No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.
The symmetry is striking: two lawyers, two different eras of Donald Trump’s career, and two courtrooms in different regions of the country. The lessons from Jenna Ellis and Michael Cohen, however, are the same. Loyalty to Trump is seldom returned, with disastrous results for those who offer it.In an Atlanta courtroom today, Jenna Ellis, a former attorney for Trump, pleaded guilty to a single felony count of aiding and abetting false statements.
Not long ago, the idea that a former president—or major-party presidential nominee—would face serious legal jeopardy was nearly unthinkable. Today, merely keeping track of the many cases against Donald Trump requires a law degree, a great deal of attention, or both.In all, Trump faces 91 felony counts across two state courts and two different federal districts, any of which could potentially produce a prison sentence.
Three down, 16 to go.With the attorney Kenneth Chesebro agreeing to plead guilty to a single felony today, the Fulton County, Georgia, racketeering case against Donald Trump and others for attempting to steal the 2020 election has one more conviction and one fewer defendant.As part of the deal, Chesebro pleaded guilty to one count of conspiracy to file false documents. He’ll pay $5,000 in fines, write an apology letter, and face five years of probation.
When Judge Tanya Chutkan of the federal district court for D.C. was assigned the trial of Donald Trump for his attempt to steal the election, according to the journalist Robert Draper, she asked a friend to pray for her. Chutkan’s decision today to impose a gag order on the former president, her most consequential pronouncement in the case so far, shows why she’ll need prayer, if not outright divine wisdom, to navigate the challenge before her.
Let no one say that Donald Trump has lost his edge. His speech Wednesday evening, amid the roiling violence in the Gaza Strip, shows he’s still got it, whatever it is.In Florida, the former president and GOP presidential front-runner blasted Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for a supposed disagreement over a 2020 U.S. missile strike that killed Iranian General Qassem Soleimani. “I’ll never forget,” Trump said.
No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.
This might be Nikki Haley’s moment.Not her moment to become the Republican presidential front-runner. (Don’t be silly.) Not even her moment to nip at Donald Trump’s heels. But it could be her chance to consolidate the anti-Trump support in the GOP, and to make a solid play for the silver medal and maybe a good speaking slot at the RNC in Milwaukee next summer.
No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.
No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.
In a court of law, defendants are entitled to a presumption of innocence. In the court of public opinion, Senator Bob Menendez enjoys no such indulgence.The Democrat from New Jersey was indicted today—along with his wife, Nadine, and three others—on three counts of corruption. Federal prosecutors say the group accepted hundreds of thousands of dollars of bribes to assist the Egyptian government. Among other allegations, they say Menendez gave sensitive U.S.
Once upon a time, presidential impeachment was a rare event. But with four of the five inquiries in U.S. history coming in the past 25 years, people seeking to understand and explain the impeachment inquiry into President Joe Biden, launched Tuesday, have looked to the 2019 impeachment of President Donald Trump as an analogy. Both center on allegations of using elected office for personal gain, and both have been divided sharply along partisan lines.
Hunter Biden, the son of President Joe Biden, was indicted today on three counts of gun-related crimes. Federal prosecutors in Delaware allege that Hunter Biden lied on paperwork when he bought a revolver, saying he did not use illegal substances, and then possessed the pistol while on narcotics.This is one of two major stories about the younger Biden in the headlines this week.
Say this for the Proud Boys: They abide by their own creed. “Fuck around, find out!” members of the group, with Joseph Biggs in front, chanted as they marched down the National Mall, in Washington, D.C., on January 6, 2021.Over the past week, they’ve found out. Enrique Tarrio, the group’s former chairman, was sentenced today to 22 years in prison on charges of seditious conspiracy.
Updated at 10:18 a.m. ET on September 4, 2023You don’t often see someone turn down $346 million in free money. But that’s effectively what Florida’s Ron DeSantis is doing.The Republican governor and presidential candidate has blocked his state from getting energy-efficiency incentives under the Inflation Reduction Act, the signature Biden-administration policy that passed in 2022, Politico noted last week.
To borrow a phrase from the man himself, Rudy Giuliani had a theory, but not a lot of evidence.The lack of evidence—or more specifically, the failure to hand it over—caught up with him today, when a federal judge in Washington, D.C., ruled that Giuliani was liable for defaming Ruby Freeman and Shaye Moss, a mother and daughter who served as election workers in Fulton County, Georgia.
