<The conservative parental rights group Moms for Liberty plans to spend more than $3 million on a multi-state advertising blitz to increase its membership and engage voters before November, following through on a pledge it made last year to become more politically active across the country in 2024.

Yet the considerable investment comes with a twist for a group that has previously said its focus was on local school board races: It will specifically target voters in Arizona, Georgia, North Carolina and Wisconsin, four states that are among the most important presidential battlegrounds this fall, and some of its initial advertising directly criticizes the Biden administration. The group hopes to expand its efforts to the three other swing states that will help decide the presidential contest. The campaign signals Moms for Liberty’s return to the national spotlight after a spate of bad press and criticism. The group emerged in 2021 as a rising star in conservative politics but has faced backlash for various scandals and for its efforts to strip mentions of LGBTQ+ identity and structural racism from the classroom.

The coordinated push in presidential swing states also raises questions about the group’s intentions and funding. The nonprofit has long classified itself as a grassroots collection of like-minded parents. But Moms for Liberty co-founder Tina Descovich told The Associated Press that the new campaign came about as "investors" have approached the group wanting to see it “grow in specific states.”

She declined to identify the funders, and the nonprofit is not required to disclose them as a federally recognized 501(c)4 social welfare group. Federal Election Commission records show the group's affiliated PAC, Moms for Liberty Action, has received $161,000 since October from Restoration PAC, which is funded by the conservative billionaire Richard Uihlein. Restoration PAC didn't respond to a call from the AP, and it was unclear whether its funding was supporting Moms for Liberty's latest campaign.

Randi Weingarten, president of the American Federation of Teachers, said Moms for Liberty was being cagey about its true intentions.

“Given the timing of their new push and given that they will not reveal their investors, they’re telling you two things: One, they’re telling you it’s not grassroots. And two, they’re telling you that they’re operatives for somebody else,” Weingarten said.

Descovich said the intention is for Moms for Liberty to “grow more grassroots chapters” and that its existing local chapters are supportive of the campaign. She noted that Georgia, where the campaign kicked off this week, has just seven Moms for Liberty chapters.

The ad push will expand into Arizona, North Carolina and Wisconsin within the next month, Descovich said. The group hopes to promote the campaign later this year in the three other major presidential swing states — Michigan, Nevada and Pennsylvania. The Nevada effort will focus on Clark County, which includes Las Vegas.

Descovich said Moms for Liberty conducted an analysis of its membership and found that about 20% are not registered to vote. With that in mind, she said the group’s goal is to “wake them up and activate them to take action, not just in these local elections that we endorse in, but at all levels of government.”

Moms for Liberty doesn't endorse in presidential races, and Descovich said the group will invite all three top presidential contenders to its annual summit this summer. Still, the new advertising blitz includes billboards that directly criticize President Joe Biden for his new Title IX regulations that provide safeguards for LGBTQ+ students. Moms for Liberty last week joined several states in suing the Biden administration to block those rules.....>

<....Biden campaign spokesperson Charles Lutvak said Moms for Liberty is “villainizing teachers and working to ban books as if we live in Soviet Russia.”

“President Biden is proudly campaigning alongside educators, parents and young Americans to strengthen public education for every American and keep our schools safe from gun violence,” he said.

In addition to the billboards, which advocate against “gender confusion” and call for parents to have more say in the classroom, the campaign also will include media interviews, targeted digital ads, and emails and text messages to voters, Descovich said.

The campaign comes as Moms for Liberty has been mired in recent scandals, including the recent sex assault investigation into the husband of co-founder Bridget Ziegler, who left the group shortly after starting it.

Ziegler’s husband, the now-ousted Florida Republican Party Chair Christian Ziegler, has since been cleared of rape and video voyeurism charges. However, news around the incident drove some Moms for Liberty members to quit the group and close their local chapters, citing a difference in values.

Local Moms for Liberty chapters and chapter leaders also have come under fire over the past year. Moms for Liberty removed two chapter chairs in Kentucky last fall after the women posed in photos with members of the far-right group the Proud Boys. Last summer, an Indiana chapter of the group apologized and condemned Adolf Hitler after using a quote attributed to the Nazi leader to make a statement in its inaugural newsletter.

Amid criticism, the group's endorsed candidates saw an underwhelming performance in school board elections last year, with fewer than a third winning their races, according to an analysis by the Brookings Institution.

Descovich said negative stories about the group haven't hurt its funding support.

“No one reached out to me and said, ‘We’re not going to donate to you anymore because of these stories,’” she said. “Everybody understands that the work we’re doing is going to be under intense attacks and scrutiny.”

Of the presidential swing states Moms for Liberty will be targeting, North Carolina is the only one with a state school superintendent race this year. The race will pit Republican Michele Morrow, a home-schooling parent and conservative activist who has signed Moms for Liberty's “parent pledge,” against Democrat Maurice “Mo" Green, a former Guilford County schools superintendent.

Morrow didn't respond to a request for comment about Moms for Liberty's new campaign. Green sent an emailed statement saying his opponent and Moms for Liberty had spread “conspiracy theories and hateful propaganda that demean teachers, students and parents.”

“The very soul of public education is on the ballot this November in North Carolina,” he said. "The good news is that I know that the champions of public education, those who believe in the transformative value of public education, will meet this moment and defeat these distorted and misguided views.”>

<On Thursday, The New York Times reported that 11 days after the Jan. 6 insurrection and three days before Joe Biden’s inauguration, an upside-down flag was seen flying outside Supreme Court Justice Samuel Alito’s home. This act is usually a symbol of distress, but after the 2020 election it became a form of political protest for many Trump supporters to signal their belief that the vote had been stolen from the soon-to-be former president.

Alito’s explanation for the upside-down flag on his property has been, how shall we say, creative. But it’s also befitting for a public servant who clearly believes he has no responsibility to the public.

First, the justice blamed his wife. “I had no involvement whatsoever in the flying of the flag,” Alito said in a statement to the Times that was the marital equivalent of throwing his better half under fellow Justice Clarence Thomas’ luxury RV. “It was briefly placed by Mrs. Alito in response to a neighbor’s use of objectionable and personally insulting language on yard signs.”

Then, in a longer explanation to Fox News’ Shannon Bream, Alito put some more flesh on the bone. He claimed that an angry spat with anti-Trump neighbors left his wife “so distraught” that she “hung the flag upside down for a very ‘short period of time.’”

For the sake of argument, let’s give Alito the benefit of the doubt. Let’s assume that while the justice claims some of his neighbors are “very political,” he and his wife are politically agnostic. Let’s also assume that three days before Biden’s inauguration — and in light of Trump’s claims of election theft — the Alitos, by chance, seized upon the upside-down flag as a symbolic response to their neighbors’ unneighborly-like behavior and were unaware of its use by Trump supporters to signal their anger over the 2020 election.

Even if we accept this admittedly unlikely series of events, Alito surely knows now the significance of the upside-down flag and its symbolic importance to Trump and his supporters. And it wasn’t as if the flag hung upside briefly, as he says. That claim is directly contradicted by his neighbors, who say it was fluttering on his front lawn for several days. Surely, Alito understands that some Americans could reasonably draw the impression that he and his wife acted in an overtly political manner, casting doubt on his impartiality as a Supreme Court justice. Even Sen. Lindsay Graham, R-S.C., called it “not good judgment.” Moreover, the Supreme Court has very clear and stringent rules for its staff on even the appearance of impartiality or political partisanship. Supreme Court employees are forbidden from any political activity, including attaching bumper stickers to their cars or displaying signs that suggest a political view.

