be forgiven for thinking it was Mike Johnson’s idea to host the House Republicans’ annual policy retreat at the Greenbrier resort in West Virginia, though in fact the conference has gathered there for several years. Step into the upper lobby, red staircase runner giving way to gleaming black-and-white tile, symmetrical furnishings, George Washington gazing east from his gilded-frame portrait above a marble fireplace, and for a moment Johnson’s fantasy of what Congress once was, what it could be—what he tries to convince himself it actually still is—seems s ..read more

Donald Trump’s biographers all seem to agree that he didn’t get a lot of love from his father. But what Fred Trump did impart to his son was an indelible lesson: There are two kinds of people in the world—killers and losers—and like his father, Donald had to be a killer. In Fred Trump’s dark vision, all of life was a jungle in which the strong survive and prosper and the weak fall away. The killers take what they want, however they need to take it. Rules? Norms? Laws? Institutions? They’re for suckers. The only unpardonable sin in Trumpworld is the failure to act in your own self-interest. The ..read more

A specter is haunting Donald Trump’s criminal trial in New York state court—the specter of the Access Hollywood tape. The tape does not itself feature in the charges against Trump, which allege that the former president falsified business records as part of covering up payments to the adult-film actor Stormy Daniels in exchange for her silence over a past sexual encounter. But according to Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg, the tape is “centrally relevant” in explaining Trump’s alleged motives behind orchestrating the payments to Daniels. Still, jurors will not hear audio of Trump’s voic ..read more

Ukraine won. Trump lost. The House vote to aid Ukraine renews hope that Ukraine can still win its war. It also showed how and why Donald Trump should lose the 2024 election. For nine years, Trump has dominated the Republican Party. Senators might have loathed him, governors might have despised him, donors might have ridiculed him, college-educated Republican voters might have turned against him—but LOL, nothing mattered. Enough of the Republican base supported him. Everybody else either fell in line, retired from politics, or quit the party. Trump did not win every fight. In 2019 and 2020, Sen ..read more

On Indivisible’s website, the first words you’ll find—in large font and all caps—are “Defeat MAGA. Save democracy.” The progressive organizing group, formed shortly after Donald Trump’s 2016 win, sees the stakes of this fall’s presidential election as enormous, even existential. Yet when it deploys more than 2,000 volunteers to canvass neighborhoods in Arizona over the next seven months, the presidential race is the last topic it plans to bring up. “We’re not going to be knocking on doors trying to convince people to vote for Joe Biden,” Indivisible’s co-founder Ezra Levin told me. Instead, it ..read more

This is The Trump Trials by George T. Conway III, a newsletter that chronicles the former president’s legal troubles. Sign up here. The defendant nodded off a couple of times on Monday. And I have to confess, as a spectator in an overflow courtroom watching on closed-circuit television, so did I. Legal proceedings can be like that. Mundane, even boring. That’s how the first couple of days of the trial in the People of the State of New York v. Donald J. Trump, Indictment No. 71543–2023, felt much of the time. Ordinary—despite being so extraordinary. And, frankly, that was comforting. The ordina ..read more

Interstate 81, southbound, you can’t miss it: Exit 185 PRESIDENT BIDEN EXPRESSWAY. The three-quarter-mile road leads into downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania, birthplace of Joe Biden. Keep going straight and you’ll eventually end up—where else?—on Biden Street. That these namesake roads exist while the president is still alive, let alone still in office, feels odd. But this exact strangeness—forced nostalgia, preemptive memorialization—is the essence of Biden’s 2024 reelection campaign. Yesterday afternoon, inside the Scranton Cultural Center, Biden sought to remind a few hundred supporters of his ..read more

The Iranian attack on Israel has heightened the fierce cross-pressures shaping President Joe Biden’s conflicted approach to the war in Gaza. Throughout Israel’s military engagement, Biden has struggled to square his historic inclination to support Israel almost unreservedly with growing hostility in his party toward Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s conduct of the war. For months, Biden has been escalating his criticism of Netanyahu, but once the Iran attack began, the president snapped back to his instinct to rally behind Israel. The barrage of missiles and drones that Iran fired at ..read more