No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.
Forget the ides of March. Beware the first week of March.At a hearing this morning in Washington, D.C., Judge Tanya Chutkan ruled that former President Donald Trump’s federal trial for attempting to subvert the 2020 election will begin on March 4, 2024, with jury selection. The following day, March 5, is Super Tuesday, the day when the greatest number of delegates in the Republican primary is up for grabs.
No one alive has seen a race like the 2024 presidential election. For months, if not years, many people have expected a reprise of the 2020 election, a matchup between the sitting president and a former president.But that hasn’t prevented a crowded primary. On the GOP side, more than a dozen candidates are ostensibly vying for the nomination.
The epigraph for the first 2024 Republican presidential debate came from Vivek Ramaswamy. “It is not morning in America. We’re living in a dark moment,” he said, midway through the melee in Milwaukee. He seemed to speak for every candidate on the stage during a dour and punchy evening on Fox News.Ramaswamy was a fitting messenger for the mantra, because the debate was his coming out party. He was, if not definitively the winner of the debate, clearly the main character.
If justice is blind, she sometimes heads down unpredictable paths. For example, only in Donald Trump’s fourth felony indictment, unsealed last night in Atlanta, has a local prosecutor managed to deliver a sweeping, nationwide view of the former president’s scheme to steal the 2020 election.
In some ways, Donald Trump’s mental state is more transparent than nearly any public figure’s: He has no shame, little discretion, and ample channels to broadcast his feelings in real time. Yet his constant stream of consciousness and always elevated dudgeon make it hard to parse the finer fluctuations in his mood.Even so, the former president’s public behavior since Special Counsel Jack Smith indicted him last week suggests a man feeling cornered.
In January, one of the first acts of the new Republican House majority was to establish a special subcommittee devoted to rooting out the ways the FBI and other federal bodies have supposedly been used as tools of political persecution.“We have a duty to get into these agencies and look at how they have been weaponized to go against the very people they’re supposed to represent,” said Representative Jim Jordan, the Trump ally who chairs the body.
More than two and a half years after Donald Trump attempted to steal the 2020 presidential election, a grand jury in Washington, D.C., has indicted the former president on four felony counts related to the plot.This is the third time that Trump has been charged with felonies in 2023, but it is also the most significant case against him.
Though Donald Trump has sometimes been called “Teflon Don”—a label that connects not just to his own name but to his modus operandi—the truth is not that he has escaped consequences for everything, just his most egregious behavior. He has lost defamation cases, his company got dinged for tax evasion, and he has been charged with byzantine business crimes. But his biggest sins—especially trying to steal the 2020 presidential election—have gone unpunished.
A recurring dynamic of the Trump era is that his opponents warn darkly about his secret motives or actions, and then he bluntly confirms their hunches in public.For years, Democrats insisted that Trump had secret, illicit ties to Russia. Then, in the summer of 2017, Donald Trump Jr. abruptly disclosed a 2016 meeting he’d held with Russians promising “dirt” on Hillary Clinton.
Marjorie Taylor Greene has been called many things, but she has never been called a moderate squish.Until now.The U.S. representative from Georgia was apparently kicked out of the House Freedom Caucus, the hard-right group famous for bedeviling Republican House speakers, in a vote last month, Politico first reported. Representative Andy Harris, a board member, told several outlets about the outcome.
This is an edition of The Atlantic Daily, a newsletter that guides you through the biggest stories of the day, helps you discover new ideas, and recommends the best in culture. Sign up for it here.Elon Musk and Joe Biden are the unlikely tag team changing the way American journalists approach their jobs.First, here are three new stories from The Atlantic:
The gravitational pull of supervising kids all the time
There’s no such thing as an RFK Jr. voter.
Everyone has “car brain.
Donald Trump is not an articulate speaker, but he is an effective one, because he understands the power of the spoken word and deftly wields tone and inflection. One reason the tape of him boasting about sexual assault was such a bombshell was that you could actually listen to Trump saying it all in his inimitable manner.
Chris Christie is the hottest candidate in the Republican presidential race right now. Oh, not with Republican voters. He’s still polling in the low single digits among the people who will actually choose the nominee. But among liberal pundits, Christie’s reputation is on the rise.