So here’s the question for Alito: why not apologize? Even if Alito believes he did nothing wrong, why not simply say he’s sorry if people drew the wrong impression from the upside-down flag?

The answer is not difficult to discern: He does not care....>

<....We saw similarly petulant behavior from Alito last year ahead of a ProPublica story about his acceptance of an all-expenses-paid fishing trip with a conservative donor who had significant business before the Supreme Court. Alito pre-empted the piece by publishing an op-ed in The Wall Street Journal that haughtily denied any wrongdoing and, as was the case in the current imbroglio, refused to acknowledge any wrongdoing on his part.

Alito could have said, then and now, that he was sorry if anyone was offended — a tried-and-true non-apology apology. But even a minimum concession to his critics is too much for Alito. His sense of entitlement and victimization is so extreme that he believes he doesn’t owe anyone any explanation for behavior that suggests he is not an neutral arbiter of justice.

If Alito were concerned about the legitimacy of the Court and its perception among the American people, he would recuse himself from current cases that deal directly with the Jan. 6 insurrection. These include the prosecution of those arrested for their actions that day and former President Trump’s claims of immunity for his role in supporting an attempted electoral coup. But there is little indication that Alito has any intention of doing so.

It never seems to occur to Alito that as a public servant blessed with a lifetime appointment to the highest court in the land, he has any responsibility to the public he allegedly serves.

If Americans raise questions about Alito’s potential biases because of the upside-down flag incident or, even worse, question the legitimacy of a Supreme Court that seems to operate in a partisan manner and whose members flagrantly violate basic ethics rules or prohibitions on political speech, that’s their problem, not his. He has no obligation to reassure them. He owes them nothing.

Alito’s child-like petulance would almost be amusing if it wasn’t so horribly toxic. He and his fellow justices write decisions that have life-changing consequences for the American people — like the Dobbs ruling he wrote two years ago stripping away reproductive health rights from millions of American women. With that kind of awesome power comes enormous responsibility — and a basic obligation to assure Americans that justice is being meted out fairly, based not on partisan whim but on a dispassionate reading of the law.

Alito has clearly failed the test, and he could not care less.>

<Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-N.Y.) filed an ethics complaint Tuesday accusing the judge presiding over former President Trump's New York hush money trial of a conflict of interest, Axios has learned.

The letter is unlikely to have an immediate effect on the trial, but it's the latest chapter in Trump allies attempting to defend the former president by lodging complaints against the judge and prosecutors involved in the case.

"Acting Judge [Juan] Merchan is in clear violation of section 100.3(E)(1)(d)(iii) of the Rules of Judicial Conduct for the New York State Unified Court System as his family has enriched itself through anti-Trump fundraising mentioning this case directly," Stefanik told Axios in a statement.

A Trump acquittal would be "detrimental to Democrats, including clients of Judge Merchan's daughter," Stefanik said in a letter to the New York State Commission on Judicial Conduct requesting an investigation.

"If, on the other hand, [Trump] is convicted, such a verdict would provide a fundraising windfall for Democrat [sic] clients of Judge Merchan's daughter."

Stefanik's argument is akin to that of the Trump campaign and other right-wing Trump allies, who have seized upon Merchan's daughter, Loren, and her Democratic consulting work to call for Merchan's recusal.

Merchan last August rejected Trump's demand that he step aside from the criminal hush money case, citing guidance from the New York court system's Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics about his daughter's employment.

The New York court system did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

Stefanik, a close Trump ally and one of his most vocal defenders in Congress, has filed five formal complaints against judges and prosecutors involved in cases against Trump.

Those include complaints to the New York Commission on Judicial Conduct, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, the New York Bar Association and DOJ's Office of Professional Responsibility.

In November of last year, Stefanik previously filed an ethics complaint against Judge Arthur Engoron, the judge presiding over Trump's civil fraud trial, accusing Engoron of "weaponized lawfare" against Trump.

That complaint was dismissed.>

<The most entertaining aspect of a Republican Supreme Court ethics scandal is when the justices construct an elaborate defense tailored to fit the known facts of their ally’s misconduct, only for new facts to quickly arise that render their defense moot. It happened repeatedly in the Clarence Thomas financial scandals, and now it’s happening to Samuel Alito.

The first Alito story found that the justice had flown an upside-down American flag, a symbol used by stop-the-stealers, in January 2021. It was a scandal because judges are not supposed to engage in political displays and because it associated Alito with an especially nutty faction of right-wing politics (and one that calls into question his ability to fairly adjudicate cases related to Trump’s coup attempt)

Alito and his allies came back with several defenses. They insisted the flag had been flown by Alito’s wife in response to the provocations of a rude neighbor. This defense did not explain why Alito was unaware of a flag flying at his own house, nor why his wife chose to respond to a neighborhood quarrel by endorsing Trump’s election lies. And they insisted she briefly flew the flag because “it was a very heated time in January 2021.”

A series of conservative writers rushed to Alito’s defense by insisting nobody knew the upside-down flag signified support for Trump’s election lies.

Now, the New York Times reports that Alito flew another flag associated with Trump’s insurrection, the “Appeal to Heaven” flag, which was carried by insurrectionists on January 6. The flag was confirmed to have flown over Alito’s beach house in July and September 2023.

Note how the old Alito defenses are totally useless in the face of this new case. It can’t be chalked up to a dispute with a neighbor, unless the same neighbor happens to own property near Alito in two different states. The wife excuse is also threadbare. (Indeed, Alito, who blamed his wife in a response to the first Times story, has no comment in response to the second one.) And the excuse that it was “a heated time in January 2021” obviously does not explain why the Alito home continued to display insurrectionist flags two and a half years later.

Now maybe they will try to say that they also didn’t realize what the Appeal to Heaven flag signifies and that the Alitos coincidentally flew two different insurrectionist flags by mistake. But the meaning of this flag was well known on the far right; here is an article about it from 2021. You could invent a barely plausible story about how a non-insurrectionist would have a regular American flag on hand and fly it upside down in a fit of pique. It’s pretty hard to explain why they would also have an obscure flag used by Trump coup enthusiasts.

However, we can be sure Alito’s defenders will come up with something!>

That damn, rude neighbour!! Nerve of the bugger!!

<Congressional leaders recently unveiled a new statue of Billy Graham in the U.S. Capitol's Statuary Hall in a ceremony attended by his son Franklin Graham, House Speaker Mike Johnson, former Vice President Mike Pence and televangelist John Hagee, among others.

The pictures of Franklin in the shadow of his father's statue were a stark reminder that if the apple didn't fall far from the tree, it definitely rolled downhill a while.

Certainly, while beloved by many, the late Billy Graham is a complicated figure. On the one hand, the antisemitism and the anti-Catholic views that marked his early career were horrific and have no place in American society. Full stop. And it is also true that the famed Baptist evangelist was able to grow beyond many of those views, preached at integrated venues as early as 1953, and built bridges between conflicting groups. Polls repeatedly showed him to be one of the most admired and influential Americans of his time. Franklin, however, is a far less complicated figure. Distorting his father's legacy rather than safeguarding it, the younger Graham has twisted his father's name as much as he's twisted Christ's—and all in the pursuit of the proximity to "hard right" political power that his father repeatedly said he came to abhor. Despite Billy's beloved reputation and Franklin's presence on Capitol Hill for the statue unveiling, lawmakers and reporters should remember that Franklin is not his father, and that he does not speak for most Christians in the United States.

To be clear, while I do have significant concerns about the implications for the separation of church and state of putting a preacher's statue in the Capitol—even a preacher I can somewhat admire—the biggest issue is not the statue. It's the use of Billy Graham's legacy as sheep's clothing to disguise wolves like Franklin, Speaker Johnson, and their allies.

Because when Franklin is allowed to misrepresent his father's legacy unchecked, especially in front of an audience as influential as at the statue unveiling, we risk allowing his anti-democratic, hate-filled, pro-former President Donald Trump, Christian-nationalist agenda to become more palatable and seem more mainstream than it really is.

If we are to take Billy Graham at his word, he likely would not approve of his son's actions. Indeed, the elder Graham told Parade magazine that he had urged Jerry Falwell, Sr. to avoid politics: "It would disturb me if there was a wedding between the religious fundamentalists and the political right. The hard right has no interest in religion except to manipulate it."

Yet, the boundaries between evangelism and activism for which Billy Graham's later years became well-known are now blatantly ignored, dismissed, and defenestrated by Franklin and his friends. Franklin's initial support for Trump's Big Lie, his dismissal of the Capitol Riot of Jan. 6, 2021, as a false flag by "antifa," and his claim that Trump is "one of the great presidents" have surely left his father rolling over in his grave. It's small wonder that he, like Speaker Johnson, is a leading member of Faithful America's False Prophets hall of fame. (Disclosure: I am the executive director of Faithful America, which represents approximately 200,000 grassroots Christians.)....>

<....While, late in life, Billy told Christianity Today that one of his greatest regrets was being too involved in partisan politics, Franklin is running the other way, snatching up every photo opportunity he can with Trump and other extreme Republican leaders. He also appeared at Trump's 2020 convention, offering his prayers from behind a Trump campaign sign.

While Billy refused to tell people they would go to hell if they didn't share his Christian views, instead finding more loving ways to spread his faith, Franklin writes fork-tongued articles with titles such as "Progressive Christianity Can Lead You to Hell." Franklin is also a notorious homophobe, attacking LGBTQ Americans—including LGBTQ Christians by name, such as Pete Buttigieg—with the kind of vicious language that increases suicide rates and turns people off to the church and away from Jesus, rather than inviting them in as his father did.

While Billy Graham sought to be a man of great humility, Franklin Graham responded to criticism with bravado and dismissal, implying that to critique him is to critique Scripture itself. For example, when we at Faithful America criticized the hypocrisy of his misleadingly named recent "God Loves Tour," he said, "The opposition ultimately isn't against me—it's against what God says in the Bible."

Thankfully, thousands of Christians across the country have seen through Franklin's disguise. Faithful America has gathered 250,000 signatures over the years to call out Franklin Graham's homophobia, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, and support for white Christian nationalism.

But events like the unveiling of the Capitol's Billy Graham statue are signs we can't stop now. That's why we had a mobile billboard calling out Franklin both on Capitol Hill last week and at his tour stops along the border earlier this year, reminding him of his father's words.

Lawmakers looking for feedback from their constituents, as well as reporters covering the role of religion in politics, should not be fooled by Franklin Graham: Despite his ridiculous claim that any organization that criticizes him is only a "so-called Christian group," he is a false prophet, hardly the "Protestant Pope" his father was, and will never be able to speak for the majority of American Christians.>

<A top House Republican has threatened former White House press secretary Jen Psaki with a subpoena if she does not voluntarily testify before Congress about President Joe Biden’s botched withdrawal from Afghanistan.

The 2021 sudden and chaotic exit from the country ended in the deaths of 13 U.S. service members and billions of dollars in weapons ending up in the hands of terrorists.

Republican Rep. Michael McCaul of Texas, the chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, is investigating the country’s end to the two-decade war in Afghanistan.

According to Axios, he has sought to hear Psaki’s side of the colossal military and leadership failure, but she has declined to speak with his committee since last September. When she claimed falsely in her new book released this month that her then-boss, President Joe Biden, never looked at his watch during the dignified transfer of remains of some of the killed U.S. service members, McCaul renewed a push to speak with Psaki.

In a letter addressed to both the now-MSNBC anchor and her attorney Emily Loeb this week, McCaul demanded accountability and transparency.

"As a private citizen, willing and able to publish a memoir on her tenure as White House Press Secretary, I encourage Ms. Psaki to refrain from relying on thin legal arguments to dodge her responsibility to appear before Congress,” McCaul wrote in his letter.

“The Committee will not tolerate Ms. Psaki's continued obstruction of its critical investigation," he added.

The Texas Republican concluded he felt Psaki was making an attempt to cash in on the deaths of American soldiers by publishing the book “Say More: Lessons from Work, the White House, and the World.”

Psaki had already updated the ebook to retract a false claim that Biden did not look at his watch multiple times in 2021 as the president met with the family members of dead American service members killed at the airport in Kabul when U.S. forces scrambled for the exits.

"It is troubling that Ms. Psaki seeks to profit off the Afghanistan tragedy, and has felt comfortable writing accounts and making them available to the general public, but refuses to make herself available to Congress,” McCaul wrote, Axios reported.

Axios concluded McCaul threatened Psaki with a subpoena in the letter.

In remarks earlier this year on the investigation into the Biden administration’s Afghanistan withdrawal, McCaul stated that “nothing was done” by the Pentagon or White House when intelligence experts warned them that conditions in the country were deteriorating before the scheduled exit date of the military.

“Instead, our investigation uncovered the White House refused to listen to warnings about the situation on the ground,” he added.

“People all over the world watched as babies were flung over barbed wire fence[s] by mothers without hope, desperate Afghans fell to their deaths from airplanes, and hordes of people surrounded the airport as they tried to flee for their lives,” McCaul also said.

When addressing family members of the U.S. service members killed at the Kabul airport, McCaul said, “I will not rest until I get to the bottom of this tragedy. You deserve answers. The American people deserve answers.”

The congressman concluded by saying that the sacrifices of the troops would not be forgotten, even though, as he said, “The president has never publicly stated the names of your children.”

McCaul is seeking to release a report about the exit from Afghanistan by the end of the summer, Axios reported.>

<The American electorate is always shifting, altering the scenarios that determine who the next president will be.

The nation is becoming more diverse and more educated. Growing Latino and Asian-American communities are changing the voter composition in many states. White, working-class voters—a majority of the electorate as recently as 2008—continue to shrink with each election.

These trends, combined with changes in candidate choices by various voter groups, mean that the 2024 presidential candidates are navigating a landscape different from earlier elections.

Our Swing-States Dial shows how such shifts in the seven battleground states can alter the outcome of the presidential election. Even small movements in voter turnout or party preference among a single subgroup can tip not just one swing state, but multiple states—and therefore the Electoral College.

The Dial considers three inputs to create different election-outcome scenarios:

Which Americans make up the voter pool? Latino voters, for example, are a growing force in the electorate and are likely to exceed the 10% share of all voters they posted in 2020. White, working-class voters—those without a college degree—are projected to fall by nearly 2 percentage points. Which Americans will choose to vote? Will young voters sit out the election, in part because of anger at U.S. policy in the Israel-Hamas war? Will former President Donald Trump drive up turnout among white, working-class voters?Which candidate wins their vote? Will college-educated voters continue their Democratic tilt? Will Republicans increase their share of voters without college degrees?

Take a look at the hypothetical scenarios below or jump straight to our interactive tool ↓

Pennsylvania
A small shift in support from white, working-class voters could put the state back in Trump’s column

White, working-class voters are hugely important to Trump, providing 57% of all the votes he received nationally in 2020. This group remains a majority of the voter pool in the swing states of the industrial north: Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin. In Pennsylvania, they cast 53% of the ballots in 2020, according to AP VoteCast, a large survey of the electorate that year.

That is such a big share that only a 1-point increase in Republican support among this group would flip the state from President Biden to Trump—even as its ranks give way to a younger cohort that is more diverse and educated.

Educational attainment—whether someone has a four-year college degree—has divided white voters sharply into those backing Democratic candidates and those backing Republicans. The same hasn’t been true among Black or Latino voters. Nationally, Trump in 2020 won white voters without a four-year degree by 25 percentage points, while Biden won white college graduates by 7 points.

Black voters, by contrast, weren’t divided by their level of education: Biden won more than 90% support among those with and without degrees. And he won more than 60% support among Latino voters with and without degrees.

Georgia

What a depressed or energized Black electorate means for the nation’s most competitive state

Black voters are one of the most loyal and important components of the Democratic coalition. Will they turn out this year? That question is particularly important in Georgia.

Biden won the state in 2020 by a closer margin than in any other battleground, partly because of a big increase in turnout among Black voters: 64% in 2020 compared with 59% in 2016. It was the first time a Democrat carried Georgia since Bill Clinton won it in 1992. If the turnout rate among these voters slips to the 2016 level this year, the state would flip back to Trump....>

<....Nevada

The Latino population is growing and is increasingly open to the GOP

In Nevada, Latino voters accounted for 16% of ballots cast in 2020, up 5 points from 2008, according to Catalist, a Democratic voter-data firm.

Democrats’ winning margin has shrunk in recent elections. Another big shift in Nevada would flip the state to the GOP.

Nevada also has one of the largest shares of young voters among the swing states, many of them Latino. Latino voters under the age of 30 swung 9 points away from Democrats in 2020 compared with 2016, Catalist found, while those over age 65 shifted by only 3 points.

Your turn

Adjust the party lean and turnout rate of various voting groups to see how small changes affect the swing states and overall election outcome

Methodology

The Swing-States Dial illustrates hypothetical scenarios of how shifting turnout and vote choice could potentially alter the election outcome. It considers one demographic category at a time, such as race, to illustrate the impact of each population characteristic (e.g., Latino voters). In reality, the various demographic characteristics intermingle.

The dial works by first estimating the pool of eligible voters using the U.S. Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey as of November 2023. Eligible voters are defined as U.S. citizens 18 and older. Totals are calculated for each population characteristic in each state.

Turnout rates are calculated as a percentage of eligible voters. The historical range represents turnout rates in presidential elections from 1996 to 2020.

Data on 2020 party lean for each demographic characteristic are based on the share of the vote for Biden and Trump in 2020, excluding third parties, using data from AP VoteCast, a large poll of the electorate that year conducted in all 50 states.

Adjustments to party lean and voter turnout for each demographic group cascade to the state level. State-level turnout rates for each demographic group are calculated based on the state’s difference from the national turnout rate in 2020 for that group. State-level party lean for each demographic group is calculated based on the state’s difference from the national party lean for that group, averaged across 2018, 2020 and 2022, with 2020 data given more weight, and 2022 weighted more heavily than 2018. Party lean for certain demographic characteristics isn’t available in some states for all years; in those cases, the difference from the national party lean is calculated using the years for which data are available.

Accounting for third-party votes adjusts for both state and demographic group effects. On the state level, the adjustment considers the average third-party share of the vote in the state relative to the nationwide third-party average over the past six presidential elections. The third-party share within each demographic group is based on the most recent WSJ national poll. These two factors combine to adjust the share of the vote for Biden and Trump among that group within each state.>

<It takes a lot of courage for a lower court judge to criticize the Supreme Court, but Judge Carlton Reeves has long felt a responsibility to speak candidly to the public about threats to their civil rights. In an opinion on Monday, he calls for the abolition of qualified immunity—a noxious legal doctrine that insulates violent and corrupt government officials, especially law enforcement, from accountability. He embedded this call to action in a broader critique of the Supreme Court’s selective application of precedent—with a focus on the cavalier reversal of Roe v. Wade—as well as its pernicious distrust of democracy. Reeves’ opinion warns all who wish to listen that a broad array of our constitutional liberties are in serious and imminent jeopardy.

A Barack Obama appointee, Reeves sits on a U.S. District Court in Mississippi. His latest opinion was sparked by facts that he sees all too often and has written about before: the egregious violation of a criminal suspect’s constitutional rights as an innocent person wrongly charged with a crime. It began when detective Jacquelyn Thomas of Jackson, Mississippi, accused Desmond Green of murder. The detective’s only evidence was a statement made by Green’s acquaintance, Samuel Jennings—after Jennings was arrested for burglary and grand larceny, and while he was under the influence of meth. Thomas allegedly encouraged Jennings to select Green’s picture out of a photo lineup after he identified someone else as the killer. Allegedly, she also misled the grand jury to secure an indictment, concealing Jennings’ drug abuse as well as the many inconsistencies and inaccuracies in his statement.

Jennings later recanted, admitting that, in his meth-addled state, he’d provided a bogus tip. A judge finally dismissed the charges. By that point, Green had spent 22 months in jail, serving pretrial detention. The facility was violent. The food was moldy. He slept on the floor. His cell was infested with snakes and vermin.

Green then sued Thomas, accusing her of malicious prosecution in violation of the Constitution. Thomas promptly asserted qualified immunity to defeat the lawsuit. This doctrine protects government officials from liability unless they run afoul of “clearly established” law. In other words, there must be an earlier case on the books with similar, “particularized” facts that explicitly bars the official’s actions. If there is no near-identical precedent that unambiguously prohibits those acts, qualified immunity kicks in, the lawsuit is tossed out, and the case never even reaches a jury.

This shield has allowed a repulsive amount of wrongdoing by police and prosecutors to go totally unpunished. Cops are permitted to brutally beat, murder, steal from, and conspire against innocent people because the rights they violate are, ostensibly, not “clearly established.” Courts regularly apply the doctrine when there is a tiny discrepancy between a previous case and the facts at hand as an excuse to let the officer off scot-free. And over the past few decades, SCOTUS itself has expanded qualified immunity to new extremes. The result, as Reeves wrote, is “a perpetuation of racial inequality”: Black Americans experience more violations of their civil rights than any other class, yet qualified immunity denies them a remedy in even the most appalling circumstances.

Here, though, Reeves refused to let the doctrine devour the Constitution. He concluded that there is sufficient on-point precedent to show that Thomas’ malicious prosecution, if proved, violated Green’s “clearly established” rights. So the case may go to trial. That, however, was not the end of his analysis—because, as he pointed out, the concept of qualified immunity is unlawful, unworkable, and indefensible.

The first problem is that judges made up the doctrine as a special favor to other employees of the government. Congress, as Reeves explained, gave individuals the power to sue state officials in federal court through the Ku Klux Klan Act of 1871, enacted after the Civil War so newly freed Black Americans could sue racist and abusive local police. Congress did not establish anything like “qualified immunity” in the statute. Rather, the Supreme Court invented the doctrine in 1967, purporting to protect cops who commit illegal arrests in “good faith,” and imposed it unilaterally on the nation. It then crept, kudzu-like, into other areas of law.....>

<....“The People never enshrined qualified immunity in the Constitution,” Reeves wrote. “Our representatives in Congress never put it into the statute or voted for it. No President signed it into law. If anything, it represents a kind of ‘trickle-down’ democratic legitimacy.” In recent years, the Supreme Court has not bothered to account for qualified immunity’s origins, but rather maintains it on the basis of respect for precedent: It exists already, so it might as well keep existing.

And here is where Reeves goes for the jugular: The Supreme Court has tossed out far more defensible and entrenched precedent on the basis of far feebler excuses. How can it justify keeping qualified immunity around while recklessly destabilizing vast areas of settled law it doesn’t like?

SCOTUS has suggested that law enforcement officers have come to rely on qualified immunity, creating a “reliance interest” that counsels keeping the doctrine. But when the court overruled Roe in 2022’s Dobbs decision, Reeves wrote, the majority rejected that “kind of vague, ‘generalized assertion about the national psyche.’ ” Instead, Reeves wrote, the justices “thought voters should resolve reliance interests, not judges.” He then repurposed Dobbs’ most notorious lines: “After all, just like women, law enforcement officers and their unions ‘are not without electoral or political power.’ ” Law enforcement officers, like women, can “affect the legislative process by influencing public opinion, lobbying legislators, voting, and running for office.” If courts can’t protect women’s bodily autonomy, he asked, why should they do the bidding of police unions?

Dobbs, Reeves went on, “also reflects the Supreme Court’s desire to remove itself from the center of a hot-button issue and return it to the electoral process.” Police reform, like abortion, is undoubtedly a “controversy on issues of life and death, where passions run high.” Yet even after Dobbs, SCOTUS “has not yet seen fit to return this contested issue to the democratic process,” Reeves opined. “It is not clear why.” After all, “the current court is certainly not shy about overturning precedent.” And the list of cases on the chopping block “seems to grow every year.” Teachers’ unions and racial minorities have watched the court gut precedent that shielded them for decades. Why should cops get favored treatment? Merely because of SCOTUS’ “policy-based choice” to “privilege government officials over all others.”....>

<....Reeves has a complex history with reproductive rights. He was the district court judge who struck down the Mississippi law that the Supreme Court later upheld in Dobbs when overruling Roe. His emphatic opinion famously accused the Mississippi Legislature of misogynistic “gaslighting,” analogizing the state’s defiance of Roe to its earlier defiance of Brown v. Board of Education. It’s evident that, to Reeves, the Supreme Court’s embrace of democracy in Dobbs rings hollow alongside its rejection of democracy in so many other areas, including the Second Amendment. (In a pointed footnote, he called out the court for treating the right to bear arms as a uniquely absolute, unlimited freedom—while greenlighting the erosion of other liberties that it values less.)

The judge folds together these rather scathing observations by reminding us that the Supreme Court’s creation and expansion of qualified immunity is, itself, a rejection of democracy. The Framers, after all, envisioned jury trials as a bulwark of democratic power, a check by “We the People” on government abuse. It was, Reeves wrote, designed to be exercised “one dispute at a time, day after day, rather than on fixed election days.” Unfortunately, an arrogant “judicial supremacy has too-often deprived the people of their proper role” in deciding whether public officials should be liable for their unconstitutional acts. Qualified immunity “reflects a deep distrust of ordinary people” in direct conflict with the Constitution. “In the same way we trust the collective judgment of voters in elections, we must trust the judgment of jurors in deciding cases,” Reeves wrote. They can resolve “tensions and contradictions case by case, as the evidence dictates.” All judges must do “is tell jurors the truth.”

Will the Supreme Court listen? The conservative justices seem disinclined to reevaluate their cynical, selective concerns about precedent and democracy. But with this opinion, Reeves has given the public yet another reason to question these justices’ increasingly dubious wisdom and integrity. Just as importantly, other judges may take note of Monday’s critique and follow Reeves’ suggestion of narrowing qualified immunity wherever possible. They might even join him in calling for its eradication, forcing SCOTUS to either stand by its handiwork or reevaluate it. The judge’s simple suggestion boils down to this: If we’re going to do democracy, let’s actually do democracy—not whatever partisan, half-baked substitute this Supreme Court is trying to pass off to the people.>

<It’s easy to be furious at Samuel Alito, who has recently racked up yet another petty personal grievance display over, of all things, flags. Last week saw the earthquake report that his wife flew a flag upside down—signaling either that the country is in danger or that the election was stolen—in the days after the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol. This week, the New York Times further reports that Alito was flying an “Appeal to Heaven” flag at his New Jersey beach house this past summer. That flag is not merely another Jan. 6 signifier but is also rooted in John Locke’s “appeal to heaven,” meaning “a responsibility to rebel, even use violence, to overthrow unjust rule.”

In some ways, this is another very ridiculous, very 2024 story about the lengths to which ostensible adults will go toward owning the libs, and one justice’s fantastically bad judgment and cluelessness about the appearance of impropriety. But this is not even about Samuel Alito. Neither, actually, was the bombshell report about his alleged leak of the outcome of the Hobby Lobby decision in 2014 to wealthy religious Supreme Court lobbyists about Samuel Alito. To expend energy railing against this one petty, petty little man is to inveigh against the symptom as opposed to the problem.

It is just as easy to be enraged at Clarence Thomas and his myriad and corrosive ethics violations. His wife has texted with Mark Meadows over what she believed to be a stolen 2020 election, tried to encourage state legislators to support a slate of dummy electors, attended part of the “Stop the Steal” rally on Jan. 6, and testified before the Jan. 6 committee that she still believed that that election had been stolen. And Thomas has declined to recuse himself from the three Jan. 6 cases heard at the high court this year. But again, this is not about Ginni or Clarence Thomas. Expending energy hopelessly trying to shame Clarence Thomas or Samuel Alito is an act of incalculable futility.

It is not even, I fear, about Chief Justice John Roberts, who might have, in a different time and under different circumstances, been the type of history-minded leader who would have dealt with this shameless and flagrant squandering of the court’s reputation as a serious body. After all, Roberts once told Jeffrey Rosen in the Atlantic, “The Court is also ripe for a similar refocus on functioning as an institution, because if it doesn’t it’s going to lose its credibility and legitimacy as an institution.” But that chief justice left the chat at least a decade ago. In failing to act, over and over, he has been a powerful actor.

In Legitimacy Roberts’ stead we have been left with yet another defensive, thin-skinned thunderer about judicial independence and a longtime coddler of insurrectionists and grifters. Which is why calling on Roberts to take a page from Chief Justice Earl Warren’s playbook and use his moral authority to do something about Alito and Thomas—as Warren once did about Abe Fortas—is almost as futile as calling for him to put real teeth into an ethics code or conduct a meaningful investigation of the Dobbs leak. Roberts, respectfully, has long ago made the decision that he is simply one coequal vote among nine. He neither wants nor possesses the authority to rein in the MAGA justices. He may vote as though he cares about court legitimacy, but he chief justices like the harassed mother of a kid throwing a tantrum at Safeway—all shrugs and eye rolls. We can and should demand that Roberts account for what he knew and when he knew it, but Roberts will not solve the problem he has allowed to fester and grow....>

<....So if the real problem here is not Sam Alito, or Clarence Thomas, or John Roberts, why have we wasted years of ink and umbrage and energy trying to change their behavior? Alito and Thomas will not be recusing themselves from either Fisher or the Trump immunity case. The chief justice will not be urging them to do so. No lawyer arguing in front of the court will, as Sherrilyn Ifill has been urging, demand a recusal or an investigation of justices with blatant conflicts of interest hearing these Jan. 6 cases because, as Noah Bookbinder of CREW recently told us on the Amicus podcast, to ask the very people you want to cast votes for you to find themselves conflicted is rank insanity. “The system of leaving it up to litigants to challenge justices as potentially conflicted doesn’t make any sense,” Bookbinder said. “Of course that’s not going to work. And leaving justices to make that determination doesn’t make any sense. You need to have some kind of outside body who can evaluate those kinds of questions.”

Who, who, who might that outside body be? Tapping my chin—you tap yours.

Bookbinder’s answer points beautifully to the real problem: We have a judicial enterprise that rules over us with absolutely no one ruling over it. Nobody should be all that surprised that Sen. Dick Durbin has announced that the Senate Judiciary Committee will not launch a probe into Alito’s recent conduct. The Senate has also been trying to unearth the financing for Thomas’ quarter-million-dollar, salt-of-the-earth RV, amid other ethics violations, and Leonard Leo has declined to comply with subpoenas related to it. Yes, the Senate should be acting to resolve this problem, but that seems to have largely stalled at “Ask them to recuse.”

So, just to review, this isn’t really a Sam Alito problem, or a Clarence Thomas problem, or a John Roberts problem—but it also isn’t even a Senate-Dems-who-can’t-muster-the-energy-to-clo- se-the-deal problem.

No, I have come to conclude that this is an us problem. Because rather than hurling ourselves headlong into the “Alito Must Recuse” brick wall of “yeah, no,” we need to dedicate the upcoming election cycle, and the attendant election news cycle, to a discussion of the courts. Not just Alito or Thomas, who happen to go to work every day at the court, and not just Dobbs and gun control, which happen to have come out of the very same court, but the connection between those two tales: what it means to have a Supreme Court that is functionally immune from political pressure, from internal norms of behavior, from judicial ethics and disclosure constraints, and from congressional oversight, and why that is deeply dangerous. More so, why justices who were placed on the court to behave as well-compensated partisan politicians would do so in public as well as on paper. Until we do that, Alito will continue to fly around the world, giving speeches about his triumph in Dobbs and Thomas will keep taking gifts and failing to disclose them. That won’t be the end of the Supreme Court story; it will be just the start of it.>

<For many outside the ivory tower, it was clear university leaders needed to do something to quell the chaos surrounding pro-Palestinian encampments on their campuses. So when college presidents from New Hampshire to New York to Georgia to California invited riot police to break up the protest camps, firing "less-lethal" weapons, zip-tying students and throwing professors to the ground, it may have seemed like a tough but necessary call.

"There must be consequences," declared the president of my university, USC’s Carol Folt, for students who "foment harassment, violence, and threats." This echoed statements of other university leaders, and President Biden himself, who, despite a nod to the First Amendment, pronounced, "order must prevail." In denouncing the protestors, he also cited antisemitism and a "fear of being attacked." Not least, and not lost on university presidents, Virginia Foxx, the Republican chair of a key House education committee, warned administrators to take firm action against their "unlawful antisemitic encampments" — lest they be hauled in front of Congress, and, like a few of their Ivy League peers, be forced to resign. By opting to militarize our campus, Folt has dodged the next round of these McCarthyistic congressional hearings, which begin today.

Yet for those of us on the inside, at USC and elsewhere, the image of a lawless, violent, antisemitic pro-Palestinian mob stands completely at odds with the reality. With few exceptions, the encampments have been overwhelmingly peaceful, well-organized microsocieties, with posted community rules, medical and food tents, yoga and meditation, kite-making workshops, teach-ins, and Shabbat services and Passover seders. These students and supporting faculty form a multi-racial interfaith community. They are united by their outrage at the slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza by Israeli bombs supplied by U.S. taxpayers. They share a vision for freedom and justice for Palestine.

President Folt could have understood all this herself had she ventured from her office bunker and walked the 75 paces to the encampment. The many Jewish students there would have told her why they've been proudly saying, "Not in my name." Or, that there's a difference between feeling unsafe by hearing a "free Palestine" chant, and actually being unsafe — a crucial distinction in determining free-speech rights. Even the allegedly antisemitic chant, "from the river to the sea" — which originated as a Zionist concept decades before the creation of Israel, and was written in the original platform of the Likud Party in 1977 — is understood by Gaza protestors today as a vision of equality, and freedom from occupation and violence, for all the people of the Holy Land, Palestinian and Israeli alike. While the slogan engenders fear for many Jewish students, a University of Chicago poll showed 76 percent of Muslim students understood it to mean that Palestinians and Israelis should live together (in one or two states) on the same land.

Some university presidents, refusing to "solve" the problem with riot police, have shown what real leadership means. They listened to their encamped students and agreed to some of their demands. "That's what a lot of students are really looking for — to take a moral stance about what is taking place in the world," Cal State-Sacramento president Luke Wood told CBS News. Wood said he did "92 listening sessions" before coming to an agreement. College presidents at Northwestern and Rutgers also reached agreements with their student encampments without calling in the police. Not coincidentally, those two presidents have now been summoned before Rep. Foxx's committee and will appear today.

Avoiding that summons is likely one of the reasons why USC President Folt never made that walk to our student encampment. Nor has she responded to the letter signed by some 60 USC Jewish faculty members, denouncing the weaponization of antisemitism "to silence and delegitimize certain perspectives and expressions of protest," while "fueling counter-protests by right-wing nationalists exploiting the struggle against antisemitism for their own gain." Missing in the discussion is the fact that nearly equal percentages of Muslims also feel unsafe on campus. Hardly surprising, Islamophobia is not on the Foxx agenda today. Yet pro-Palestinian students "have not only had job offers rescinded," writes UCLA's Saree Makdisi in the Los Angeles Review of Books, "but also have been doxed, placed on blacklists...fired, suspended, banned from campus," and "sprayed with irritants or chemical weapons..." >

<....At UCLA late on April 30 and the morning of May 1, multiple accounts show, pro-Israel counterdemonstrators relentlessly attacked a peaceful pro-Palestinian encampment. “A mob of men, some of them later identified as far-right activists, reportedly launched fireworks into the encampment, swung two-by-fours with nails sticking out of them, and uttered death and rape threats," Piper French wrote in the New York Review of Books. "They punched and maced four student journalists, brought one to the ground, and beat him at length.” One student journalist required hospitalization, along with 25 other students for "broken bones, head trauma, and severe lacerations." The counter-protesters also inexplicably released live mice into the camp. The violent siege went on for several hours, with no police intervention.

One of the men on hand that night was later identified as a member of the Proud Boys; another, as an anti-gay activist known for his antisemitic statements and Nazi salutes. Yet another participant, it turned out, was apparently embedded with the Los Angeles Sheriff's Department. Aaron Cohen, a self-proclaimed former Israeli special-ops veteran, boasted on X that he "[r]an a quiet infiltration operation into the UCLA encampment and now down here with LASD who’s staging now and preparing to make entry...to begin taking down the pro-terror antisemitic encampment. "

Meanwhile, after a night in which the police were shockingly absent, in the wee hours of May 2, dozens of officers from LAPD, LASD and the California Highway Patrol dismantled the camp, arresting more than 200 protesters. Despite the one-sided violence, UCLA Chancellor Gene Block defended his decision to ask the police to take down the camp. "Several days of violent clashes between demonstrators and counter-demonstrators put too many Bruins in harm’s way and created an environment that was completely unsafe for learning." Of course, riot police are also, arguably, not safe for learning.

And yet despite the smearing and false accusations against pro-Palestinian demonstrators, in the vast majority of cases, at UCLA, USC, and elsewhere, students who endured the violent crackdowns now face trespassing charges on their own college campuses, and potentially disastrous academic sanctions. They are guilty not of antisemitism, but of expressing the "wrong" kind of speech about Israel's war on Gaza. As the USC Jewish faculty letter states, "the university’s actions have distorted principled, peaceful protest and demonized encamped students and their supporters."

In smearing our students, my USC president and her peers have taken extreme measures against those they are charged to protect – not, I believe, to ensure peace on campus, but out of mortal fear of their own universities’ donors, and of being called to testify in Congress. Rep. Foxx assailed the Rutgers and Northwestern agreements as "surrender to antisemitic radicals." Foxx's Education and the Workforce Committee has been transformed into a modern-day Star Chamber, where Trump sycophant, Rep. Elise Stefanik, R-NY, lies in wait like a 21st Century inquisitor. Stefanik, who inspires dread akin to the likes of Lord Voldemort, already has a few notches on her belt, including the resignations of the presidents of Harvard and Penn....>

<....It's a sign of the times that university presidents like Folt, who called in the helicopters and body-armored police, sealed the gates of the university, barred non-USC journalists, and implemented double-ID scans and bag checks for everyone on campus, have for now escaped the committee's scrutiny. And so the Northwestern and Rutgers presidents who refused to militarize their campus are now preparing to defend themselves in Congress. UCLA's chancellor will also face questioning by Foxx, Stefanik and other committee members.

Stefanik has a much broader agenda, including as a potential running mate to Donald Trump in 2024. On Sunday she was in Israel, addressing the Knesset, where she proclaimed that "with God's help," Donald Trump will win reelection. Part of her Trump bona fides is her broader reactionary attack on free speech. She voted for the bipartisan Antisemitism Awareness Act, which incorporates a sweeping definition of antisemitism proposed by the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance. Many Jewish groups oppose this effort, believing it stifles legitimate criticism of Israel under the guise of antisemitism. A coalition of 104 human rights and civil society groups, including many in Israel, wrote that the IHRA definition "has often been used to wrongly label criticism of Israel as antisemitic, and thus chill and sometimes suppress, non-violent protest, activism and speech critical of Israel." More than 1300 Jewish professors in the U.S. also objected. "If imported into federal law," the scholars wrote, "the IHRA definition will delegitimize and silence Jewish Americans–among others–who advocate for Palestinian human rights or otherwise criticize Israeli policies."

These efforts to restrict criticism of Israel are themselves part of a broader right-wing effort to undermine academic freedom, attack diversity efforts and suppress dissent nationwide. Some 57 bills in state legislatures are part of a "coordinated attack against public colleges and universities with legislation that would undermine academic freedom, chill classroom speech and impose partisan agendas," according to the American Association of University Professors. And in recent years, since the protests against oil pipelines in the Dakotas and the Black Lives Matter mobilizations after the murder of George Floyd, dozens of red states have advanced anti-protest laws. In some cases, these laws define a "riot" as a gathering of three or more people that allegedly pose a threat to public safety.

This anti-democratic agenda is already gaining momentum under Biden. We can only imagine how far it could go in a second Trump term.

And so the college presidents preparing to address Congress this morning would do well to consider the broader historical implications of their testimony. It is time for them to speak out: not in support of repression, but in defense of their students, and of the principles of free expression and academic freedom.

Seventy years ago, Army lawyer Joseph Welch faced down Sen. Joe McCarthy, who accused Welch of harboring a Communist sympathizer on his staff. Welch responded with the words that Americans had been longing for.

"Until this moment, Senator, I think I never really gauged your cruelty or your recklessness," Welch told McCarthy. "Have you no sense of decency?"

The time has come for an American college president to stop cowering and speak truth to power. We need another Joseph Welch moment. College administrators who bow to the anti-democratic forces of the hard right in Congress, and the Trumpian neofascists poised to take power, are perched at the edge of an icy, perilous slope. Principles far greater than job security are at stake. How college presidents act from here forward matters more than ever.>

<The evidence in People v. Trump is officially closed after a turbulent few days in the courtroom.

Early this week, Michael Cohen finally ended his testimony after several days of aggressive and possibly crucial cross-examination by Donald Trump’s lead attorney, Todd Blanche. One witness for Trump concluded his testimony after a public confrontation with the judge.

Some crucial events remain outstanding. The judge has not yet finalized the instructions that jurors will receive — the so-called jury charge — which may be crucial to the case. More importantly, closing arguments will take place on Tuesday, which could turn out to be a make-or-break event for either side.

To get a sense of exactly where things stand as the trial enters its final phase as well as how it may be affecting Trump’s presidential campaign, we convened the third in a series of roundtables with POLITICO’s legal and political reporters. We were joined for this session by Erica Orden, Ben Feuerherd and Josh Gerstein, who have been reporting from the courthouse and the courtroom, as well as Meridith McGraw, who has been covering the Trump 2024 bid as a potentially critical inflection point — the verdict — approaches.

This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.

Ben, we had the last witness get off the stand on Tuesday. It was a lawyer named Robert Costello testifying on behalf of Trump about his brief work representing Cohen. Things ended up being much testier than I would have expected from a lawyer testifying in a criminal case, but on top of that, I thought it was a little unclear — if I were a juror — what I was supposed to take away. What did you see as the key points from Costello’s time on the stand?

Feuerherd: I think the substance of his testimony probably helped prosecutors make the point that they wanted to make — that Costello wanted to have this relationship with Cohen to create this backchannel to the Trump team and ultimately, to feed information to [Trump personal attorney] Rudy Giuliani and then on to Trump. Prosecutors might use that and say that the fact that Trump wanted to keep Cohen in the fold after the FBI raided him in 2018 is evidence that Trump knew that Cohen may have damaging information or that the investigation may come back to him, and that maybe he did something wrong with Cohen.

Separate to the substance of it, Costello is this bombastic lawyer who played a character similar to Trump, where he rolled his eyes, literally, at the judge, and conveyed with his demeanor in court that this whole thing is just like a sham or a kangaroo court.

And ultimately, there was a big blow-up by the judge. It wasn’t huge, but he cleared the courtroom to admonish Costello, so I think he spoke volumes with his demeanor in court.

Do you think Trump’s team was able to make any useful points with the jury through Costello’s testimony?

Feuerherd: Costello said Cohen told him that Cohen didn’t believe he had anything on Trump in these meetings and these phone calls that he had in 2018, but I feel like that’s going to be a hard pill to swallow for the jury.

Erica, Trump had been saying he wanted to testify in this case. He did, in fact, take the stand twice of his own volition in the last year. Were you surprised that he didn’t take the stand this time around?

Orden: I was not surprised. In addition to all of the downsides that many people have discussed regarding how he would be cross-examined and what he would be cross examined on, I think it’s instructive to look at these other two times that he testified.

The first time was in the civil fraud case, and there was no jury, and Judge [Arthur] Engoron gave him a long leash on that testimony, he let him insult him to his face and go off on all sorts of tangents in his testimony.

But the second time, there was a jury in the second E. Jean Carroll trial, and Judge [Lewis] Kaplan was extremely strict with — well, he was extremely strict with the entire trial, in terms of his handling of it, but he was also very narrow in terms of what he allowed Trump to do on the stand. I think he allowed him to answer three questions. He allowed his attorney to ask him three questions. I believe one of those questions was limited to a “yes” or “no” answer, and the other two, Judge Kaplan cut him off after a single sentence, maybe two sentences. He was on the stand for a total of three or four minutes.

In this trial, there is again a jury and I think that even though Justice [Juan] Merchan has not run quite as tight of a ship as Judge Kaplan — I just think that’s his style — I think Trump has seen him rein in witnesses. He saw what Merchan did with Costello.

<....Meridith, Trump has been saying for months he wanted to testify in this case, he was going to testify in this case.

I never saw it as a very serious legal proposition, just given the practicalities, but politically, he appears to have thought that was a very important position to take with the general public as part of his brand — this bravado, confrontational thing. One way of looking at what happened is that he backed down. Do his supporters care?

McGraw: I think it sort of speaks even more broadly to this trial in general. I don’t think we’re going to see this move the needle much on public opinion, or public polling, at least among Republicans and Trump supporters themselves.

In a lot of the recent polls, it’s said that among Trump supporters if he is convicted, that they might reconsider voting for him, but the key word being “reconsider.” The other option is Joe Biden, and they’re already identifying as a Republican or Trump supporter in those polls.

When I’ve talked to the Trump campaign about it — I was talking to one of his pollsters yesterday, and I asked, “Do you think he’s convicted? Are you guys concerned that this is going to make any difference?”

And they really don’t feel that way at all. I think there’s just this general sentiment that at least in terms of public opinion, the cake is baked. If you don’t like Trump, you’ve viewed him as guilty from the get-go. And even if he is convicted, it won’t make much of a difference, and him saying he’s going to testify, he would go to jail — that’s just a big part of the public bravado.

I’m sure you’ve seen the fundraising emails that he has sent out saying basically, “They’re gonna put me in jail.” It’s just all sort of part of his political package at this point.

Josh, let’s talk about the jury instructions, which are still up in the air as we are speaking. A lot of people have said that this is a simple case. Maybe it is, on some level, factually. But at the legal level, it’s actually quite intricate and tricky.

What do you make of the fact that we’re talking days after the close of the testimony, and we don’t really know what the jury’s instructions will be on some very important legal issues?

Gerstein: We had a couple hours of argument on this on Tuesday afternoon, and there are a lot of issues to wade through there as you point out, Ankush, and some of them are complicated. Some of them appear to be unprecedented.

Some of the things Trump and his supporters are saying about this case, I think are accurate. People have had trouble coming up with analogous cases where prosecutors in New York State have tried to do some of the things that District Attorney Alvin Bragg and his team are trying to do in this case. That doesn’t mean that they’re illegal, or that the top-most court in New York or the U.S. Supreme Court might not eventually uphold them as valid.

And some of this stuff is very, very critical.

I think the main category that is most critical is around the question of what kind of intent the prosecutors need to prove, on Trump’s part. Having sat through a good chunk of that trial, I think, at the end of the day — despite a lot of questions about Michael Cohen’s credibility, and other things that aren’t clear in the trial — that the basic facts of what happened are going to be pretty well established in terms of who has paid what amounts and when. It seems pretty clear that Trump signed most of these $35,000 reimbursement checks to Cohen.

We have this almost amazing document where the Trump financial people are sketching out what this $420,000 to Michael Cohen represents. It’s sort of a dream piece of evidence for prosecutors.

I think that that part of the case is going to be pretty well nailed down. Some things that aren’t maybe 100 percent clear, or not actually legally central to the case — the most famous part of it probably being whether he actually had sex with Stormy Daniels or not, I actually think it doesn’t really matter for the legalities of the case.

<....Gerstein: It matters to the credibility of both sides at this point, but there’s not going to be a box on the verdict form that says, “Did Trump have sex with Stormy Daniels?” The truth will be part of the public assessment and the ultimate verdict in the court of public opinion, but for the jury, it’s not that critical.

The biggest issue that’s hanging out there is on the intent question: Did Trump, or really anybody who was involved in these payments, have anything in mind at the time that they were trying to prevent these from being recorded as campaign donations? Because that’s the central allegation of the case, or at least the one that escalates this from a misdemeanor to a felony.

There was precious little testimony about that. You have the David Pecker non-prosecution deal where he basically admitted that they did something illegal, and you have Michael Cohen pleading guilty to doing something illegal, but the judge is going to give the juries some cautions about the fact that they can’t assume another person is guilty just because one of the witnesses admitted that he was guilty of something.

There hasn’t been testimony that Trump said like, “This will be great, because we don’t have to put it on our campaign donation disclosures,” or that Michael Cohen told him that that would be one of the effects of arranging the payments the way they did.

That’s just sort of something the jury and I guess the rest of us are supposed to infer. And that’s one of the key questions we’re waiting to see from Justice Merchan: What is he going to say that the prosecution has to prove about that?

I think that could be legally critical. Whether it is what the jury verdict ultimately turns on? I don’t know.

Honestly, there has been less evidence on this point than I anticipated coming into trial.

There are several calls or meetings that Cohen testified to and elaborated on during the course of his testimony, but I kind of expected him to say something along the lines of what Josh just described in terms of, “We got to do this because the FEC will be on our back.”

Erica and Ben: Was I expecting too much?

Orden: I don’t know. I don’t think you were necessarily expecting too much.

You’re definitely correct that that didn’t happen. None of that evidence came in in terms of his intent and motivation.

What they got out of the Cohen testimony was largely about whether or not he took these steps in order to help the campaign, and frankly, on that front, they got really mixed testimony. There are some witnesses that definitely said — Cohen, Pecker, one or two others — who gave fairly strong testimony in support of the notion that this was strictly in service of the campaign, and that it probably wouldn’t have occurred if not for the existence of the campaign at that time.

But there were other people — Hope Hicks, I believe one or two others — who gave some testimony vaguely to that effect, but then also said pretty clearly that Trump either told them, or acted in a manner that suggested, he was striking this deal to save his family from the embarrassment of learning these allegations.

Feuerherd: I don’t know if this is totally circumstantial, but there was this notion that Cohen was withholding the payments after the deal was struck with Daniels’ lawyer.

He stalled them for a while until Daniels — whether accurately or not — said that the Daily Mail was going to pay her a lot of money, and then that spurred the actual payment. That’s evidence that they did this to get it done before the election. And then you had Cohen testifying that Trump wasn’t worried about being single.

He said something like, “I’ll be the most eligible bachelor,” so that’s evidence showing that the election was the motivating factor.....>